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Some of his Oxford acquaintances moved among writers and painters, but these seemed to care for things that he did not understand. He was not modern at all. When your favourite poets are Wordsworth, Arnold, and Clare, your novelists Fielding and Sterne, your artists Cotman and Bonington and Girtin, what place had you in this other world of eccentricity and revolt? The modern arts, when he touched them at all, seemed to him all negation. His incomprehension seemed to him his own stupidity. He felt himself slow, behind the times.

Meanwhile neither the social world nor the religious world of Halkin Street realised that he cared at all for these things. His good looks, the courtesy that he inherited from his father, a certain gentleness that was never effeminacy, retained for him in London the reputation that he had had at Oxford: "Poole's a good sort. A bit absent-minded, hard to know exactly, but one of the best really."

Then, early in 1920, came his meeting with Diana Guard.

Before this women had meant little to him. His love for his father had been the only emotional experience roused by another human being that he had known.