No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.

This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran.

And what is love anyway? Love's all over the mountain where the beautiful go to die no doubt, but I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it's something you've invented now.

I prayed that all might be well between me and Hartley, that somehow that lifelong faithful remembering, what I now thought of as my mystical marriage, might not be lost or wasted, but somehow come to good!

There had been a slaughter of all my other interests, and upon the strange white open scene of the future only one thing remained.

Even now I shake and tremble as I write. Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation. Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead.

But with her I would have been faithful, with her my whole life would have been different, less rootless, less empty.

I did not harbour intelligent doubts about whether Hartley would go on loving me, naturally I knew that she was mine forever. But as we closed our eyes upon tears of joy there was cosmic dread.

My first love, and also my only love. All the best, even Clement, have been shadows by comparison. The necessity of this seems, in my own case, so great that I find it hard to imagine that it is not so with everyone.

Can one, in such a self-portrait, omit something which affected one's whole being and which one has thought of every day of one's life? 'Every day' exaggerates, but not much. I do not need to 'recall' Hartley, she is here. She is my end and my beginning, she is alpha and omega.