THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

BOOK THE SECOND
MARGARET
CHAPTER THE FIRST
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
1

I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I

have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my

class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my

experience that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in

this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give

something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some

intimations of the forces that went to her making. I met her in

Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have

already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my

mother in Penge. Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.

It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so

much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and

circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid

memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial

world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,

come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at

once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol…

But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that

served as a foil for her.