"Only six months after I married, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. I first met Harriet when we were both at Oxford. She had a pleasing aura of the aristocratic. It was well known that she, or rather her family, was quite agreeably rich. Even more attractively, her behavior suggested that money was something long taken for granted, and therefore not to be thought about. This impression may have been strengthened by her milieu. Penniless but undoubted aristocrats were her acquaintances, and even friends: young men and women of such assured position socially that they could affect no position. In such company, she too appeared fashionably impecunious and aristocratically uninhibited.

How could I have told that only months after marriage she would show distressing bourgeois tendencies inherited from a family where they had lain nearer the surface than I had been led to suppose? I resented it. I felt a kind of deception had been practised upon me."