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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11360 ***
+
+SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+
+A NOVEL IN THREE EPISODES
+
+BY ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+1905
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO MY FRIEND EDEN PHILLPOTTS
+
+THE NOVELIST FOR WHOM MAN AND NATURE ARE INSEPARABLE WITH PROFOUND
+RESPECT FOR THE CLASSICAL DIGNITY OF HIS AIM AND EQUAL ADMIRATION
+FOR THE AUSTERE SPLENDOUR OF HIS PERFORMANCE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+PART II
+
+THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+
+_'How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women of the
+past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have opened for the
+kiss, and who are dead! The kiss--it is immortal! It passes from lip to
+lip, from century to century, from age to age. Men gather it, give it
+back, and die.'_--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+
+
+
+
+SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+
+
+PART I
+
+IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love--and by love I
+mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the
+soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to
+the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of
+my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in
+amorous dreams.
+
+I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the
+piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to
+conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me:
+warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round
+on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and
+I asked myself: 'Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?' For
+even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and
+the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at
+the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of
+those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort
+of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian
+room, large and stately and symmetrical, full--but not too full--of
+twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes,
+gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and
+here and there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, recalled the Empire
+period and the deserted Napoleonic palaces of France. The expanse of
+yellow and green carpet had been married to the floor by two generations
+of decorous feet, and the meaning of its tints was long since explained
+away. Never have I seen a carpet with less individuality of its own than
+that carpet; it was so sweetly faded, amiable, and flat, that its sole
+mission in the world seemed to be to make things smooth for the chairs.
+The wall-paper looked like pale green silk, and the candles were
+reflected in it as they were reflected in the crystals of the chandelier.
+The grand piano, a Collard and Collard, made a vast mass of walnut in the
+chamber, incongruous, perhaps, but still there was something in its mild
+and indecisive tone that responded to the furniture. It, too, spoke of
+Evangelicalism, the Christian Year, and a dignified reserved confidence
+in Christ's blood. It, too, defied the assault of time and the invasion
+of ideas. It, too, protested against Chopin and romance, and demanded
+Thalberg's variations on 'Home, Sweet Home.'
+
+My great-grandfather, the famous potter--second in renown only to
+Wedgwood--had built that Georgian house, and my grandfather had furnished
+it; and my parents, long since dead, had placidly accepted it and the
+ideal that it stood for; and it had devolved upon my Aunt Constance, and
+ultimately it would devolve on me, the scarlet woman in a dress of
+virginal white, the inexplicable offspring of two changeless and
+blameless families, the secret revolutionary, the living lie! How had I
+come there?
+
+I went to the window, and, pulling the curtain aside, looked vaguely out
+into the damp, black garden, from which the last light was fading. The
+red, rectangular house stood in the midst of the garden, and the garden
+was surrounded by four brick walls, which preserved it from four streets
+where dwelt artisans of the upper class. The occasional rattling of a
+cart was all we caught of the peaceable rumour of the town; but on clear
+nights the furnaces of Cauldon Bar Ironworks lit the valley for us, and
+we were reminded that our refined and inviolate calm was hemmed in by
+rude activities. On the east border of the garden was a row of poplars,
+and from the window I could see the naked branches of the endmost. A
+gas-lamp suddenly blazed behind it in Acre Lane, and I descried a bird in
+the tree. And as the tree waved its plume in the night-wind, and the bird
+swayed on the moving twig, and the gas-lamp burned meekly and patiently
+beyond, I seemed to catch in these simple things a glimpse of the secret
+meaning of human existence, such as one gets sometimes, startlingly, in a
+mood of idle receptiveness. And it was so sad and so beautiful, so full
+of an ecstatic melancholy, that I dropped the curtain. And my thought
+ranged lovingly over our household--prim, regular, and perfect: my old
+aunt embroidering in the breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in
+the impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion
+that Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in
+fancy all over the house--the attics, my aunt's bedroom so miraculously
+neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the corridors where
+clocks ticked.
+
+I had the sense of the curious compact organism of which my aunt was the
+head, and into which my soul had strayed by some caprice of fate. What I
+felt was that the organism was suspended in a sort of enchantment,
+lifelessly alive, unconsciously expectant of the magic touch which would
+break the spell, and I wondered how long I must wait before I began to
+live. I know now that I was happy in those serene preliminary years, but
+nevertheless I had the illusion of spiritual woe. I sighed grievously as
+I went back to the piano, and opened the volume of Mikuli's Chopin.
+
+Just as I was beginning to play, Rebecca came into the room. She was a
+maid of forty years, and stout; absolutely certain of a few things, and
+quite satisfied in her ignorance of all else; an important person in our
+house, and therefore an important person in the created universe, of
+which our house was for her the centre. She wore the white cap with
+distinction, and when an apron was suspended round her immense waist it
+ceased to be an apron, and became a symbol, like the apron of a
+Freemason.
+
+'Well, Rebecca?' I said, without turning my head.
+
+I guessed urgency, otherwise Rebecca would have delegated Lucy.
+
+'If you please, Miss Carlotta, your aunt is not feeling well, and she
+will not be able to go to the concert to-night.'
+
+'Not be able to go to the concert!' I repeated mechanically.
+
+'No, miss.'
+
+'I will come downstairs.'
+
+'If I were you, I shouldn't, miss. She's dozing a bit just now.'
+
+'Very well.'
+
+I went on playing. But Chopin, who was the chief factor in my emotional
+life; who had taught me nearly all I knew of grace, wit, and tenderness;
+who had discovered for me the beauty that lay in everything, in sensuous
+exaltation as well as in asceticism, in grief as well as in joy; who had
+shown me that each moment of life, no matter what its import, should be
+lived intensely and fully; who had carried me with him to the dizziest
+heights of which passion is capable; whose music I spiritually
+comprehended to a degree which I felt to be extraordinary--Chopin had
+almost no significance for me as I played then the most glorious of his
+compositions. His message was only a blurred sound in my ears. And
+gradually I perceived, as the soldier gradually perceives who has been
+hit by a bullet, that I was wounded.
+
+The shock was of such severity that at first I had scarcely noticed it.
+What? My aunt not going to the concert? That meant that I could not go.
+But it was impossible that I should not go. I could not conceive my
+absence from the concert--the concert which I had been anticipating and
+preparing for during many weeks. We went out but little, Aunt Constance
+and I. An oratorio, an amateur operatic performance, a ballad concert in
+the Bursley Town Hall--no more than that; never the Hanbridge Theatre.
+And now Diaz was coming down to give a pianoforte recital in the Jubilee
+Hall at Hanbridge; Diaz, the darling of European capitals; Diaz, whose
+name in seven years had grown legendary; Diaz, the Liszt and the
+Rubenstein of my generation, and the greatest interpreter of Chopin since
+Chopin died--Diaz! Diaz! No such concert had ever been announced in the
+Five Towns, and I was to miss it! Our tickets had been taken, and they
+were not to be used! Unthinkable! A photograph of Diaz stood in a silver
+frame on the piano; I gazed at it fervently. I said: 'I will hear you
+play the Fantasia this night, if I am cut in pieces for it to-morrow!'
+Diaz represented for me, then, all that I desired of men. All my dreams
+of love and freedom crystallized suddenly into Diaz.
+
+I ran downstairs to the breakfast-room.
+
+'You aren't going to the concert, auntie?' I almost sobbed.
+
+She sat in her rocking-chair, and the gray woollen shawl thrown round her
+shoulders mingled with her gray hair. Her long, handsome face was a
+little pale, and her dark eyes darker than usual.
+
+'I don't feel well enough,' she replied calmly.
+
+She had not observed the tremor in my voice.
+
+'But what's the matter?' I insisted.
+
+'Nothing in particular, my dear. I do not feel equal to the exertion.'
+
+'But, auntie--then I can't go, either.'
+
+'I'm very sorry, dear,' she said. 'We will go to the next concert.'
+
+'Diaz will never come again!' I exclaimed passionately. 'And the tickets
+will be wasted.'
+
+'My dear,' my Aunt Constance repeated, 'I am not equal to it. And you
+cannot go alone.'
+
+I was utterly selfish in that moment. I cared nothing whatever for my
+aunt's indisposition. Indeed, I secretly accused her of maliciously
+choosing that night of all nights for her mysterious fatigue.
+
+'But, auntie,' I said, controlling myself, 'I must go, really. I shall
+send Lucy over with a note to Ethel Ryley to ask her to go with me.'
+
+'Do,' said my aunt, after a considerable pause, 'if you are bent
+on going.'
+
+I have often thought since that during that pause, while we faced each
+other, my aunt had for the first time fully realized how little she knew
+of me; she must surely have detected in my glance a strangeness, a
+contemptuous indifference, an implacable obstinacy, which she had never
+seen in it before. And, indeed, these things were in my glance. Yet I
+loved my aunt with a deep affection. I had only one grievance against
+her. Although excessively proud, she would always, in conversation with
+men, admit her mental and imaginative inferiority, and that of her sex.
+She would admit, without being asked, that being a woman she could not
+see far, that her feminine brain could not carry an argument to the end,
+and that her feminine purpose was too infirm for any great enterprise.
+She seemed to find a morbid pleasure in such confessions. As regards
+herself, they were accurate enough; the dear creature was a singularly
+good judge of her own character. What I objected to was her assumption,
+so calm and gratuitous, that her individuality, with all its confessed
+limitations, was, of course, superior--stronger, wiser, subtler than
+mine. She never allowed me to argue with her; or if she did, she treated
+my remarks with a high, amused tolerance. 'Wait till you grow older,' she
+would observe, magnificently ignorant of the fact that my soul was
+already far older than hers. This attitude naturally made me secretive in
+all affairs of the mind, and most affairs of the heart.
+
+We took in the county paper, the _Staffordshire Recorder,_ and the _Rock_
+and the _Quiver_. With the help of these organs of thought, which I
+detested and despised, I was supposed to be able to keep discreetly and
+sufficiently abreast of the times. But I had other aids. I went to the
+Girls' High School at Oldcastle till I was nearly eighteen. One of the
+mistresses there used to read continually a red book covered with brown
+paper. I knew it to be a red book because the paper was gone at the
+corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in
+the book--she would pick it up at every spare moment--excited in me an
+ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on the
+title-page, _Introduction to the Study of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer.
+Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that astonished
+and charmed me. I said: 'Why are not our school histories like this?' The
+owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it to me, but she would
+not, nor would she give me any reason for declining. Soon afterwards I
+left school. I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free Library at the
+Wedgwood Institution. But the book was not in the catalogue. (How often,
+in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the reading-room, where men
+read the daily papers and the magazines, without daring to enter!) At
+length I audaciously decided to buy the book. I ordered it, not at our
+regular stationer's in Oldcastle Street, but at a little shop of the
+same kind in Trafalgar Road. In three days it arrived. I called for it,
+and took it home secretly in a cardboard envelope-box. I went to bed
+early, and I began to read. I read all night, thirteen hours. O book with
+the misleading title--for you have nothing to do with sociology, and you
+ought to have been called _How to Think Honestly_--my face flushed again
+and again as I perused your ugly yellowish pages! Again and again I
+exclaimed: 'But this is marvellous!' I had not guessed that anything so
+honest, and so courageous, and so simple, and so convincing had ever been
+written. I am capable now of suspecting that Spencer was not a supreme
+genius; but he taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing
+is sacred that will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory. The next
+morning after breakfast I fell asleep in a chair. 'My dear!' protested
+Aunt Constance. 'Ah,' I thought, 'if you knew, Aunt Constance, if you had
+the least suspicion, of the ideas that are surging and shining in my
+head, you would go mad--go simply mad!' I did not care much for
+deception, but I positively hated clumsy concealment, and the red book
+was in the house; at any moment it might be seized. On a shelf of books
+in my bedroom was a novel called _The Old Helmet_, probably the silliest
+novel in the world. I tore the pages from the binding and burnt them; I
+tore the binding from Spencer and burnt it; and I put my treasure in the
+covers of _The Old Helmet_. Once Rebecca, a person privileged, took the
+thing away to read; but she soon brought it back. She told me she had
+always understood that _The Old Helmet_ was more, interesting than that.
+
+Later, I discovered _The Origin of Species_ in the Free Library. It
+finished the work of corruption. Spencer had shown me how to think;
+Darwin told me what to think. The whole of my upbringing went for naught
+thenceforward. I lived a double life. I said nothing to my aunt of the
+miracle wrought within me, and she suspected nothing. Strange and
+uncanny, is it not, that such miracles can escape the observation of a
+loving heart? I loved her as much as ever, perhaps more than ever. Thank
+Heaven that love can laugh at reason!
+
+So much for my intellectual inner life. My emotional inner life is less
+easy to indicate. I became a woman at fifteen--years, interminable years,
+before I left school. I guessed even then, vaguely, that my nature was
+extremely emotional and passionate. And I had nothing literary on which
+to feed my dreams, save a few novels which I despised, and the Bible and
+the plays and poems of Shakespeare. It is wonderful, though, what good I
+managed to find in those two use-worn volumes. I knew most of the Song of
+Solomon by heart, and many of the sonnets; and I will not mince the fact
+that my favourite play was _Measure for Measure_. I was an innocent
+virgin, in the restricted sense in which most girls of my class and age
+are innocent, but I obtained from these works many a lofty pang of
+thrilling pleasure. They illustrated Chopin for me, giving precision and
+particularity to his messages. And I was ashamed of myself. Yes; at the
+bottom of my heart I was ashamed of myself because my sensuous being
+responded to the call of these masterpieces. In my ignorance I thought I
+was lapsing from a sane and proper ideal. And then--the second miracle in
+my career, which has been full of miracles--I came across a casual
+reference, in the _Staffordshire Recorder_, of all places, to the
+_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ of Théophile Gautier. Something in the
+reference, I no longer remember what, caused me to guess that the book
+was a revelation of matters hidden from me. I bought it. With the
+assistance of a dictionary, I read it, nightly, in about a week. Except
+_Picciola_, it was the first French novel I had ever read. It held me
+throughout; it revealed something on nearly every page. But the climax
+dazzled and blinded me. It was exquisite, so high and pure, so
+startling, so bold, that it made me ill. When I recovered I had fast in
+my heart's keeping the new truth that in the body, and the instincts of
+the body, there should be no shame, but rather a frank, joyous pride.
+From that moment I ceased to be ashamed of anything that I honestly
+liked. But I dared not keep the book. The knowledge of its contents would
+have killed my aunt. I read it again; I read the last pages several
+times, and then I burnt it and breathed freely.
+
+Such was I, as I forced my will on my aunt in the affair of the concert.
+And I say that she who had never suspected the existence of the real me,
+suspected it then, when we glanced at each other across the
+breakfast-room. Upon these apparent trifles life swings, as upon a pivot,
+into new directions.
+
+I sat with my aunt while Lucy went with the note. She returned soon with
+the reply, and the reply was:
+
+'So sorry I can't accept your kind invitation. I should have liked to go
+awfully. But Fred has got the toothache, and I must not leave him.'
+
+The toothache! And my very life, so it seemed to me, hung in the balance.
+
+I did not hesitate one second.
+
+'Hurrah!' I cried. 'She can go. I am to call for her in the cab.'
+
+And I crushed the note cruelly, and threw it in the fire.
+
+'Tell him to call at Ryleys',' I said to Rebecca as she was putting me
+and my dress into the cab.
+
+And she told the cabman with that sharp voice of hers, always arrogant
+towards inferiors, to call at Ryleys.'
+
+I put my head out of the cab window as soon as we were in
+Oldcastle Street.
+
+'Drive straight to Hanbridge,' I ordered.
+
+The thing was done.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He was like his photograph, but the photograph had given me only the most
+inadequate idea of him. The photograph could not render his extraordinary
+fairness, nor the rich gold of his hair, nor the blue of his dazzling
+eyes. The first impression was that he was too beautiful for a man, that
+he had a woman's beauty, that he had the waxen beauty of a doll; but the
+firm, decisive lines of the mouth and chin, the overhanging brows, and
+the luxuriance of his amber moustache, spoke more sternly. Gradually one
+perceived that beneath the girlish mask, beneath the contours and the
+complexion incomparably delicate, there was an individuality intensely
+and provocatively male. His body was rather less than tall, and it was
+muscular and springy. He walked on to the platform as an unspoilt man
+should walk, and he bowed to the applause as if bowing chivalrously to a
+woman whom he respected but did not love. Diaz was twenty-six that year;
+he had recently returned from a tour round the world; he was filled full
+of triumph, renown, and adoration. As I have said, he was already
+legendary. He had become so great and so marvellous that those who had
+never seen him were in danger of forgetting that he was a living human
+being, obliged to eat and drink, and practise scales, and visit his
+tailor's. Thus it had happened to me. During the first moments I found
+myself thinking, 'This cannot be Diaz. It is not true that at last I see
+him. There must be some mistake.' Then he sat down leisurely to the
+piano; his gaze ranged across the hall, and I fancied that, for a second,
+it met mine. My two seats were in the first row of the stalls, and I
+could see every slightest change of his face. So that at length I felt
+that Diaz was real, and that he was really there close in front of me, a
+seraph and yet very human. He was all alone on the great platform, and
+the ebonized piano seemed enormous and formidable before him. And all
+around was the careless public--ignorant, unsympathetic, exigent,
+impatient, even inimical--two thousand persons who would get value for
+their money or know the reason why. The electric light and the inclement
+gaze of society rained down cruelly upon that defenceless head. I wanted
+to protect it. The tears rose to my eyes, and I stretched out towards
+Diaz the hands of my soul. My passionate sympathy must have reached him
+like a beneficent influence, of which, despite the perfect
+self-possession and self-confidence of his demeanour, it seemed to me
+that he had need.
+
+I had risked much that night. I had committed an enormity. No one but a
+grown woman who still vividly remembers her girlhood can appreciate my
+feelings as I drove from Bursley to Hanbridge in the cab, and as I got
+out of the cab in the crowd, and gave up my ticket, and entered the
+glittering auditorium of the Jubilee Hall. I was alone, at night, in the
+public places, under the eye of the world. And I was guiltily alone.
+Every fibre of my body throbbed with the daring and the danger and the
+romance of the adventure. The horror of revealing the truth to Aunt
+Constance, as I was bound to do--of telling her that I had lied, and that
+I had left my maiden's modesty behind in my bedroom, gripped me at
+intervals like some appalling and exquisite instrument of torture. And
+yet, ere Diaz had touched the piano with his broad white hand, I was
+content, I was rewarded, and I was justified.
+
+The programme began with Chopin's first Ballade.
+
+There was an imperative summons, briefly sustained, which developed into
+an appeal and an invocation, ascending, falling, and still higher
+ascending, till it faded and expired, and then, after a little pause, was
+revived; then silence, and two chords, defining and clarifying the
+vagueness of the appeal and the invocation. And then, almost before I was
+aware of it, there stole forth from under the fingers of Diaz the song of
+the soul of man, timid, questioning, plaintive, neither sad nor joyous,
+but simply human, seeking what it might find on earth. The song changed
+subtly from mood to mood, expressing that which nothing but itself could
+express; and presently there was a low and gentle menace, thrice repeated
+under the melody of the song, and the reply of the song was a proud cry,
+a haughty contempt of these furtive warnings, and a sudden winged leap
+into the empyrean towards the Eternal Spirit. And then the melody was
+lost in a depth, and the song became turgid and wild and wilder,
+hysteric, irresolute, frantically groping, until at last it found its
+peace and its salvation. And the treasure was veiled in a mist of
+arpeggios, but one by one these were torn away, and there was a hush, a
+pause, and a preparation; and the soul of man broke into a new song of
+what it had found on earth--the magic of the tenderness of love--an air
+so caressing and so sweet, so calmly happy and so mournfully sane, so
+bereft of illusions and so naïve, that it seemed to reveal in a few
+miraculous phrases the secret intentions of God. It was too beautiful; it
+told me too much about myself; it vibrated my nerves to such an
+unbearable spasm of pleasure that I might have died had I not willed to
+live.... It gave place momentarily to the song of the question and the
+search, but only to return, and to return again, with a more thrilling
+and glorious assurance. It was drowned in doubt, but it emerged
+triumphantly, covered with noble and delicious ornaments, and swimming
+strongly on mysterious waves. And finally, with speed and with fire, it
+was transformed and caught up into the last ecstasy, the ultimate
+passion. The soul swept madly between earth and heaven, fell, rose; and
+there was a dreadful halt. Then a loud blast, a distortion of the magic,
+an upward rush, another and a louder blast, and a thunderous fall,
+followed by two massive and terrifying chords....
+
+Diaz was standing up and bowing to his public. What did they understand?
+Did they understand anything? I cannot tell. But I know that they felt.
+A shudder of feeling had gone through the hall. It was in vain that
+people tried to emancipate themselves from the spell by the violence of
+their applause. They could not. We were all together under the
+enchantment. Some may have seen clearly, some darkly, but we were equal
+before the throne of that mighty enchanter. And the enchanter bowed and
+bowed with a grave, sympathetic smile, and then disappeared. I had not
+clapped my hands; I had not moved. Only my full eyes had followed him as
+he left the platform; and when he returned--because the applause would
+not cease--my eyes watched over him as he came back to the centre of the
+platform. He stood directly in front of me, smiling more gaily now. And
+suddenly our glances met! Yes; I could not be mistaken. They met, and
+mine held his for several seconds.... Diaz had looked at me. Diaz had
+singled me out from the crowd. I blushed hotly, and I was conscious of a
+surpassing joy. My spirit was transfigured. I knew that such a man was
+above kings. I knew that the world and everything of loveliness that it
+contained was his. I knew that he moved like a beautiful god through the
+groves of delight, and that what he did was right, and whom he beckoned
+came, and whom he touched was blessed. And my eyes had held his eyes for
+a little space.
+
+The enchantment deepened. I had read that the secret of playing Chopin
+had died with Chopin; but I felt sure that evening, as I have felt sure
+since, that Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have
+received Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a
+superior. For Diaz had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of
+the keyboard that Chopin could not have possessed. Diaz had come to the
+front in a generation of pianists who had lifted technique to a plane of
+which neither Liszt nor Rubinstein dreamed. He had succeeded primarily by
+his gigantic and incredible technique. And then, when his technique had
+astounded the world, he had invited the world to forget it, as the glass
+is forgotten through which is seen beauty. And Diaz's gift was now such
+that there appeared to intervene nothing between his conception of the
+music and the strings of the piano, so perfected was the mechanism.
+Difficulties had ceased to exist.
+
+The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if
+they were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they
+should fall off. It was not so with Diaz. When Diaz played you
+experienced the pure emotions caused by the unblurred contemplation of
+that beauty which the great masters had created, and which Diaz had
+tinted with the rare dyes of his personality. You forgot all but beauty.
+The piano was not a piano; it was an Arabian magic beyond physical laws,
+and it, too, had a soul.
+
+So Diaz laid upon us the enchantment of Chopin and of himself. Mazurkas,
+nocturnes, waltzes, scherzos, polonaises, preludes, he exhibited to us in
+groups those manifestations of that supreme spirit--that spirit at once
+stern and tender, not more sad than joyous, and always sane, always
+perfectly balanced, always preoccupied with beauty. The singular myth of
+a Chopin decadent, weary, erratic, mournful, hysterical, at odds with
+fate, was completely dissipated; and we perceived instead the grave
+artist nourished on Bach and studious in form, and the strong soul that
+had dared to look on life as it is, and had found beauty everywhere. Ah!
+how the air trembled and glittered with visions! How melody and harmony
+filled every corner of the hall with the silver and gold of sound! How
+the world was changed out of recognition! How that which had seemed
+unreal became real, and that which had seemed real receded to a horizon
+remote and fantastic!...
+
+He was playing the fifteenth Prelude in D flat now, and the water was
+dropping, dropping ceaselessly on the dead body, and the beautiful calm
+song rose serenely in the dream, and then lost itself amid the presaging
+chords of some sinister fate, and came again, exquisite and fresh as
+ever, and then was interrupted by a high note like a clarion; and while
+Diaz held that imperious, compelling note, he turned his face slightly
+from the piano and gazed at me. Several times since the first time our
+eyes had met, by accident as I thought. But this was a deliberate seeking
+on his part. Again I flushed hotly. Again I had the terrible shudder of
+joy. I feared for a moment lest all the Five Towns was staring at me,
+thus singled out by Diaz; but it was not so: I had the wit to perceive
+that no one could remark me as the recipient of that hurried and burning
+glance. He had half a dozen bars to play, yet his eyes did not leave
+mine, and I would not let mine leave his. He remained moveless while the
+last chord expired, and then it seemed to me that his gaze had gone
+further, had passed through me into some unknown. The applause startled
+him to his feet.
+
+My thought was: 'What can he be thinking of me?... But hundreds of women
+must have loved him!'
+
+In the interval an attendant came on to the platform and altered the
+position of the piano. Everybody asked: 'What's that for?' For the new
+position was quite an unusual one; it brought the tail of the piano
+nearer to the audience, and gave a better view of the keyboard to the
+occupants of the seats in the orchestra behind the platform. 'It's a
+question of the acoustics, that's what it is,' observed a man near me,
+and a woman replied: 'Oh, I see!'
+
+When Diaz returned and seated himself to play the Berceuse, I saw that he
+could look at me without turning his head. And now, instead of flushing,
+I went cold. My spine gave way suddenly. I began to be afraid; but of
+what I was afraid I had not the least idea. I fixed my eyes on my
+programme as he launched into the Berceuse. Twice I glanced up, without,
+however, moving my head, and each time his burning blue eyes met mine.
+(But why did I choose moments when the playing of the piece demanded less
+than all his attention?) The Berceuse was a favourite. In sentiment it
+was simpler than the great pieces that had preceded it. Its excessive
+delicacy attracted; the finesse of its embroidery swayed and enraptured
+the audience; and the applause at the close was mad, deafening, and
+peremptory. But Diaz was notorious as a refuser of encores. It had been
+said that he would see a hall wrecked by an angry mob before he would
+enlarge his programme. Four times he came forward and acknowledged the
+tribute, and four times he went back. At the fifth response he halted
+directly in front of me, and in his bold, grave eyes I saw a question. I
+saw it, and I would not answer. If he had spoken aloud to me I could not
+have more clearly understood. But I would not answer. And then some power
+within myself, hitherto unsuspected by me, some natural force, took
+possession of me, and I nodded my head.... Diaz went to the piano.
+
+He hesitated, brushing lightly the keys.
+
+'The Prelude in F sharp,' my thought ran. 'If he would play that!'
+
+And instantly he broke into that sweet air, with its fateful hushed
+accompaniment--the trifle which Chopin threw off in a moment of his
+highest inspiration.
+
+'It is the thirteenth Prelude,' I reflected. I was disturbed,
+profoundly troubled.
+
+The next piece was the last, and it was the Fantasia, the masterpiece
+of Chopin.
+
+In the Fantasia there speaks the voice of a spirit which has attained all
+that humanity may attain: of wisdom, of power, of pride and glory. And
+now it is like the roll of an army marching slowly through terrific
+defiles; and now it is like the quiet song of royal wanderers meditating
+in vast garden landscapes, with mossy masonry and long pools and
+cypresses, and a sapphire star shining in the purple sky on the shoulder
+of a cypress; and now it is like the cry of a lost traveller, who,
+plunging heavily through a virgin forest, comes suddenly upon a green
+circular sward, smooth as a carpet, with an antique statue of a beautiful
+nude girl in the midst; and now it is like the oratory of richly-gowned
+philosophers awaiting death in gorgeous and gloomy palaces; and now it is
+like the upward rush of winged things that are determined to achieve,
+knowing well the while that the ecstasy of longing is better than the
+assuaging of desire. And though the voice of this spirit speaking in the
+music disguises itself so variously, it is always the same. For it
+cannot, and it would not, hide the strange and rare timbre which
+distinguishes it from all others--that quality which springs from a pure
+and calm vision, of life. The voice of this spirit says that it has lost
+every illusion about life, and that life seems only the more beautiful.
+It says that activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but
+another form of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but
+another form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. It
+says there is no end, only a means; and that the highest joy is to
+suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will but live, it
+cries, that grave but yet passionate voice--if you will but live! Were
+there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more than live. The
+true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and lose, and weep
+and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to live, and blind
+your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of existence....
+
+No, no; I cannot--I cannot describe further the experiences of my soul
+while Diaz played. When words cease, music has scarcely begun. I know
+now--I did not know it then--that Diaz was playing as perhaps he had
+never played before. The very air was charged with exquisite emotion,
+which went in waves across the hall, changing and blanching faces,
+troubling hearts, and moistening eyes.... And then he finished. It was
+over. In every trembling breast was a pang of regret that this spell,
+this miracle, this divine revolution, could not last into eternity....
+He stood bowing, one hand touching the piano. And as the revolution he
+had accomplished in us was divine, so was he divine. I felt, and many
+another woman in the audience felt, that no reward could be too great for
+the beautiful and gifted creature who had entranced us and forced us to
+see what alone in life was worth seeing: that the whole world should be
+his absolute dominion; that his happiness should be the first concern of
+mankind; that if a thousand suffered in order to make him happy for a
+moment, it mattered not; that laws were not for him; that if he sinned,
+his sin must not be called a sin, and that he must be excused from
+remorse and from any manner of woe.
+
+The applauding multitude stood up, and moved slightly towards the exits,
+and then stopped, as if ashamed of this readiness to desert the sacred
+temple. Diaz came forward three times, and each time the applause
+increased to a tempest; but he only smiled--smiled gravely. I could not
+see distinctly whether his eyes had sought mine, for mine were full of
+tears. No persuasions could induce him to show himself a fourth time, and
+at length a middle-aged man appeared and stated that Diaz was extremely
+gratified by his reception, but that he was also extremely exhausted and
+had left the hall.
+
+We departed, we mortals; and I was among the last to leave the
+auditorium. As I left the lights were being extinguished over the
+platform, and an attendant was closing the piano. The foyer was crowded
+with people waiting to get out. The word passed that it was raining
+heavily. I wondered how I should find my cab. I felt very lonely and
+unknown; I was overcome with sadness--with a sense of the futility and
+frustration of my life. Such is the logic of the soul, and such the force
+of reaction. Gradually the foyer emptied.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+'You think I am happy,' said Diaz, gazing at me with a smile
+suddenly grave; 'but I am not. I seek something which I cannot find.
+And my playing is only a relief from the fruitless search; only
+that. I am forlorn.'
+
+'You!' I exclaimed, and my eyes rested on his, long.
+
+Yes, we had met. Perhaps it had been inevitable since the beginning of
+time that we should meet; but it was none the less amazing. Perhaps I had
+inwardly known that we should meet; but, none the less, I was astounded
+when a coated and muffled figure came up swiftly to me in the emptying
+foyer, and said: 'Ah! you are here! I cannot leave without thanking you
+for your sympathy. I have never before felt such sympathy while playing.'
+It was a golden voice, pitched low, and the words were uttered with a
+very slight foreign accent, which gave them piquancy. I could not reply;
+something rose in my throat, and the caressing voice continued: 'You are
+pale. Do you feel ill? What can I do? Come with me to the artists' room;
+my secretary is there.' I put out a hand gropingly, for I could not see
+clearly, and I thought I should reel and fall. It touched his shoulder.
+He took my arm, and we went; no one had noticed us, and I had not spoken
+a word. In the room to which he guided me, through a long and sombre
+corridor, there was no sign of a secretary. I drank some water. 'There,
+you are better!' he cried. 'Thank you,' I said, but scarcely whispering.
+'How fortunate I ventured to come to you just at that moment! You might
+have fallen'; and he smiled again. I shook my head. I said: 'It was your
+coming--that--that--made me dizzy!' 'I profoundly regret--' he began.
+'No, no,' I interrupted him; and in that instant I knew I was about to
+say something which society would, justifiably, deem unpardonable in a
+girl situated as I was. 'I am so glad you came'; and I smiled, courageous
+and encouraging. For once in my life--for the first time in my adult
+life--I determined to be my honest self to another. 'Your voice is
+exquisitely beautiful,' he murmured. I thrilled.
+
+Of what use to chronicle the steps, now halting, now only too hasty, by
+which our intimacy progressed in that gaunt and echoing room? He asked me
+no questions as to my identity. He just said that he would like to play
+to me in private if that would give me pleasure, and that possibly I
+could spare an hour and would go with him.... Afterwards his brougham
+would be at my disposal. His tone was the perfection of deferential
+courtesy. Once the secretary came in--a young man rather like
+himself--and they talked together in a foreign language that was not
+French nor German; then the secretary bowed and retired.... We were
+alone.... There can be no sort of doubt that unless I was prepared to
+flout the wisdom of the ages, I ought to have refused his suggestion. But
+is not the wisdom of the ages a medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I
+was prepared to flout it, as in our highest and our lowest moments we
+often are. Moreover, how many women in my place, confronted by that
+divine creature, wooed by that wondrous personality, intoxicated by that
+smile and that voice, allured by the appeal of those marvellous hands,
+would have found the strength to resist? I did not resist, I yielded; I
+accepted. I was already in disgrace with Aunt Constance--as well be
+drowned in twelve feet of water as in six!
+
+So we drove rapidly away in the brougham, through the miry,
+light-reflecting streets of Hanbridge in the direction of Knype. And the
+raindrops ran down the windows of the brougham, and in the cushioned
+interior we could see each other darkly. He did his best to be at ease,
+and he almost succeeded. My feeling towards him, as regards the external
+management, the social guidance, of the affair, was as though we were at
+sea in a dangerous storm, and he was on the bridge and I was a mere
+passenger, and could take no responsibility. Who knew through what
+difficult channels we might not have to steer, and from what lee-shores
+we might not have to beat away? I saw that he perceived this. When I
+offered him some awkward compliment about his good English, he seized the
+chance of a narrative, and told me about his parentage: how his mother
+was Scotch, and his father Danish, and how, after his father's death, his
+mother had married Emilio Diaz, a Spanish teacher of music in Edinburgh,
+and how he had taken, by force of early habit, the name of his
+stepfather. The whole world was familiar with these facts, and I was
+familiar with them; but their recital served our turn in the brougham,
+and, of course, Diaz could add touches which had escaped the
+_Staffordshire Recorder_, and perhaps all other papers. He was explaining
+to me that his secretary was his stepfather's son by another wife, when
+we arrived at the Five Towns Hotel, opposite Knype Railway Station. I
+might have foreseen that that would be our destination. I hooded myself
+as well as I could, and followed him quickly to the first-floor. I sank
+down into a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my
+cloak, and then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table
+were some glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that
+the secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly
+departed. My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its
+full enormity. 'Oh,' I sighed, 'if I were a man like you!' Then it was
+that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was not happy,
+that he was forlorn.
+
+'Yes,' he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; 'I am profoundly
+dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year it is a
+homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You do not
+know how I hate a strange piano. That one'--he pointed to a huge
+instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially for
+him--'is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only yesterday, and
+after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across the world,
+and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a museum, and
+bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.'
+
+'But have you no friends?' I ventured.
+
+'Who can tell?' he replied. 'If I have, I scarcely ever see them.'
+
+'And no home?'
+
+'I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I
+loathe it.'
+
+'Why do you loathe it?'
+
+'Ah! For what it has witnessed--for what it has witnessed.' He sighed.
+'Suppose we discuss something else.'
+
+You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in
+social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know
+that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath
+that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious,
+dazzling haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new
+being, excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said:
+
+'You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for
+love of you.'
+
+He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing.
+
+'Let me guess at your history,' he said. 'You have lived much alone with
+your thoughts, and you have read a great deal of the finest romantic
+poetry, and you have been silent, especially with men. You have seen
+little of men.'
+
+'But I understand them,' I answered boldly.
+
+'I believe you do,' he admitted; and he laughed. 'So I needn't explain to
+you that a thousand women dying of love for one man will not help that
+man to happiness, unless he is dying of love for the thousand and first.'
+
+'And have you never loved?'
+
+The words came of themselves out of my mouth.
+
+'I have deceived myself--in my quest of sympathy,' he said.
+
+'Can you be sure that, in your quest of sympathy, you are not deceiving
+yourself tonight?'
+
+'Yes,' he cried quickly, 'I can.' And he sprang up and almost ran to the
+piano. 'You remember the D flat Prelude?' he said, breaking into the
+latter part of the air, and looking at me the while. 'When I came to that
+note and caught your gaze'--he struck the B flat and held it--'I knew
+that I had found sympathy. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Do you
+remember?'
+
+'Remember what?'
+
+'The way we looked at each other.'
+
+'Yes,' I breathed, 'I remember.'
+
+'How can I thank you? How can I thank you?'
+
+He seemed to be meditating. His simplicity, his humility, his kindliness
+were more than I could bear.
+
+'Please do not speak like that,' I entreated him, pained. 'You are the
+greatest artist in the world, and I am nobody--nobody at all. I do not
+know why I am here. I cannot imagine what you have seen in me. Everything
+is a mystery. All I feel is that I am in your presence, and that I am not
+worthy to be. No matter how long I live, I shall never experience again
+the joy that I have now. But if you talk about thanking me, I must run
+away, because I cannot stand it--and--and--you haven't played for me, and
+you said you would.'
+
+He approached me, and bent his head towards mine, and I glanced up
+through a mist and saw his eyes and the short, curly auburn locks on
+his forehead.
+
+'The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most
+lasting things,' he said softly, 'are often mysterious and inexplicable
+and sudden. And let me tell you that you do not know how lovely you are.
+You do not know the magic of your voice, nor the grace of your gestures.
+But time and man will teach you. What shall I play?'
+
+He was very close to me.
+
+'Bach,' I ejaculated, pointing impatiently to the piano.
+
+I fancied that Bach would spread peace abroad in my soul.
+
+He resumed his place at the piano, and touched the keys.
+
+'Another thing that makes me more sure that I am not deceiving myself
+to-night,' he said, taking his fingers off the keys, but staring at the
+keyboard, 'is that you have not regretted coming here. You have not
+called yourself a wicked woman. You have not even accused me of taking
+advantage of your innocence.'
+
+And ere I could say a word he had begun the Chromatic Fantasia,
+smiling faintly.
+
+And I had hoped for peace from Bach! I had often suspected that deep
+passion was concealed almost everywhere within the restraint and the
+apparent calm of Bach's music, but the full force of it had not been
+shown to me till this glorious night. Diaz' playing was tenfold more
+impressive, more effective, more revealing in the hotel parlour than in
+the great hall. The Chromatic Fantasia seemed as full of the magnificence
+of life as that other Fantasia which he had given an hour or so earlier.
+Instead of peace I had the whirlwind; instead of tranquillity a riot;
+instead of the poppy an alarming potion. The rendering was masterly to
+the extreme of masterliness.
+
+When he had finished I rose and passed to the fireplace in silence; he
+did not stir.
+
+'Do you always play like that?' I asked at length.
+
+'No,' he said; 'only when you are there. I have never played the Chopin
+Fantasia as I played it to-night. The Chopin was all right; but do not
+be under any illusion: what you have just heard is Bach played by a
+Chopin player.'
+
+Then he left the piano and went to the small table where the
+glasses were.
+
+'You must be in need of refreshment,' he whispered gaily. 'Nothing is
+more exhausting than listening to the finest music.'
+
+'It is you who ought to be tired,' I replied; 'after that long concert,
+to be playing now.'
+
+'I have the physique of a camel,' he said. 'I am never tired so long as I
+am sure of my listeners. I would play for you till breakfast to-morrow.'
+
+The decanter contained a fluid of a pleasant green tint. He poured very
+carefully this fluid to the depth of half an inch in one glass and
+three-quarters of an inch in another glass. Then he filled both glasses
+to the brim with water, accomplishing the feat with infinite pains and
+enjoyment, as though it had been part of a ritual.
+
+'There!' he said, offering me in his steady hand the glass which had
+received the smaller quantity of the green fluid. 'Taste.'
+
+'But what is it?' I demanded.
+
+'Taste,' he repeated, and he himself tasted.
+
+I obeyed. At the first mouthful I thought the liquid was somewhat
+sinister and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my
+opinion, and found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet
+not strong.
+
+'Do you like it?' he asked.
+
+I nodded, and drank again.
+
+'It is wonderful,' I answered. 'What do you call it?'
+
+'Men call it absinthe,' he said.
+
+'But--'
+
+I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.
+
+'Don't be frightened,' he soothed me. 'I know what you were going to
+say. You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of all poisons,
+that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most terrible of all
+drunkards. So it is; so it does. But not as we are drinking it; not as I
+invariably drink it.'
+
+'Of course,' I said, proudly confident in him. 'You would not have
+offered it to me otherwise.'
+
+'Of course I should not,' he agreed. 'I give you my word that a few drops
+of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and the least
+harmful stimulant in the world.'
+
+'I am sure of it,' I said.
+
+'But drink slowly,' he advised me.
+
+I refused the sandwiches. I had no need of them. I felt sufficient unto
+myself. I no longer had any apprehension. My body, my brain, and my soul
+seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency. The fear of being
+maladroit departed from me. Ideas--delicate and subtle ideas--welled up
+in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them. I began
+to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric
+interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still
+stood by the fire.
+
+'Yes, he said, 'that is very interesting.'
+
+'What does the Fantasia mean to you?' I asked him.
+
+'Nothing,' he said.
+
+'Nothing!'
+
+'Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense.
+You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
+forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
+emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it
+can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the
+greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas.
+Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes
+direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but
+which the soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the
+Fantasia is that it moves me profoundly. I _know how_ it moves me, but I
+cannot tell you; I cannot even tell myself.'
+
+Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.
+
+'Oh, do go on,' I entreated him. 'Tell me more about music. Do you not
+think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do, since
+you always play him.'
+
+He smiled.
+
+'No,' he said, 'I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art. When
+fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes
+impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme.
+No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song.
+The whole last act of _The Twilight of the Gods_ is not greater than a
+little song of Grieg's.'
+
+'I see,' I murmured humbly. '_The Twilight of the Gods_--that is Wagner,
+isn't it?'
+
+'Yes. Don't you know your Wagner?'
+
+'No. I--'
+
+'You don't know _Tristan_?'
+
+He jumped up, excited.
+
+'How could I know it?' I expostulated. 'I have never seen any opera. I
+know the marches from _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_, and "O Star of Eve!"'
+
+'But it is impossible that you don't know _Tristan_!' he exclaimed. 'The
+second act of _Tristan_ is the greatest piece of love-music--No, it
+isn't.' He laughed. 'I must not contradict myself. But it is
+marvellous--marvellous! You know the story?'
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'Play me some of it.'
+
+'I will play the Prelude,' he answered.
+
+I gulped down the remaining drops in my glass and crossed the room to a
+chair where I could see his face. And he played the Prelude to the most
+passionately voluptuous opera ever written. It was my first real
+introduction to Wagner, my first glimpse of that enchanted field. I was
+ravished, rapt away.
+
+'Wagner was a great artist in spite of himself,' said Diaz, when he had
+finished. 'He assigned definite and precise ideas to all those melodies.
+Nothing could be more futile. I shall not label them for you. But perhaps
+you can guess the love-motive for yourself.'
+
+'Yes, I can,' I said positively. 'It is this.'
+
+I tried to hum the theme, but my voice refused obedience. So I came to
+the piano, and played the theme high up in the treble, while Diaz was
+still sitting on the piano-stool. I trembled even to touch the piano in
+his presence; but I did it.
+
+'You have guessed right,' he said; and then he asked me in a casual tone:
+'Do you ever play pianoforte duets?'
+
+'Often,' I replied unsuspectingly, 'with my aunt. We play the symphonies
+of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and overtures, and so on.'
+
+'Awfully good fun, isn't it?' he smiled.
+
+'Splendid!' I said.
+
+'I've got _Tristan_ here arranged for pianoforte duet,' he said.
+'Tony, my secretary, enjoys playing it. You shall play part of the
+second act with me.'
+
+'Me! With you!'
+
+'Certainly.'
+
+'Impossible! I should never dare! How do you know I can play at all?'
+
+'You have just proved it to me,' said he. 'Come; you will not
+refuse me this!'
+
+I wanted to leave the vicinity of the piano. I felt that, once out of the
+immediate circle of his tremendous physical influence, I might manage to
+escape the ordeal which he had suggested. But I could not go away. The
+silken nets of his personality had been cast, and I was enmeshed. And if
+I was happy, it was with a dreadful happiness.
+
+'But, really, I can't play with you,' I said weakly.
+
+His response was merely to look up at me over his shoulder. His beautiful
+face was so close to mine, and it expressed such a naïve and strong
+yearning for my active and intimate sympathy, and such divine frankness,
+and such perfect kindliness, that I had no more will to resist. I knew I
+should suffer horribly in spoiling by my coarse amateurishness the
+miraculous finesse of his performance, but I resigned myself to
+suffering. I felt towards him as I had felt during the concert: that he
+must have his way at no matter what cost, that he had already earned the
+infinite gratitude of the entire world--in short, I raised him in my soul
+to a god's throne; and I accepted humbly the great, the incredible honour
+he did me. And I was right--a thousand times right.
+
+And in the same moment he was like a charming child to me: such is always
+in some wise the relation between the creature born to enjoy and the
+creature born to suffer.
+
+'I'll try,' I said; 'but it will be appalling.'
+
+I laughed and shook my head.
+
+'We shall see how appalling it will be,' he murmured, as he got the
+volume of music.
+
+He fetched a chair for me, and we sat down side by side, he on the stool
+and I on the chair.
+
+'I'm afraid my chair is too low,' I said.
+
+'And I'm sure this stool is too high,' he said. 'Suppose we exchange.'
+
+So we both rose to change the positions of the chair and the stool, and
+our garments touched and almost our faces, and at that very moment there
+was a loud rap at the door.
+
+I darted away from him.
+
+'What's that?' I cried, low in a fit of terror.
+
+'Who's there?' he called quietly; but he did not stir.
+
+We gazed at each other.
+
+The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.
+
+'Who's there?' Diaz demanded again.
+
+'Go to the door,' I whispered.
+
+He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor.
+Diaz went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the
+corridor, and looked into the darkness.
+
+'Curious!' he commented tranquilly. 'I see no one.'
+
+He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby
+to shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of
+our own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on
+the small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a
+half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other
+room; one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ball,
+which caught the light of the candle on the piano.
+
+'You were startled,' he said. 'You must have a little more of our
+cordial--just a spoonful.'
+
+He poured out for me an infinitesimal quantity, and the same for himself.
+
+I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling
+incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and
+that did not leave me.
+
+We sat down a second time to the piano.
+
+'You understand,' he explained, staring absently at the double page of
+music, 'this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is dark in
+the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king, her
+husband, has just gone off hunting--you will hear the horns dying in the
+distance--and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch is burning
+in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the signal by
+extinguishing it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment when
+they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that you
+will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers. Are
+you ready?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous.
+I was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes.
+The notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was
+the big black letters at the top, 'Zweiter Aufzug.' And furthermore, on
+that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the bass of
+the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and
+closed my eyes.
+
+'I can't,' I whispered, 'I can't. I would if I could.'
+
+He gently took my hand.
+
+'My dear companion,' he said, 'tell me your name.'
+
+I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason,
+flashed through my mind.
+
+'Magdalen,' I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and sincere
+that he believed it.
+
+I could see that he was taken aback.
+
+'It is a holy name and a good name,' he said, after a pause. 'Magda, you
+are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read
+it, won't you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me, and
+play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.'
+
+And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The
+influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had
+resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and
+lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and
+dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in
+conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing
+out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had
+ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I
+abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not
+disgrace myself.'
+
+'Unless it was Chopin,' whispered Diaz. 'No one could ever see two things
+at once as well as Wagner.'
+
+We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the
+page, and then the hunters' horns were heard departing from the garden of
+love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a scarce-heard drone,
+out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the horns died away,
+so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the future. I
+surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty which we
+were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.
+
+The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once
+feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of
+modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of
+heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I
+might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and
+complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam
+about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a
+background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they
+were the emotions of love--the sense of the splendour of love, the
+headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the
+finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the
+universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: 'Where love is,
+there is God also.'
+
+The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be
+approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy,
+but I held on, and the climax arrived--a climax which touched the
+limits of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in
+coming together.
+
+'Tristan has come into the garden,' I muttered.
+
+And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.
+
+We plunged forward into the love-scene itself--the scene in which the
+miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all
+miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then
+occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces,
+what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what
+sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In
+what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that
+marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond
+the common lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more
+fully than I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a
+supreme experience, and that another such could not be contained in my
+life.... And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on
+the music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the
+left hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar,
+and becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air
+fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of
+the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The
+whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought
+gently and persistently against the rhythm.
+
+'Hear the beating of their hearts,' Diaz' whisper floated over the
+chords.
+
+It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the
+vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands
+fell from the keyboard. He looked at me--and with what a glance!
+
+'I can bear no more,' I cried wildly. 'It is too beautiful, too
+beautiful!'
+
+And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my
+face in my hands.
+
+He came to me, and bent over me.
+
+'Magda,' he whispered, 'show me your face.' With his hands he delicately
+persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to look on him. 'How
+dark and splendid you are, Magda!' he said, still holding my hands. 'How
+humid and flashing your eyes! And those eyelashes, and that hair--dark,
+dark! And that bosom, with its rise and fall! And that low, rich voice,
+that is like dark wine! And that dress--dark, and full of mysterious
+shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known each other in a
+previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this moment is the
+fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You were to be
+mine. You are mine, Magda!'
+
+There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny
+to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief
+instant, to this noble and glorious creature, on whom the gods had
+showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not
+already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of
+society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the
+resistless tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable,
+and everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we
+were together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in
+contact. He held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at
+once that those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was
+proud and glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that
+point I ceased to have volition....
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+When I woke up, perplexed at first, but gradually remembering where I
+was, and what had occurred to me, the realistic and uncompromising light
+of dawn had commenced its pitiless inquiry, and it fell on the brass
+knob, which I had noticed a few hours before, from the other room, and
+on another brass knob a few feet away. My eyes smarted; I had
+disconcerting sensations at the back of my head; my hair was brittle,
+and as though charged with a dull electricity; I was conscious of actual
+pain, and an incubus, crushing but intangible, lay heavily, like a
+physical weight, on my heart. After the crest of the wave the trough--it
+must be so; but how profound the instinct which complains! I listened. I
+could hear his faint, regular breathing. I raised myself carefully on
+one elbow and looked at him. He was as beautiful in sleep as in
+consciousness; his lips were slightly parted, his cheek exquisitely
+flushed, and nothing could disarrange that short, curly hair. He slept
+with the calmness of the natural innocent man, to whom the assuaging of
+desires brings only content.
+
+I felt that I must go, and hastily, frantically. I could not face him
+when he woke; I should not have known what to say; I should have been
+abashed, timid, clumsy, unequal to myself. And, moreover, I had the
+egoist's deep need to be alone, to examine my soul, to understand it
+intimately and utterly. And, lastly, I wanted to pay the bill of pleasure
+at once. I could never tolerate credit; I was like my aunt in that.
+Therefore, I must go home and settle the account in some way. I knew not
+how; I knew only that the thing must be done. Diaz had nothing to do with
+that; it was not his affair, and I should have resented his interference.
+Ah! when I was in the bill-paying mood, how hard I could be, how stony,
+how blind! And that morning I was like a Malay running amok.
+
+Think not that when I was ready to depart I stopped and stooped to give
+him a final tender kiss. I did not even scribble a word of adieu or of
+explanation. I stole away on tiptoe, without looking at him. This sounds
+brutal, but it is a truth of my life, and I am writing my life--at
+least, I am writing those brief hours of my existence during which I
+lived. I had always a sort of fierce courage; and as I had proved the
+courage of my passion in the night, so I proved the courage of my--not
+my remorse, not my compunction, not my regret--but of my intellectual
+honesty in the morning. Proud and vain words, perhaps. Who can tell? No
+matter what sympathies I alienate, I am bound to say plainly that,
+though I am passionate, I am not sentimental. I came to him out of the
+void, and I went from him into the void. He found me, and he lost me.
+Between the autumn sunset and the autumn sunrise he had learnt to know
+me well, but he did not know my name nor my history; he had no clue, no
+cord to pull me back.
+
+I passed into the sitting-room, dimly lighted through the drawn curtains,
+and there was the score of _Tristan_ open on the piano. Yes; and if I
+were the ordinary woman I would add that there also were the ashes in the
+cold grate, and so symbolize the bitterness of memory and bring about a
+pang. But I have never regretted what is past. The cinders of that fire
+were to me cinders of a fire and nothing more.
+
+In the doorway I halted. To go into the corridor was like braving the
+blast of the world, and I hesitated. Possibly I hesitated for a very
+little thing. Only the women among you will guess it. My dress was dark
+and severe. I had a simple, dark cloak. But I had no hat. I had no hat,
+and the most important fact in the universe for me then was that I had no
+hat. My whole life was changed; my heart and mind were in the throes of a
+revolution. I dared not imagine what would happen between my aunt and me;
+but this deficiency in my attire distressed me more than all else. At the
+other end of the obscure corridor was a chambermaid kneeling down and
+washing the linoleum. Ah, maid! Would I not have exchanged fates with
+you, then! I walked boldly up to her. She seemed to be surprised, but she
+continued to wring out a cloth in her pail as she looked at me.
+
+'What time is it, please?' I asked her.
+
+'Better than half-past six, ma'am,' said she.
+
+She was young and emaciated.
+
+'Have you got a hat you can lend me? Or I'll buy it from you.'
+
+'A hat, ma'am?'
+
+'Yes, a hat,' I repeated impatiently. And I flushed. 'I must go out at
+once, and I've--I've no hat And I can't--'
+
+It is extraordinary how in a crisis one's organism surprises one. I had
+thought I was calm and full of self-control, but I had almost no command
+over my voice.
+
+'I've got a boat-shaped straw, ma'am, if that's any use to you,' said the
+girl kindly.
+
+What she surmised or what she knew I could not say. But I have found out
+since in my travels, that hotel chambermaids lose their illusions early.
+At any rate her tone was kindly.
+
+'Get it me, there's a good girl,' I entreated her.
+
+And when she brought it, I drew out the imitation pearl pins and put them
+between my teeth, and jammed the hat on my head and skewered it savagely
+with the pins.
+
+'Is that right?'
+
+'It suits you better than it does me, ma'am, I do declare,' she said.
+'Oh, ma'am, this is too much--I really couldn't!'
+
+I had given her five shillings.
+
+'Nonsense! I am very much obliged to you,' I whispered hurriedly,
+and ran off.
+
+She was a good girl. I hope she has never suffered. And yet I would
+not like to think she had died of consumption before she knew what
+life meant.
+
+I hastened from the hotel. A man in a blue waistcoat with shining black
+sleeves was moving a large cocoa-nut mat in the hall, and the pattern of
+the mat was shown in dust on the tiles where the mat had been. He glanced
+at me absently as I flitted past; I encountered no other person. The
+square between the hotel and the station was bathed in pure
+sunshine--such sunshine as reaches the Five Towns only after a rain-storm
+has washed the soot out of the air. I felt, for a moment, obscene in that
+sunshine; but I had another and a stronger feeling. Although there was
+not a soul in the square, I felt as if I was regarding the world and
+mankind with different eyes from those of yesterday. Then I knew nothing;
+to-day I knew everything--so it seemed to me. It seemed to me that I
+understood all sorts of vague, subtle things that I had not understood
+before; that I had been blind and now saw; that I had become kinder, more
+sympathetic, more human. What these things were that I understood, or
+thought I understood, I could not have explained. All I felt was that a
+radical change of attitude had occurred in me. 'Poor world!
+
+Poor humanity! My heart melts for you!' Thus spoke my soul, pouring
+itself out. The very stone facings of the station and the hotel seemed
+somehow to be humanized and to need my compassion.
+
+I walked with eyes downcast into the station. I had determined to take
+the train from Knype to Shawport, a distance of three miles, and then to
+walk up the hill from Shawport through Oldcastle Street to Bursley. I
+hoped that by such a route at such an hour, I should be unlikely to meet
+acquaintances, of whom, in any case, I had few. My hopes appeared to be
+well founded, for the large booking-hall at the station was thronged with
+a multitude entirely strange to me--workmen and workwomen and workgirls
+crowded the place. The first-class and second-class booking-windows were
+shut, and a long tail of muscular men, pale men, stout women, and thin
+women pushed to take tickets at the other window. I was obliged to join
+them, and to wait my turn amid the odour of corduroy and shawl, and the
+strong odour of humanity; my nostrils were peculiarly sensitive that
+morning. Some of the men had herculean arms and necks, and it was these
+who wore pieces of string tied round their trousers below the knee,
+disclosing the lines of their formidable calves. The women were mostly
+pallid and quiet. All carried cans, or satchels, or baskets; here and
+there a man swung lightly on his shoulder a huge bag of tools, which I
+could scarcely have raised from the ground. Everybody was natural,
+direct, and eager; and no one attempted to be genteel or refined; no one
+pretended that he did not toil with his hands for dear life. I
+anticipated that I should excite curiosity, but I did not. The people had
+a preoccupied, hurried air. Only at the window itself, when the
+ticket-clerk, having made me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of
+his lair to get my ticket, did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and
+inimical interest in this drone who caused delay to busy people.
+
+It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same
+on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I
+could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full
+tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they
+employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains
+generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at
+one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.
+
+'These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of
+_our_ wealth and luxury!' I thought; for I was just beginning, at that
+period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social
+organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on
+paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep
+of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable
+directness. They frightened me with their vivid humanity.
+
+I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a
+compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls
+were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her
+dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.
+From the young man's soiled white jacket under his black coat, I
+gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and
+left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession
+of compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people.
+None of my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance. It
+was uncanny.
+
+Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained
+prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn,
+musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life.
+'Ah,' I thought, 'you little know what I know! I may appear a butterfly,
+but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence. I am above you, beyond
+you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by the turmoil
+in my heart!' And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that they probably
+knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten more than I
+had ever learnt. I remembered an absorbing correspondence about the
+manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the _Staffordshire
+Recorder_--a correspondence which had driven Aunt Constance to conceal
+the paper after the second week. I guessed that they might smile at the
+simplicity of my heart could they see it. Meaning of existence! Why, they
+were reared in it! The naturalness of natural people and of natural acts
+struck me like a blow, and I withdrew, whipped, into myself. My adventure
+grew smaller. But I recalled its ecstasies. I dwelt on the romantic
+perfection of Diaz. It seemed to me amazing, incredible, that Diaz, the
+glorious and incomparable Diaz, had loved me--_me_! out of all the
+ardent, worshipping women that the world contained. I wondered if he had
+wakened up, and I felt sorry for him. So far, I had not decided how soon,
+if at all, I should communicate with him. My mind was incapable of
+reaching past the next few hours--the next hour.
+
+We stopped at a station surrounded by the evidences of that tireless,
+unceasing, and tremendous manufacturing industry which distinguishes the
+Five Towns, and I was left alone in the compartment. The train rumbled on
+through a landscape of fiery furnaces, and burning slag-heaps, and foul
+canals reflecting great smoking chimneys, all steeped in the mild
+sunshine. Could the toil-worn agents of this never-ending and gigantic
+productiveness find time for love? Perhaps they loved quickly and forgot,
+like animals. Thoughts such as these lurked sinister and carnal, strange
+beasts in the jungle of my poor brain. Then the train arrived at
+Shawport, and I was obliged to get out. I say 'obliged,' because I
+violently wished not to get out. I wished to travel on in that train to
+some impossible place, where things were arranged differently.
+
+The station clock showed only five minutes to seven. I was astounded. It
+seemed to me that all the real world had been astir and busy for hours.
+And this extraordinary activity went on every morning while Aunt
+Constance and I lay in our beds and thought well of ourselves.
+
+I shivered, and walked quickly up the street. I had positively not
+noticed that I was cold. I had scarcely left the station before Fred
+Ryley appeared in front of me. I saw that his face was swollen. My
+heart stopped. Of course, he would tell Ethel.... He passed me
+sheepishly without stopping, merely raising his hat, and murmuring the
+singular words:
+
+'We're both very, very sorry.'
+
+What in the name of Heaven could they possibly know, he and Ethel? And
+what right had he to ...? Did he smile furtively? Fred Ryley had
+sometimes a strange smile. I reddened, angry and frightened.
+
+The distance between the station and our house proved horribly short. And
+when I arrived in front of the green gates, and put my hand on the latch,
+I knew that I had formed no plan whatever. I opened the right-hand gate
+and entered the garden. The blinds were still down, and the house looked
+so decorous and innocent in its age. My poor aunt! What a night she must
+have been through! It was inconceivable that I should tell her what had
+happened to me. Indeed, under the windows of that house it seemed
+inconceivable that the thing had happened which had happened.
+Inconceivable! Grotesque! Monstrous!
+
+But could I lie? Could I rise to the height of some sufficient and
+kindly lie?
+
+A hand drew slightly aside the blind of the window over the porch. I
+sighed, and went wearily, in my boat-shaped straw, up the gravelled path
+to the door.
+
+Rebecca met me at the door. It was so early that she had not yet put on
+an apron. She looked tired, as if she had not slept.
+
+'Come in, miss,' she said weakly, holding open the door.
+
+It seemed to me that I did not need this invitation from a servant.
+
+'I suppose you've all been fearfully upset, wondering where I was,' I
+began, entering the hall.
+
+My adventure appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this
+buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything one
+hundredth part so dreadful.
+
+'No, miss; I wasn't upset on account of you. You're always so sensible
+like. You always know what to do. I knew as you must have stopped the
+night with friends in Hanbridge on account of the heavy rain, and perhaps
+that there silly cabman not turning up, and them tramcars all crowded;
+and, of course, you couldn't telegraph.'
+
+This view that I was specially sagacious and equal to emergencies rather
+surprised me.
+
+'But auntie?' I demanded, trembling.
+
+'Oh, miss!' cried Rebecca, glancing timidly over her shoulder, 'I want
+you to come with me into the dining-room before you go upstairs.'
+
+She snuffled.
+
+In the dining-room I went at once to the window to draw up the blinds.
+
+'Not that, not that!' Rebecca appealed, weeping. 'For pity's sake!' And
+she caught my hand.
+
+I then noticed that Lucy was standing in the doorway, also weeping.
+Rebecca noticed this too.
+
+'Lucy, you go to your kitchen this minute,' she said sharply, and then
+turned to me and began to cry again. 'Miss Peel--how can I tell you?'
+
+'Why do you call me Miss Peel?' I asked her.
+
+But I knew why. The thing flashed over me instantly. My dear aunt was
+dead.
+
+'You've got no aunt,' said Rebecca. 'My poor dear! And you at the
+concert!'
+
+I dropped my head and my bosom on the bare mahogany table and cried.
+Never before, and never since, have I spilt such tears--hot, painful
+drops, distilled plenteously from a heart too crushed and torn.
+
+'There, there!' muttered Rebecca. 'I wish I could have told you
+different--less cruel; but it wasn't in me to do it.'
+
+'And she's lying upstairs this very moment all cold and stiff,' a wailing
+voice broke in.
+
+It was Lucy, who could not keep herself away from us.
+
+'Will you go to your kitchen, my girl!'
+
+Rebecca drove her off. 'And the poor thing's not stiff either. Her poor
+body's as soft as if she was only asleep, and doctor says it will be for
+a day or two. It's like that when they're took off like that, he says.
+Oh, Miss Carlotta--'
+
+'Tell me all about it before I go upstairs,' I said.
+
+I had recovered.
+
+'Your poor aunt went to bed just as soon as you were gone, miss,' said
+Rebecca. 'She would have it she was quite well, only tired. I took her up
+a cup of cocoa at ten o'clock, and she seemed all right, and then I sends
+Lucy to bed, and I sits up in the kitchen to wait for you. Not a sound
+from your poor aunt. I must have dropped asleep, miss, in my chair, and I
+woke up with a start like, and the kitchen clock was near on one. Thinks
+I, perhaps Miss Carlotta's been knocking and ringing all this time and me
+not heard, and I rushes to the front door. But of course you weren't
+there. The porch was nothing but a pool o' water. I says to myself she's
+stopping somewhere, I says. And I felt it was my duty to go and tell your
+aunt, whether she was asleep or whether she wasn't asleep.... Well, and
+there she was, miss, with her eyes closed, and as soft as a child. I
+spoke to her, loud, more than once. "Miss Carlotta a'n't come," I says.
+"Miss Carlotta a'n't come, ma'am," I says. She never stirred. Thinks I,
+this is queer this is. And I goes up to her and touches her. Chilly! Then
+I takes the liberty of pushing back your poor aunt's eyelids, and I could
+but see the whites of her eyes; the eyeballs was gone up, and a bit
+outwards. Yes; and her poor dear chin was dropped. Thinks I, here's
+trouble, and Miss Carlotta at the concert. I runs to our bedroom, and I
+tells Lucy to put a cloak on and fetch Dr. Roycroft. "Who for?" she says.
+"Never you mind who for!" I says, says I. "You up and quick. But you can
+tell the doctor it's missis as is took." And in ten minutes he was here,
+miss. But it's only across the garden, like. "Yes," he said, "she's been
+dead an hour or more. Failure of the heart's action," he said. "She died
+in her sleep," he said. "Thank God she died in her sleep if she was to
+die, the pure angel!" I says. I told the doctor as you were away for the
+night, miss. And I laid her out, miss, and your poor auntie wasn't my
+first, either. I've seen trouble--I've--'
+
+And Rebecca's tears overcame her voice.
+
+'I'll go upstairs with you, miss,' she struggled out.
+
+One thought that flew across my mind was that Doctor Roycroft was very
+intimate with the Ryleys, and had doubtless somehow informed them of my
+aunt's death. This explained Fred Ryley's strange words and attitude to
+me on the way from the station. The young man had been too timid to stop
+me. The matter was a trifle, but another idea that struck me was not a
+trifle, though I strove to make it so. My aunt had died about midnight,
+and it was at midnight that Diaz and I had heard the mysterious knock on
+his sitting-room door. At the time I had remarked how it resembled my
+aunt's knock. Occasionally, when the servants overslept themselves, Aunt
+Constance would go to their rooms in her pale-blue dressing-gown and
+knock on their door exactly like that. Could it be that this was one of
+those psychical manifestations of which I had read? Had my aunt, in
+passing from this existence to the next, paused a moment to warn me of
+my terrible danger? My intellect replied that a disembodied soul could
+not knock, and that the phenomenon had been due simply to some guest or
+servant of the hotel who had mistaken the room, and discovered his error
+in time. Nevertheless, the instinctive part of me--that part of us which
+refuses to fraternize with reason, and which we call the superstitious
+because we cannot explain it--would not let go the spiritualistic
+theory, and during all my life has never quite surrendered it to the
+attacks of my brain.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+'No,' I said; 'I will go upstairs alone;' and I went, leaving my cloak
+and hat with Rebecca.
+
+Already, to my hypersensitive nostrils, there was a slight odour in the
+darkened bedroom. What lay on the bed, straight and long and thin,
+resembled almost exactly my aunt as she lived. I forced myself to look on
+it. Except that the face was paler than usual, and had a curious
+transparent, waxy appearance, and that the cheeks were a little hollowed,
+and the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth somewhat
+deepened, there had been no outward change.... And _this_ once was she! I
+thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved
+me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling,
+sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The
+shaft of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the
+same hour, and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled
+and quailed. I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul
+also was solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not
+a moral coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at
+that calm and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much
+I had lost. At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt
+Constance at over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among men for
+interminable years, and never _known_! It seemed impossible, shockingly
+against Nature, that my aunt's existence should have been so! I pitied
+her profoundly. I felt that essentially she was girlish compared to me.
+And yet--and yet--that which she had kept and which I had given away was
+precious, too--indefinably and wonderfully precious! The price of
+knowledge and of ecstasy seemed heavy to me then. The girl that had gone
+with Diaz into that hotel apartment had come out no more. She had expired
+there, and her extinction was the price, Oh, innocence! Oh, divine
+ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered
+you! And herein is the woman's tragedy.
+
+There in that mausoleum I decided that I must never see Diaz again. He
+was fast in my heart, a flashing, glorious treasure, but I must never see
+him again. I must devote myself to memory.
+
+On the dressing-table lay a brown-paper parcel which seemed out of place
+there. I opened it, and it contained a magnificently-bound copy of _The
+Imitation of Christ_. Upon the flyleaf was written: 'To dearest Carlotta
+on attaining her majority. With fondest love. C.P.'
+
+It was too much; it was overwhelming. I wept again. Soul so kind and
+pure! The sense of my loss, the sense of the simple, proud rectitude of
+her life, laid me low.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the
+conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or
+flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains
+loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy,
+wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of
+existence; trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the
+air of your own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night
+with your yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave
+the night behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that
+carry bread and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of
+fresh water; trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through
+the landscapes and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting,
+formidable, and yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your
+arrogance and your pathos.
+
+That little journey from Knype to Shawport had implanted itself painfully
+in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of
+life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months
+had elapsed--three months of growing misery and despair; three months of
+tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the
+exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange
+fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs
+of wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy,
+and no interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there
+by my secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of
+the Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been
+so minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would
+not. Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been
+able to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the
+house; I sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca
+and the clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as
+though I had sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week,
+I cut myself to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a
+sort of terrible languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony,
+and yet tortured by my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that
+no philosophy could stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more
+than the strapping and the labelling of my trunks that morning after I
+had slept, dreamfully, in the bed that I should never use again--the bed
+that, indeed, was even then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I
+wept at all, I should have wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks:
+'Miss Peel, passenger to Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,'
+with two thick lines drawn under the 'Euston.' That writing of labels was
+the climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and
+all bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some
+day, when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has
+been fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved
+passionately the disfigured hills and valleys of the Five Towns. And as I
+think of Oldcastle Street, dropping away sleepily and respectably from
+the Town Hall of Bursley, with the gold angel holding a gold crown on its
+spire, I vibrate with an inexplicable emotion. What is there in Oldcastle
+Street to disturb the dust of the soul?
+
+I must tell you here that Diaz had gone to South America on a triumphal
+tour of concerts, lest I forget! I read it in the paper.
+
+So I arrived in London on a February day, about one o'clock. And the
+hall-porter at the Golden Cross Hotel, and the two pale girls in the
+bureau of the hotel, were sympathetic and sweet to me, because I was
+young and alone, and in mourning, and because I had great rings round my
+eyes. It was a fine day, blue and mild. At half-past three I had nothing
+in the world to do. I had come to London without a plan, without a
+purpose, with scarcely an introduction; I wished simply to plunge myself
+into its solitude, and to be alone with my secret fear. I walked out into
+the street, slowly, like one whom ennui has taught to lose no chance of
+dissipating time. I neither liked nor disliked London. I had no feelings
+towards it save one of perplexity. I thought it noisy, dirty, and
+hurried. Its great name roused no thrill in my bosom. On the morrow, I
+said, I would seek a lodging, and perhaps write to Ethel Ryley.
+Meanwhile I strolled up into Trafalgar Square, and so into Charing Cross
+Road. And in Charing Cross Road--it was the curst accident of fate--I saw
+the signboard of the celebrated old firm of publishers, Oakley and
+Dalbiac. It is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in
+this history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt's
+death I had already written my first novel, _The Jest_, and sent it to
+precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful
+extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew
+nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had
+kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely
+formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance of
+success, and that they would be prepared to publish it on certain terms,
+but that I must not expect, etc. By that time I had lost my original
+sublime faith in the exceeding excellence of my story, and I replied that
+I preferred to withdraw the book. To this letter I had received no
+answer. When I saw the famous sign over a doorway the impulse seized me
+to enter and get the manuscript, with the object of rewriting it. Soon, I
+reflected, I might not be able to enter; the portals of mankind might be
+barred to me for a space.... I saw in a flash of insight that my
+salvation lay in work, and in nothing else. I entered, resolutely. A
+brougham was waiting at the doors.
+
+After passing along counters furnished with ledgers and clerks, through a
+long, lofty room lined with great pigeon-holes containing thousands of
+books each wrapped separately in white paper, I was shown into what the
+clerk who acted as chamberlain called the office of the principal. This
+room, too, was spacious, but so sombre that the electric light was
+already burning. The first thing I noticed was that the window gave on a
+wall of white tiles. In the middle of the somewhat dingy apartment was a
+vast, square table, and at this table sat a pale, tall man, whose youth
+astonished me--for the firm of Oakley and Dalbiac was historic.
+
+He did not look up exactly at the instant of my entering, but when he did
+look up, when he saw me, he stared for an instant, and then sprang from
+his chair as though magically startled into activity. His age was about
+thirty, and he had large, dark eyes, and a slight, dark moustache, and
+his face generally was interesting; he wore a dark gray suit. I was
+nervous, but he was even more nervous; yet in the moment of looking up he
+had not seemed nervous. He could not do enough, apparently, to make me
+feel at ease, and to show his appreciation of me and my work. He spoke
+enthusiastically of _The Jest_, begging me neither to suppress it nor to
+alter it. And, without the least suggestion from me, he offered me a
+considerable sum of money in advance of royalties. At that time I
+scarcely knew what royalties were. But although my ignorance of business
+was complete, I guessed that this man was behaving in a manner highly
+unusual among publishers. He was also patently contradicting the tenor of
+his firm's letter to me. I thanked him, and said I should like, at any
+rate, to glance through the manuscript.
+
+'Don't alter it, Miss Peel, I beg,' he said. 'It is "young," I know;
+but it ought to be. I remember my wife said--my wife reads many of our
+manuscripts--by the way--' He went to a door, opened it, and called
+out, 'Mary!'
+
+A tall and slim woman, extremely elegant, appeared in reply to this
+appeal. Her hair was gray above the ears, and I judged that she was four
+or five years older than the man. She had a kind, thin face, with shining
+gray eyes, and she was wearing a hat.
+
+'Mary, this is Miss Peel, the author of _The Jest_--you remember. Miss
+Peel, my wife.'
+
+The woman welcomed me with quick, sincere gestures. Her smile was very
+pleasant, and yet a sad smile. The husband also had an air of quiet,
+restrained, cheerful sadness.
+
+'My wife is frequently here in the afternoon like this,' said the
+principal.
+
+'Yes,' she laughed; 'it's quite a family affair, and I'm almost on the
+staff. I distinctly remember your manuscript, Miss Peel, and how very
+clever and amusing it was.'
+
+Her praise was spontaneous and cordial, but it was a different thing from
+the praise of her husband. He obviously noticed the difference.
+
+'I was just saying to Miss Peel--' he began, with increased nervousness.
+
+'Pardon me,' I interrupted. 'But am I speaking to Mr. Oakley or
+Mr. Dalbiac?'
+
+'To neither,' said he. 'My name is Ispenlove, and I am the nephew of the
+late Mr. Dalbiac. Mr. Oakley died thirty years ago. I have no partner.'
+
+'You expected to see a very old gentleman, no doubt,' Mrs.
+Ispenlove remarked.
+
+'Yes,' I smiled.
+
+'People often do. And Frank is so very young. You live in London?'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I have just come up.'
+
+'To stay?'
+
+'To stay.'
+
+'Alone?'
+
+'Yes. My aunt died a few months ago. I am all that is left of my
+family.'
+
+Mrs. Ispenlove's eyes filled with tears, and she fingered a gold chain
+that hung from her neck.
+
+'But have you got rooms--a house?'
+
+'I am at a hotel for the moment.'
+
+'But you have friends?'
+
+I shook my head. Mr. Ispenlove was glancing rapidly from one to the
+other of us.
+
+'My dear young lady!' exclaimed his wife. Then she hesitated, and said:
+'Excuse my abruptness, but do let me beg you to come and have tea with us
+this afternoon. We live quite near--in Bloomsbury Square. The carriage is
+waiting. Frank, you can come?'
+
+'I can come for an hour,' said Mr. Ispenlove.
+
+I wanted very much to decline, but I could not. I could not disappoint
+that honest and generous kindliness, with its touch of melancholy. I
+could not refuse those shining gray eyes. I saw that my situation and my
+youth had lacerated Mrs. Ispenlove's sensitive heart, and that she wished
+to give it balm by being humane to me.
+
+We seemed, so rapid was our passage, to be whisked on an Arabian carpet
+to a spacious drawing-room, richly furnished, with thick rugs and ample
+cushions and countless knicknacks and photographs and delicately-tinted
+lampshades. There was a grand piano by Steinway, and on it Mendelssohn's
+'Songs without Words.' The fire slumbered in a curious grate that
+projected several feet into the room--such a contrivance I had never seen
+before. Near it sat Mrs. Ispenlove, entrenched behind a vast copper disc
+on a low wicker stand, pouring out tea. Mr. Ispenlove hovered about. He
+and his wife called each other 'dearest.' 'Ring the bell for me,
+dearest.' 'Yes, dearest.' I felt sure that they had no children. They
+were very intimate, very kind, and always gently sad. The atmosphere was
+charmingly domestic, even cosy, despite the size of the room--a most
+pleasing contrast to the offices which we had just left. Mrs. Ispenlove
+told her husband to look after me well, and he devoted himself to me.
+
+'Do you know,' said Mrs. Ispenlove, 'I am gradually recalling the details
+of your book, and you are not at all the sort of person that I should
+have expected to see.'
+
+'But that poor little book isn't _me_,' I answered. 'I shall never write
+another like it. I only--'
+
+'Shall you not?' Mr. Ispenlove interjected. 'I hope you will, though.'
+
+I smiled.
+
+'I only did it to see what I could do. I am going to begin something
+quite different.'
+
+'It appears to me,' said Mrs. Ispenlove--'and I must again ask you to
+excuse my freedom, but I feel as if I had known you a long time--it
+appears to me that what you want immediately is a complete rest.'
+
+'Why do you say that?' I demanded.
+
+'You do not look well. You look exhausted and worn out.'
+
+I blushed as she gazed at me. Could she--? No. Those simple gray eyes
+could not imagine evil. Nevertheless, I saw too plainly how foolish I had
+been. I, with my secret fear, that was becoming less a fear than a
+dreadful certainty, to permit myself to venture into that house! I might
+have to fly ignominiously before long, to practise elaborate falsehood,
+to disappear.
+
+'Perhaps you are right,' I agreed.
+
+The conversation grew fragmentary, and less and less formal. Mrs.
+Ispenlove was the chief talker. I remember she said that she was always
+being thrown among clever people, people who could do things, and that
+her own inability to do anything at all was getting to be an obsession
+with her; and that people like me could have no idea of the tortures of
+self-depreciation which she suffered. Her voice was strangely wistful
+during this confession. She also spoke--once only, and quite shortly,
+but with what naïve enthusiasm!--of the high mission and influence of the
+novelist who wrote purely and conscientiously. After this, though my
+liking for her was undiminished, I had summed her up. Mr. Ispenlove
+offered no commentary on his wife's sentiments. He struck me as being a
+reserved man, whose inner life was intense and sufficient to him.
+
+'Ah!' I reflected, as Mrs. Ispenlove, with an almost motherly accent,
+urged me to have another cup of tea, 'if you knew me, if you knew me,
+what would you say to me? Would your charity be strong enough to overcome
+your instincts?' And as I had felt older than my aunt, so I felt older
+than Mrs. Ispenlove.
+
+I left, but I had to promise to come again on the morrow, after I had
+seen Mr. Ispenlove on business. The publisher took me down to my hotel in
+the brougham (and I thought of the drive with Diaz, but the water was not
+streaming down the windows), and then he returned to his office.
+
+Without troubling to turn on the light in my bedroom, I sank sighing on
+to the bed. The events of the afternoon had roused me from my terrible
+lethargy, but now it overcame me again. I tried to think clearly about
+the Ispenloves and what the new acquaintance meant for me; but I could
+not think clearly. I had not been able to think clearly for two months. I
+wished only to die. For a moment I meditated vaguely on suicide, but
+suicide seemed to involve an amount of complicated enterprise far beyond
+my capacity. It amazed me how I had managed to reach London. I must have
+come mechanically, in a heavy dream; for I had no hope, no energy, no
+vivacity, no interest. For many weeks my mind had revolved round an awful
+possibility, as if hypnotized by it, and that monotonous revolution
+seemed alone to constitute my real life. Moreover, I was subject to
+recurring nausea, and to disconcerting bodily pains and another symptom.
+
+'This must end!' I said, struggling to my feet.
+
+I summoned the courage of an absolute disgust. I felt that the power
+which had triumphed over my dejection and my irresolution and brought me
+to London might carry me a little further.
+
+Leaving the hotel, I crossed the Strand. Innumerable omnibuses were
+crawling past. I jumped into one at hazard, and the conductor put his arm
+behind my back to support me. He was shouting, 'Putney, Putney, Putney!'
+in an absent-minded manner: he had assisted me to mount without even
+looking at me. I climbed to the top of the omnibus and sat down, and the
+omnibus moved off. I knew not where I was going; Putney was nothing but a
+name to me.
+
+'Where to, lady?' snapped the conductor, coming upstairs.
+
+'Oh, Putney,' I answered.
+
+A little bell rang and he gave me a ticket. The omnibus was soon full. A
+woman with a young child shared my seat. But the population of the roof
+was always changing. I alone remained--so it appeared to me. And we moved
+interminably forward through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under the
+mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an arc-lamp,
+I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they were nothing
+but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were changed. A
+score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he never looked
+at me again. 'I've done with you,' his back seemed to say.
+
+The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly
+succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark;
+and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary
+window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the
+tragic romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to
+be almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London.
+Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction
+with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations,
+elbowing each other--No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I
+felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth,
+my inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the
+very things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in
+that despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of
+life, the beauty of life's exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like
+a red-hot iron.
+
+We crossed a great river by a great bridge--a mysterious and mighty
+stream; and then the streets closed in on us again. And at last, after
+hours and hours, the omnibus swerved into a dark road and
+stopped--stopped finally.
+
+'Putney!' cried the conductor, like fate.
+
+I descended. Far off, at the end of the vista of the dark road, I saw a
+red lamp. I knew that in large cities a red lamp indicated a doctor: it
+was the one useful thing that I did know.
+
+I approached the red lamp, cautiously, on the other side of the street.
+Then some power forced me to cross the street and open a wicket. And in
+the red glow of the lamp I saw an ivory button which I pushed. I could
+plainly hear the result; it made me tremble. I had a narrow escape of
+running away. The door was flung wide, and a middle-aged woman appeared
+in the bright light of the interior of the house. She had a kind face. It
+is astounding, the number of kind faces one meets.
+
+'Is the doctor in?' I asked.
+
+I would have given a year of my life to hear her say 'No.'
+
+'Yes, miss,' she said. 'Will you step in?'
+
+Events seemed to be moving all too rapidly.
+
+I passed into a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the
+surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano--scales,
+played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters
+of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano
+ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall
+man in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into the surgery.
+
+'Good-evening, madam,' he said gruffly. 'Won't you sit down?'
+
+'I--I--I want to ask you--'
+
+He put a chair for me, and I dropped into it.
+
+'There!' he said, after a moment. 'You felt as if you might faint,
+didn't you?'
+
+I nodded. The tears came into my eyes.
+
+'I thought so,' he said. 'I'll just give you a draught, if you
+don't mind.'
+
+He busied himself behind me, and presently I was drinking something out
+of a conical-shaped glass.
+
+My heart beat furiously, but I felt strong.
+
+'I want you to tell me, doctor,' I spoke firmly, 'whether I am about to
+become a mother.'
+
+'Ah?' he answered interrogatively, and then he hummed a fragment
+of an air.
+
+'I have lost my husband,' I was about to add; but suddenly I scorned such
+a weakness and shut my lips.
+
+'Since when--' the doctor began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'No,' I heard him saying. 'You have been quite mistaken. But I am not
+surprised. Such mistakes are frequently made--a kind of auto-suggestion.'
+
+'Mistaken!' I murmured.
+
+I could not prevent the room running round me as I reclined on the sofa;
+and I fainted.
+
+But in the night, safely in my room again at the hotel, I wondered
+whether that secret fear, now exorcised, had not also been a hope. I
+wondered....
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+And now I was twenty-six.
+
+Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the
+lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of
+avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary
+narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as
+for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire,
+and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder
+magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star;
+it held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so
+that if my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night
+in my drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy
+world. This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have
+loved I have loved much....
+
+My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama
+of my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I
+had achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had
+gradually passed away, and a new creature had replaced her--a creature
+rapidly developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of
+an extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my
+face had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given
+me fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the
+woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have
+prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no
+merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the
+accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy,
+and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage
+is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a
+caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in
+the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone
+lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.
+
+However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants
+to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once
+aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of
+another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her
+from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is
+a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing
+which will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule
+which I made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I
+lost much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And
+since elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a
+convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I
+surrounded myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is
+the business of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some
+persons after knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others
+after reading my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these
+persons lacked perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself,
+I had naturally sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest
+thinking, kindness of heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search
+had not been unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!
+
+That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes
+and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which
+Vicary, the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were
+perhaps a dozen guests assembled.
+
+Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent
+visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the
+usual quaint Vicary details--such as the solemn warning whisper of an
+equerry in Vicary's ear as he walked backwards, '_Mind the edge of the
+carpet';_ and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little
+hysterically--all save Vicary, whose foible was never to laugh. But
+immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those disconcerting,
+involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a chill hint of
+autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was over in an
+instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended that
+everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the
+beginning of the downfall.
+
+With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be
+interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from
+a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality
+in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since.
+I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and
+her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance.
+The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis
+Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano.
+Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what
+negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across
+to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.
+
+There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the difference
+between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord
+Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before
+mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of
+my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy,
+men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they
+are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their
+trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human
+wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and
+even their folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties
+enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of
+all luxuries--pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare
+man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening
+unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of
+English printing.
+
+As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude,
+elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me.
+And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out.
+He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air
+of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so,
+and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.
+
+'Pallor suits you,' he piped gallantly, and then added: 'But do not carry
+it to extremes.'
+
+'Am I so pale, then?' I faltered, trying to smile naturally.
+
+I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined
+it like a connoisseur.
+
+'Yes,' he said at length. 'What is the matter?'
+
+Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naïve question with a
+strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living
+as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, 'Does she really
+live without love? What does she conceal?' I have read this interrogation
+in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have
+had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually
+foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had
+nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this
+sage ruin of a male almost a confessor's freedom. Moreover, we had an
+affectionate regard for each other.
+
+I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:
+
+'What is the matter?'
+
+'Love is the matter!' I might have passionately cried out to him, had we
+been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked
+him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but
+thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:
+
+'I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.'
+
+It was my sixth novel in five years.
+
+'With you,' he said, 'work is simply a drug.'
+
+'Lord Francis,' I expostulated, 'how do you know that?'
+
+'And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,' he
+proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. 'Some women take to morphia,
+others take to work.'
+
+'On the contrary,' I said, 'I have quite determined to do no more work
+for twelve months.'
+
+'Seriously?'
+
+'Seriously.'
+
+He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.
+
+'Then you mean to give yourself time to love?' he murmured, as it were
+with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features
+was intensified by an enigmatic smile.
+
+'Why not?' I laughed encouragingly. 'Why not? What do you advise?'
+
+'I advise it,' he said positively. 'I advise it. You have already wasted
+the best years.'
+
+'The best?'
+
+'One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You
+have nothing to learn about love!'
+
+He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated
+their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the
+ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.
+
+The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing
+critically at his chandeliers.
+
+'Does love bring happiness?' I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring
+his remark.
+
+'For forty years,' he quavered, 'I made love to every pretty woman I
+met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent. return on
+my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I certainly
+did not get even that in happiness. I got it in--other ways.'
+
+'And if you had to begin afresh?'
+
+He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his
+bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.
+
+'I would do the same again,' he whispered.
+
+'Would you?' I said, looking up at him. 'Truly?'
+
+'Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely
+hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through
+this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one
+involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!'
+
+He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last
+spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted
+confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive
+meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the
+eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with
+admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.
+
+'What is the title of the new book?' he demanded casually, sinking
+into a chair.
+
+'_Burning Sappho_,' I answered. 'But the title is very misleading.'
+
+'Bright star!' he exclaimed, taking my hand. 'With such a title you will
+surely beat the record of the Good Dame.'
+
+'Hsh!' I enjoined him.
+
+Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.
+
+The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to
+conceal--or to display--his courteous disdain of the ideals represented
+by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that
+impeccable _doyenne_ of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had
+captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound
+problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one
+of them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her
+dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen
+thousand pounds a year.
+
+Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother's world, and she had
+apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she
+was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply
+sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in
+her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so
+anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just
+be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how
+much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....
+
+'Yes, I remember,' Lord Francis was saying. 'It was at St. Malo. And what
+did you think of the Breton peasant?'
+
+'Oh,' said Jocelyn, 'mamma has not yet allowed us to study the condition
+of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new
+Settlement.'
+
+'It must be very exhausting, my dear child,' said Lord Francis.
+
+I rose.
+
+'I came to ask you to play something,' the child appealed to me. 'I have
+never heard you play, and everyone says--'
+
+'Jocelyn, my pet,' the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis floated
+across the room.
+
+'What, mamma?'
+
+'You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal
+to playing.'
+
+My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I
+resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I
+was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became
+violently active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt
+murderous towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I
+said, with sugar in my voice:
+
+'But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.'
+
+It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the
+mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening
+phrase of Chopin's first Ballade, that composition so laden with
+formidable memories--begun it without thinking and without
+apprehension--showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the
+silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands
+filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I
+saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one
+of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind
+and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed
+unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and
+vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess.
+And then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in
+a truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience,
+my trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were
+stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love,
+to whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman
+expecting her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous;
+a woman with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who
+was at once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I
+called my dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and
+say that he, too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the
+instrument of the god?
+
+Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and
+smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my
+gaze suddenly to the keyboard. 'You too!' I thought sadly, 'You too!...
+One day! One day even you will know what life is, and the look in those
+innocent eyes will never be innocent again!'
+
+Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of
+the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and
+stopped. It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my
+longing for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My
+fingers stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey
+me; my pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting.
+And then I became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed
+and anxious faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my
+hands. It was useless to fight further; the battle was lost.
+
+'I will not play any more,' I said quickly. 'I ought not to have tried to
+play from memory. Excuse me.'
+
+And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I
+could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and
+the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.
+
+'Poor thing!' murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. 'Do sit down, dear.'
+
+'Won't you have something to drink?' said Vicary.
+
+'I am perfectly all right,' I said. 'I'm only sorry that my memory is not
+what it used to be.' And I persisted in standing for a few moments by the
+mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of a face as white as
+milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano, frightened by she knew
+not what, like a young child.
+
+'Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,' said Lord Francis
+shakily. He had followed me. 'She has wisely decided to take a long
+holiday. Good-bye, my dear.'
+
+These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We
+shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had
+ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even
+Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not
+come! My secret was my own--and his. And no one should surprise it unless
+we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as
+they filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the
+right to be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently
+woman of the world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.
+
+Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some
+lustre ware in the further drawing-room.
+
+'I'm afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,' I said,
+approaching her.
+
+'I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,' replied Mrs. Sardis. 'The
+carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk
+with you. Do you permit?'
+
+'I shall be delighted,' I said.
+
+'You are sure you are well enough?'
+
+'There is nothing whatever the matter with me,' I answered slowly and
+distinctly. 'Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I told
+Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared, that
+she might retire to bed.
+
+Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis,
+naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still
+furtively wandered to the door.
+
+'My dear co-worker,' she began, and hesitated.
+
+'Yes,' I encouraged her.
+
+She put her matron's lips together:
+
+'You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its
+honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists
+have in the work of regenerating the world.'
+
+I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing
+to be said.
+
+'I wonder,' Mrs. Sardis continued, 'if you have ever realized what a
+power _you_ are in England and America to-day.'
+
+'Power!' I echoed. 'I have done nothing but try to write as honestly and
+as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.'
+
+'No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,' Mrs. Sardis said. 'And
+I needn't tell you that I am a warm admirer of your talent, and that I
+rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work--'
+
+'Surely,' I interrupted her coldly, 'you are not taking the trouble to
+tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous
+Anglo-Saxon public!'
+
+'Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,' she protested. 'I
+personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though their
+originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but there
+exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly objects
+to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion, ignorant
+opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to employ the
+word "immoral."'
+
+'What, then?'
+
+'I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a
+motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of
+the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal
+life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find
+in it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.'
+
+'Mrs. Sardis!' I cried. 'What do you mean?'
+
+I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this
+incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth;
+and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had
+received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and
+detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the
+conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive
+that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then,
+as suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the
+painful earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I--what were we but
+two groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one
+mystery into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our
+characters? Mrs. Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a
+natural force, as I was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat
+of the sun.
+
+'What do you mean?' I repeated quietly. 'Tell me exactly what you mean.'
+
+I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the
+freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles
+were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours,
+I should find myself.
+
+'To put it in as few words as possible,' said she, 'I mean your relations
+with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.'
+
+'My--'
+
+Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We
+had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself
+a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque
+of existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a
+moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked
+steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.
+
+'You won't affect not to understand?' she said.
+
+I assented with a motion of the head.
+
+'Many persons say there is a--a liaison between you,' she said.
+
+'And do you think that?' I asked quickly.
+
+'If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,' she
+said solemnly. 'No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and I brought
+Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only heard the
+gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne in upon
+me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not everyone
+would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content to talk
+among themselves.'
+
+'About me? Oh!' It was the expression of an almost physical pain.
+
+'What can you expect them to do?' asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.
+
+'True,' I agreed.
+
+'You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship
+with her--'
+
+'Let me tell you'--I stopped her--'that not a single word has ever passed
+between me and--and the man you mean, that everybody might not hear. Not
+a single word!'
+
+'Dearest girl,' she exclaimed; 'how glad I am! How glad I am! Now I can
+take measures to--.
+
+'But--' I resumed.
+
+'But what?'
+
+In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like
+Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her
+own code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply
+to every conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast
+stolid London that hemmed me in--of attempting to explain to such an
+excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would
+not answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a
+church steeple.
+
+'Nothing,' I said, rising, 'except that I thank you. Be sure that I
+am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very
+unpleasant to you.'
+
+She smiled, virtuously happy.
+
+'You made it easy,' she murmured.
+
+I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I
+hated kissing women!
+
+'No more need be said,' she almost whispered, as I put my hand on the
+knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.
+
+'Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair
+fame of our calling.'
+
+My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and
+I opened the door.
+
+And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove,
+haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief
+stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified
+silence down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.
+
+'Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,' I reflected.
+
+It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of
+sensations caused by Ispenlove's presence.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Without a word, we passed together into the drawing-room, and I closed
+the door. Ispenlove stood leaning against the piano, as though intensely
+fatigued; he crushed his gibus with an almost savage movement, and then
+bent his large, lustrous black eyes absently on the flat top of it. His
+thin face was whiter even than usual, and his black hair, beard, and
+moustache all dishevelled; the collar of his overcoat was twisted, and
+his dinner-jacket rose an inch above it at the back of the neck.
+
+I wanted to greet him, but I could not trust my lips. And I saw that he,
+too, was trying in vain to speak.
+
+At length I said, with that banality which too often surprises us in
+supreme moments:
+
+'What is it? Do you know that your tie is under your ear?'
+
+And as I uttered these words, my voice, breaking of itself and in
+defiance of me, descended into a tone which sounded harsh and inimical.
+
+'Ah!' he murmured, lifting his eyes to mine, 'if you turn against me
+to-night, I shall--'
+
+'Turn against you!' I cried, shocked. 'Let me help you with your
+overcoat!'
+
+And I went near him, meaning to take his overcoat.
+
+'It's finished between Mary and me,' he said, holding me with his gaze.
+'It's finished. I've no one but you now; and I've come--I've come--'
+
+He stopped. We read one another's eyes at arm's length, and all the
+sorrow and pity and love that were in each of us rose to our eyes and
+shone there. I shivered with pleasure when I saw his arms move, and then
+he clutched and dragged me to him, and I hid my glowing face on his
+shoulder, in the dear folds of his overcoat, and I felt his lips on my
+neck. And then, since neither of us was a coward, we lifted our heads,
+and our mouths met honestly and fairly, and, so united, we shut our eyes
+for an eternal moment, and the world was not.
+
+Such was the avowal.
+
+I gave up my soul to him in that long kiss; all that was me, all that was
+most secret and precious in me, ascended and poured itself out through my
+tense lips, and was received by him. I kissed him with myself, with the
+entire passionate energy of my being--not merely with my mouth. And if I
+sighed, it was because I tried to give him more--more than I had--and
+failed. Ah! The sensation of his nearness, the warmth of his face, the
+titillation of his hair, the slow, luxurious intake of our breaths, the
+sweet cruelty of his desperate clutch on my shoulders, the glimpses of
+his skin through my eyelashes when I raised ever so little my eyelids!
+Pain and joy of life, you were mingled then!
+
+I remembered that I was a woman, and disengaged myself and withdrew from
+him. I hated to do it; but I did it. We became self-conscious. The
+brilliant and empty drawing-room scanned us unfavourably with all its
+globes and mirrors. How difficult it is to be natural in a great crisis!
+Our spirits clamoured for expression, beating vainly against a thousand
+barred doors of speech. There was so much to say, to explain, to define,
+and everything was so confused and dizzily revolving, that we knew not
+which door to open first. And then I think we both felt, but I more than
+he, that explanations and statements were futile, that even if all the
+doors were thrown open together, they would be inadequate. The
+deliciousness of silence, of wonder, of timidity, of things guessed at
+and hidden....
+
+'It makes me afraid,' he murmured at length.
+
+'What?'
+
+'To be loved like that.... Your kiss ... you don't know.'
+
+I smiled almost sadly. As if I did not know what my kiss had done! As if
+I did not know that my kiss had created between us the happiness which
+brings ruin!
+
+'You _do_ love me?' he demanded.
+
+I nodded, and sat down.
+
+'Say it, say it!' he pleaded.
+
+'More than I can ever show you,' I said proudly.
+
+'Honestly,' he said, 'I can't imagine what you have been able to see in
+me. I'm nothing--I'm nobody--'
+
+'Foolish boy!' I exclaimed. 'You are you.'
+
+The profound significance of that age-worn phrase struck me for the
+first time.
+
+He rushed to me at the word 'boy,' and, standing over me, took my hand in
+his hot hand. I let it lie, inert.
+
+'But you haven't always loved me. I have always loved _you_, from the
+moment when I drove with you, that first day, from the office to your
+hotel. But you haven't always loved me.'
+
+'No,' I admitted.
+
+'Then when did you--? Tell me.'
+
+'I was dull at first--I could not see. But when you told me that the end
+of _Fate and Friendship_ was not as good as I could make it--do you
+remember, that afternoon in the office?--and how reluctant you were to
+tell me, how afraid you were to tell me?--your throat went dry, and you
+stroked your forehead as you always do when you are nervous--There!
+you are doing it now, foolish boy!'
+
+I seized his left arm, and gently pulled it down from his face. Oh,
+exquisite moment!
+
+'It was brave of you to tell me--very brave! I loved you for telling me.
+You were quite wrong about the end of that book. You didn't see the fine
+point of it, and you never would have seen it--and I liked you, somehow,
+for not seeing it, because it was so feminine--but I altered the book to
+please you, and when I had altered it, against my conscience, I loved
+you more.'
+
+'It's incredible! incredible!' he muttered, half to himself. 'I never
+hoped till lately that you would care for me. I never dared to think of
+such a thing. I knew you oughtn't to! It passes comprehension.'
+
+'That is just what love does,' I said.
+
+'No, no,' he went on quickly; 'you don't understand; you can't understand
+my feelings when I began to suspect, about two months ago, that, after
+all, the incredible had happened. I'm nothing but your publisher. I can't
+talk. I can't write. I can't play. I can't do anything. And look at the
+men you have here! I've sometimes wondered how often you've been
+besieged--'
+
+'None of them was like you,' I said. 'Perhaps that is why I have always
+kept them off.'
+
+I raised my eyes and lips, and he stooped and kissed me. He wanted to
+take me in his arms again, but I would not yield myself.
+
+'Be reasonable,' I urged him. 'Ought we not to think of our situation?'
+
+He loosed me, stammering apologies, abasing himself.
+
+'I ought to leave you, I ought never to see you again.' He spoke roughly.
+'What am I doing to you? You who are so innocent and pure!'
+
+'I entreat you not to talk like that,' I gasped, reddening.
+
+'But I must talk like that,' he insisted. 'I must talk like that. You had
+everything that a woman can desire, and I come into your life and offer
+you--what?'
+
+'I _have_ everything a woman can desire,' I corrected him softly.
+
+'Angel!' he breathed. 'If I bring you disaster, you will forgive me,
+won't you?'
+
+'My happiness will only cease with your love,' I said.
+
+'Happiness!' he repeated. 'I have never been so happy as I am now; but
+such happiness is terrible. It seems to me impossible that such happiness
+can last.'
+
+'Faint heart!' I chided him.
+
+'It is for you I tremble,' he said. 'If--if--' He stopped. 'My darling,
+forgive me!'
+
+How I pitied him! How I enveloped him in an effluent sympathy that rushed
+warm from my heart! He accused himself of having disturbed my existence.
+Whereas, was it not I who had disturbed his? He had fought against me, I
+knew well, but fate had ordained his defeat. He had been swept away; he
+had been captured; he had been caught in a snare of the high gods. And he
+was begging forgiveness, he who alone had made my life worth living! I
+wanted to kneel before him, to worship him, to dry his tears with my
+hair. I swear that my feelings were as much those of a mother as of a
+lover. He was ten years older than me, and yet he seemed boyish, and I an
+aged woman full of experience, as he sat there opposite to me with his
+wide, melancholy eyes and restless mouth.
+
+'Wonderful, is it not,' he said, 'that we should be talking like this
+to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?'
+
+'Wonderful!' I responded. 'But yesterday we talked with our eyes, and our
+eyes did not say Mr. or Miss. Our eyes said--Ah, what they said can
+never be translated into words!'
+
+My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable
+curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun. Could it be true that
+Heaven had made that fine creature--noble and modest, nervous and full of
+courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things, fine and
+delicate--could it be true that Heaven had made him and then given him to
+me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves constituted
+perfection? Oh, wonder, wonder! Oh, miraculous bounty which I had not
+deserved! This thing had happened to me, of all women! How it showed, by
+comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my worldly
+splendour! I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled
+interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had
+almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water
+and the palm. And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade.
+Wonderful!
+
+'Why were you so late to-night?' I asked abruptly.
+
+'Late?' he replied absently. 'Is it late?'
+
+We both looked at the clock. It was yet half an hour from midnight.
+
+'Of course it isn't--not _very_,' I said. I was forgetting that.
+Everybody left so early.'
+
+'Why was that?'
+
+I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by
+reason of his failure to appear. He glanced at me with tender amaze.
+
+'But I am fortunate to-day,' I exclaimed. 'Was it not lucky they left
+when they did? Suppose you had arrived, in that state, dearest man, and
+burst into a room full of people? What would they have thought? Where
+should I have looked?'
+
+'Angel!' he cried. 'I'm so sorry. I forgot it was your evening. I must
+have forgotten. I forgot everything, except that I was bound to see you
+at once, instantly, with all speed.'
+
+Poor boy! He was like a bird fluttering in my hand. Millions of women
+must have so pictured to themselves the men who loved them, and whom
+they loved.
+
+'But still, you _were_ rather late, you know,' I smiled.
+
+'Do not ask me why,' he begged, with an expression of deep pain on his
+face. 'I have had a scene with Mary. It would humiliate me to tell
+you--to tell even you--what passed between us. But it is over. Our
+relations in the future can never, in any case, be more than formal.'
+
+A spasm of fierce jealousy shot through me--jealousy of Mary, my friend
+Mary, who knew him with such profound intimacy that they could go
+through a scene together which was 'humiliating.' I saw that my own
+intimacy with him was still crude with the crudity of newness, and that
+only years could mellow it. Mary, the good, sentimental Mary, had wasted
+the years of their marriage--had never understood the value of the
+treasure in her keeping. Why had they always been sad in their house?
+What was the origin of that resigned and even cheerful gloom which had
+pervaded their domestic life, and which I had remarked on my first visit
+to Bloomsbury Square? Were these, too, mysteries that I must not ask my
+lover to reveal? Resentment filled me. I came near to hating Mary, not
+because she had made him unhappy--oh no!--but because she had had the
+priority in his regard, and because there was nothing about him, however
+secret and recondite, that I could be absolutely sure of the sole
+knowledge of. She had been in the depths with him. I desired fervently
+that I also might descend with him, and even deeper. Oh, that I might
+have the joy and privilege of humiliation with him!
+
+'I shall ask you nothing, dearest,' I murmured.
+
+I had risen from my seat and gone to him, and was lightly touching his
+hair with my fingers. He did not move, but sat staring into the fire.
+Somehow, I adored him because he made no response to the fondling of
+my hand. His strange acceptance of the caress as a matter of course
+gave me the illusion that I was his wife, and that the years had
+mellowed our intimacy.
+
+'Carlotta!'
+
+He spoke my name slowly and distinctly, savouring it.
+
+'Yes,' I answered softly and obediently.
+
+'Carlotta! Listen! Our two lives are in our hands at this moment--this
+moment while we talk here.'
+
+His rapt eyes had not stirred from the fire.
+
+'I feel it,' I said.
+
+'What are we to do? What shall we decide to do?'
+
+He slowly turned towards me. I lowered my glance.
+
+'I don't know,' I said.
+
+'Yes, you do, Carlotta,' he insisted. 'You do know.'
+
+His voice trembled.
+
+'Mary and I are such good friends,' I said. 'That is what makes it
+so--'
+
+'No, no, no!' he objected loudly. His nervousness had suddenly increased.
+'Don't, for God's sake, begin to argue in that way! You are above
+feminine logic. Mary is your friend. Good. You respect her; she respects
+you. Good. Is that any reason why our lives should be ruined? Will that
+benefit Mary? Do I not tell you that everything has ceased between us?'
+
+'The idea of being false to Mary--'
+
+'There's no question of being false. And if there was, would you be false
+to love rather than to friendship? Between you and me there is love;
+between Mary and me there is not love. It isn't her fault, nor mine,
+least of all yours. It is the fault of the secret essence of existence.
+Have you not yourself written that the only sacred thing is instinct? Are
+we, or are we not, to be true to ourselves?'
+
+'You see,' I said, 'your wife is so sentimental. She would be incapable
+of looking at the affair as--as we do; as I should in her place.'
+
+I knew that my protests were insincere, and that all my heart and brain
+were with him, but I could not admit this frankly. Ah! And I knew also
+that the sole avenue to peace and serenity, not to happiness, was the
+path of renunciation and of obedience to the conventions of society, and
+that this was precisely the path which we should never take. And on the
+horizon of our joy I saw a dark cloud. It had always been there, but I
+had refused to see it. I looked at it now steadily.
+
+'Of course,' he groaned, 'if we are to be governed by Mary's
+sentimentality--'
+
+'Dear love,' I whispered, 'what do you want me to do?'
+
+'The only possible, honest, just thing. I want you to go away with me, so
+that Mary can get a divorce.'
+
+He spoke sternly, as it were relentlessly.
+
+'Does she guess--about me?' I asked, biting my lip, and looking
+away from him.
+
+'Not yet. Hasn't the slightest notion, I'm sure. But I'll tell her,
+straight and fair.'
+
+'Dearest friend,' I said, after a silence. 'Perhaps I know more of the
+world than you think. Perhaps I'm a girl only in years and situation.
+Forgive me if I speak plainly. Mary may prove unfaithfulness, but she
+cannot get a decree unless she can prove other things as well.'
+
+He stroked his forehead. As for me, I shuddered with agitation. He walked
+across the room and back.
+
+'Angel!' he said, putting his white face close to mine like an actor. 'I
+will prove whether your love for me is great enough. I have struck her. I
+struck her to-night in the presence of a servant. And I did it purposely,
+in cold blood, so that she might be able to prove cruelty. Ah! Have I
+not thought it all out? Have I not?'
+
+A sob, painfully escaping, shook my whole frame.
+
+'And this was before you had--had spoken to me!' I said bitterly.
+
+Not myself, but some strange and frigid force within me uttered
+those words.
+
+'That is what love will do. That is the sort of thing love drives one
+to,' he cried despairingly. 'Oh! I was not sure of you--I was not sure of
+you. I struck her, on the off chance.'
+
+And he sank on the sofa and wept passionately, unashamed, like a child.
+
+I could not bear it. My heart would have broken if I had watched, without
+assuaging, my boy's grief an instant longer than I did. I sprang to him.
+I took him to my breast. I kissed his eyes until the tears ceased to
+flow. Whatever it was or might be, I must share his dishonour.
+
+'My poor girl!' he said at length. 'If you had refused me, if you had
+even judged me, I intended to warn you plainly that it meant my death;
+and if that failed, I should have gone to the office and shot myself.'
+
+'Do not say such things,' I entreated him.
+
+'But it is true. The revolver is in my pocket. Ah! I have made you cry!
+You're frightened! But I'm not a brute; I'm only a little beside myself.
+Pardon me, angel!'
+
+He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour. He did not understand
+me. He did not suspect the risk he had run. If I had hesitated to
+surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should
+never have surrendered. I knew myself well enough to know that. I had a
+conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have
+parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man! But I forgave him.
+Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.
+
+'Carlotta,' he said, 'we shall leave everything. You grasp
+it?--everything.'
+
+'Yes,' I replied. 'Of all the things we have now, we shall have nothing
+but ourselves.'
+
+'If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see
+you again.'
+
+Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He
+meant what he said.
+
+'It is no sacrifice for me,' I murmured. 'The sacrifice would be not to
+give up all in exchange for you.'
+
+'We shall be exiles,' he went on, 'until the divorce business is over.
+And then perhaps we shall creep back--shall we?--and try to find out how
+many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.'
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'We shall come back. They all do.'
+
+'What do you mean?' he demanded.
+
+'Thousands have done what we are going to do,' I said. 'And all of them
+have thought that their own case was different from the other cases.'
+
+'Ah!'
+
+'And a few have been happy. A few have not regretted the price. A few
+have retained the illusion.'
+
+'Illusion? Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?'
+
+I could see that my heart's treasure was ruffled. He clasped my hand
+tenaciously.
+
+'I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen,' I answered
+quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous passion. 'In me there
+are two beings--myself and the observer of myself. It is the novelist's
+disease, this duplication of personality. When I said illusion, I meant
+the supreme illusion of love. Is it not an illusion? I have seen it in
+others, and in exactly the same way I see it in myself and I see it in
+you. Will it last?--who knows? None can tell.'
+
+'Angel!' he expostulated.
+
+'No one can foresee the end of love,' I said, with an exquisite gentle
+sorrow. 'But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if
+its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of
+disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night alone would
+not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life.'
+
+He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and
+his disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely
+round my neck.
+
+'Call it illusion if you like,' he said. 'Words are nothing. I only know
+that for me it will be eternal. I only know that my one desire is to be
+with you always, never to leave you, not to miss a moment of you; to have
+you for mine, openly, securely. Carlotta, where shall we go?'
+
+'We must travel, mustn't we?'
+
+'Travel?' he repeated, with an air of discontent. 'Yes. But where to?'
+
+'Travel,' I said. 'See things. See the world.'
+
+'I had thought we might find some quiet little place,' he said wistfully,
+and as if apologetically, where we could be alone, undisturbed, some spot
+where we could have ourselves wholly to ourselves, and go walks into
+mountains and return for dinner; and then the long, calm evenings!
+Dearest, our honeymoon!'
+
+Our honeymoon! I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human
+nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I
+not talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and
+killed by a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence!
+Inexperienced as I was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the
+experience of my impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very
+thought of calculation would have been abhorrent. But I saw, I felt, I
+lived through in a few seconds the interminable and monotonous length of
+those calm days, and especially those calm evenings succeeding each other
+with a formidable sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And
+I knew that our love--miraculously sweet as it was--probably was not
+greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive
+the cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the
+survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman
+must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she
+might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme,
+devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely
+and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion, for her, is a
+campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart,
+and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the
+beautiful plant must not be exposed to hazard. Suppose it sickened, such
+a love as ours--what then? The misery of hell, the torture of the damned!
+Only its rich and ample continuance could justify us.
+
+'My dear,' I said submissively, 'I shall leave everything to you. The
+idea of travelling occurred to me; that was all. I have never travelled
+further than Cannes. Still, we have all our lives before us.'
+
+'We will travel,' he said unselfishly. 'We'll go round the world--slowly.
+I'll get the tickets at Cook's to-morrow.'
+
+'But, dearest, if you would rather--'
+
+'No, no! In any case we shall always have our evenings.'
+
+'Of course we shall. Dearest, how good you are!'
+
+'I wish I was,' he murmured.
+
+I was glad, then, that I had never allowed my portrait to appear in a
+periodical. We could not prevent the appearance in American newspapers of
+heralding paragraphs, but the likelihood of our being recognised was
+sensibly lessened.
+
+'Can you start soon?' he asked. 'Can you be ready?'
+
+'Any time. The sooner the better, now that it is decided.'
+
+'You do not regret? We have decided so quickly. Ah! you are the merest
+girl, and I have taken advantage--'
+
+I put my hand over his mouth. He seized it, and kept it there and kissed
+it, and his ardent breath ran through my fingers.
+
+'What about your business?' I said.
+
+'I shall confide it to old Tate--tell him some story--he knows quite
+as much about it as I do. To-morrow I will see to all that. The day
+after, shall we start? No; to-morrow night. To-morrow night, eh? I'll
+run in to-morrow and tell you what I've arranged. I must see you
+to-morrow, early.'
+
+'No,' I said. 'Do not come before lunch.'
+
+'Not before lunch! Why?'
+
+He was surprised. But I had been my own mistress for five years, with my
+own habits, rules, privacies. I had never seen anyone before lunch. And
+to-morrow, of all days, I should have so much to do and to arrange. Was
+this man to come like an invader and disturb my morning? So felt the
+celibate in me, instinctively, thoughtlessly. That deep-seated objection
+to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common,
+I think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a
+rich dress, and donning the _peignoir_ of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a
+way which is an eternal enigma to men.... Then I saw, in a sudden flash,
+that I had renounced my individual existence, that I had forfeited my
+habits and rules, and privacies, that I was a man's woman. And the
+passionate lover in me gloried in this.
+
+'Come as soon as you like, dearest friend,' I said.
+
+'Nobody except Mary will know anything till we are actually gone,' he
+remarked. 'And I shall not tell her till the last thing. Afterwards,
+won't they chatter! God! Let 'em.'
+
+'They are already chattering,' I said. And I told him about Mrs. Sardis.
+'When she met you on the landing,' I added, 'she drew her own
+conclusions, my poor, poor boy!'
+
+He was furious. I could see he wanted to take me in his arms and protect
+me masculinely from the rising storm.
+
+'All that is nothing,' I soothed him. 'Nothing. Against it, we have
+our self-respect. We can scorn all that.' And I gave a short,
+contemptuous laugh.
+
+'Darling!' he murmured. 'You are more than a woman.'
+
+'I hope not.' And I laughed again, but unnaturally.
+
+He had risen; I leaned back in a large cushioned chair; we looked at
+each other in silence--a silence that throbbed with the heavy pulse of an
+unutterable and complex emotion--pleasure, pain, apprehension, even
+terror. What had I done? Why had I, with a word--nay, without a word,
+with merely a gesture and a glance--thrown my whole life into the
+crucible of passion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act,
+like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as
+an infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may
+shatter? Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when I gazed into
+those eyes?
+
+'I suppose I must go,' he said disconsolately.
+
+I nodded, and the next instant the clock struck.
+
+'Yes,' he urged himself, 'I must go.'
+
+He bent down, put his hands on the arms of the chair, and kissed me
+violently, twice. The fire that consumes the world ran scorchingly
+through me. Every muscle was suddenly strained into tension, and then
+fell slack. My face flushed; I let my head slip sideways, so that my left
+cheek was against the back of the chair. Through my drooping eyelashes I
+could see the snake-like glitter of his eyes as he stood over me. I
+shuddered and sighed. I was like someone fighting in vain against the
+sweet seduction of an overwhelming and fatal drug. I wanted to entreat
+him to go away, to rid me of the exquisite and sinister enchantment. But
+I could not speak. I shut my eyes. This was love.
+
+The next moment I heard the soft sound of his feet on the carpet. I
+opened my eyes. He had stepped back. When our glances met he averted his
+face, and went briskly for his overcoat, which lay on the floor by the
+piano. I rose freed, re-established in my self-control. I arranged his
+collar, straightened his necktie with a few touches, picked up his hat,
+pushed back the crown, which flew up with a noise like a small explosion,
+and gave it into his hands.
+
+'Thank you,' he said. 'To-morrow morning, eh? I shall get to know
+everything necessary before I come. And then we will fix things up.'
+
+'Yes,' I said.
+
+'I can let myself out,' he said.
+
+I made a vague gesture, intended to signify that I could not think of
+permitting him to let himself out. We left the drawing-room, and passed,
+with precautions of silence, to the front-door, which I gently opened.
+
+'Good-night, then,' he whispered formally, almost coldly.
+
+I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.
+
+We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.
+
+'Too late for the lift,' I murmured out there with him in the vast,
+glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above
+us and below us into the mysterious unseen.
+
+He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted
+steps, firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the
+baluster. When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below
+me, he stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he
+resolutely dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I
+had glimpses of parts of his figure as he passed story after story. Then
+I heard his tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the
+distant clatter of double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.
+
+This was love, at last--the reality of love! He would have killed himself
+had he failed to win me--killed himself! With the novelist's habit, I ran
+off into a series of imagined scenes--the dead body, with the hole in the
+temples and the awkward attitude of death; the discovery, the rush for
+the police, the search for a motive, the inquest, the rapid-speaking
+coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself, cold and
+impassive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said.... But he
+lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his
+spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was
+inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my
+mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous,
+bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and
+injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense
+fact that he was mine.
+
+'How calm I am!' I thought.
+
+It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized
+the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give
+the brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind
+factitiously active. And I began at once to anticipate Frank's coming,
+and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had determined
+that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and it
+occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which had, in
+fact, wakened me. Save on special occasions, I was never wakened, and
+Emmeline and my maid had injunctions not to come to me until I rang. My
+thoughts ran instantly to Frank. He had arrived thus early, merely
+because he could not keep away.
+
+'How extremely indiscreet of him!' I thought. 'What detestable
+prevarications with Emmeline this will lead to! I cannot possibly be
+ready in time if he is to be in and out all day.'
+
+Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing him quickly, and the idea of his
+splendid impatience, drenched me with joy.
+
+'What is it?' I called out.
+
+Emmeline entered in that terrible mauve dressing-gown which I had been
+powerless to persuade her to discard.
+
+'So sorry to disturb you,' said Emmeline, feeling her loose golden hair
+with one hand, 'but Mrs. Ispenlove has called, and wants to see you at
+once. I'm afraid something has happened.'
+
+'_Mrs_. Ispenlove?'
+
+My voice shook.
+
+'Yes. Yvonne came to my room and told me that Mrs. Ispenlove was here,
+and was either mad or very unwell, and would I go to her? So I got up at
+once. What shall I do? Perhaps it's something very serious. Not
+half-past eight, and calling like this!'
+
+'Let her come in here immediately,' I said, turning my head on the
+pillow, so that Emmeline should not see the blush which had spread over
+my face and my neck.
+
+It was inevitable that a terrible and desolating scene must pass between
+Mary Ispenlove and myself. I could not foresee how I should emerge from
+it, but I desperately resolved that I would suffer the worst without a
+moment's delay, and that no conceivable appeal should induce me to
+abandon Frank. I was, as I waited for Mrs. Ispenlove to appear, nothing
+but an embodied and fierce instinct to guard what I had won. No
+consideration of mercy could have touched me.
+
+She entered with a strange, hysterical cry:
+
+'Carlotta!'
+
+I had asked her long ago to use my Christian name--long before I ever
+imagined what would come to pass between her husband and me; but I
+always called her Mrs. Ispenlove. The difference in our ages justified
+me. And that morning the difference seemed to be increased. I realized,
+with a cruel justice of perception quite new in my estimate of her,
+that she was old--an old woman. She had never been beautiful, but she
+was tall and graceful, and her face had been attractive by the
+sweetness of the mouth and the gray beneficence of the eyes; and now
+that sweetness and that beneficence appeared suddenly to have been
+swallowed up in the fatal despair of a woman who discovers that she has
+lived too long. Gray hair, wrinkles, crow's-feet, tired eyes, drawn
+mouth, and the terrible tell-tale hollow under the chin--these were
+what I saw in Mary Ispenlove. She had learnt that the only thing worth
+having in life is youth. I possessed everything that she lacked. Surely
+the struggle was unequal. Fate might have chosen a less piteous victim.
+I felt profoundly sorry for Mary Ispenlove, and this sorrow was
+stronger in me even than the uneasiness, the false shame (for it was
+not a real shame) which I experienced in her presence. I put out my
+hands towards her, as it were, involuntarily. She sprang to me, took
+them, and kissed me as I lay in bed.
+
+'How beautiful you look--like that!' she exclaimed wildly, and with a
+hopeless and acute envy in her tone.
+
+'But why--' I began to protest, astounded.
+
+'What will you think of me, disturbing you like this? What will you
+think?' she moaned. And then her voice rose: 'I could not help it; I
+couldn't, really. Oh, Carlotta! you are my friend, aren't you?'
+
+One thing grew swiftly clear to me: that she was as yet perfectly
+unaware of the relations between Frank and myself. My brain searched
+hurriedly for an explanation of the visit. I was conscious of an
+extraordinary relief.
+
+'You are my friend, aren't you?' she repeated insistently.
+
+Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her
+friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in
+the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an
+understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart
+bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness
+that I could not bring myself to reply directly, 'Yes, I am your friend.'
+
+'We have known each other a long time,' I ventured.
+
+'There was no one else I could come to,' she said.
+
+Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pass my
+dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.
+
+'What are you going to do?' she demanded fearfully.
+
+'I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and
+then we will talk.
+
+Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You'll be more
+yourself after a cup of tea.'
+
+How young I was then! I remember my naïve satisfaction in this exhibition
+of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be--hard in spite of
+the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for her.
+And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I
+regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will
+read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she
+did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one
+is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one,
+defenceless as a rabbit.
+
+'You are very kind to me,' she said, putting her cup on the mantelpiece
+with a nervous rattle; 'and I need it.'
+
+'Tell me,' I murmured. 'Tell me--what I can do.'
+
+I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace. A distance between us
+seemed necessary.
+
+'You can't do anything, my dear,' she said. 'Only I was obliged to talk
+to someone, after all the night. It's about Frank.'
+
+'Mr. Ispenlove!' I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not
+very well.
+
+'Yes. He has left me.'
+
+'But why? What is the matter?'
+
+Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates
+me. But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation. Still, could I
+have behaved differently?
+
+'You won't understand unless I begin a long time ago,' said Mary
+Ispenlove. 'Carlotta, my married life has been awful--awful--a tragedy.
+It has been a tragedy both for him and for me. But no one has suspected
+it; we have hidden it.'
+
+I nodded. I, however, had suspected it.
+
+'It's just twenty years--yes, twenty--since I fell in love,' she
+proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.
+
+'With--Frank,' I assumed. I lay back in bed.
+
+'No,' she said. 'With another man. That was in Brixton, when I was a
+girl living with my father; my mother was dead. He was a barrister--I
+mean the man I was in love with. He had only just been called to the Bar.
+I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him. Certainly he
+did; he could not help seeing it. I could not conceal it. Of course I can
+understand now that it flattered him. Naturally it did. Any man is
+flattered when a woman falls in love with him. And my father was rich,
+and so on, and so on. We saw each other a lot. I hoped, and I kept on
+hoping. Some people even said it was a match, and that I was throwing
+myself away. Fancy--throwing myself away--me!--who have never been good
+for anything! My father did not care much for the man; said he was
+selfish and grasping. Possibly he was; but I was in love with him all the
+same. Then I met Frank, and Frank fell in love with me. You know how
+obstinate Frank is when he has once set his mind on a thing. Frank
+determined to have me; and my father was on his side. I would not listen.
+I didn't give him so much as a chance to propose to me. And this state of
+things lasted for quite a long time. It wasn't my fault; it wasn't
+anybody's fault.'
+
+'Just so,' I agreed, raising my head on one elbow, and listening
+intently. It was the first sincere word I had spoken, and I was glad
+to utter it.
+
+'The man I had fallen in love with came nearer. He was decidedly tempted.
+I began to feel sure of him. All I wanted was to marry him, whether he
+loved me a great deal or only a little tiny bit. I was in that state.
+Then he drew away. He scarcely ever came to the house, and I seemed never
+to be able to meet him. And then one day my father showed me something
+in the _Morning Post_. It was a paragraph saying that the man I was in
+love with was going to marry a woman of title, a widow and the daughter
+of a peer. I soon found out she was nearly twice his age. He had done it
+to get on. He was getting on very well by himself, but I suppose that
+wasn't fast enough for him. Carlotta, it nearly killed me. And I felt so
+sorry for him. You can't guess how sorry I felt for him. I felt that he
+didn't know what he had missed. Oh, how happy I should have made him! I
+should have lived for him. I should have done everything for him. I
+should have ... You don't mind me telling you all this?'
+
+I made an imploring gesture.
+
+'What a shame!' I burst out.
+
+'Ah, my dear!' she said, 'he didn't love me. One can't blame him.'
+
+'And then?' I questioned, with an eagerness that I tried to overcome.
+
+'Frank was so persevering. And--and--I _did_ admire his character. A
+woman couldn't help admiring his character, could she? And, besides, I
+honestly thought I had got over the other affair, and that I was in love
+with him. I refused him once, and then I married him. He was as mad for
+me as I had been for the other one. Yes, I married him, and we both
+imagined we were going to be happy.'
+
+'And why haven't you been?' I asked.
+
+'This is my shame,' she said. 'I could not forget the other one. We soon
+found that out.'
+
+'Did you _talk_ about it, you--and Frank?' I put in, amazed.
+
+'Oh _no_!' she said. 'It was never mentioned--never once during fifteen
+years. But he knew; and I knew that he knew. The other one was always
+between us--always, always, always! The other one was always in my heart.
+We did our best, both of us; but it was useless. The passion of my life
+was--it was invincible. I _tried_ to love Frank. I could only like him.
+Fancy his position! And we were helpless. Because, you know, Frank and I
+are not the sort of people that go and make a scandal--at least, that was
+what I thought,' she sighed. 'I know different now. Well, he died the day
+before yesterday.'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'Crettell. He had just been made a judge. He was the youngest judge on
+the bench--only forty-six.'
+
+'Was _that_ the man?' I exclaimed; for Crettell's character was well
+known in London.
+
+'That was the man. Frank came in yesterday afternoon, and after he had
+glanced at the paper, he said: "By the way, Crettell's dead." I did not
+grasp it at first. He repeated: "Crettell--he's dead." I burst into
+tears. I couldn't help it. And, besides, I forgot. Frank asked me very
+roughly what I was crying for. You know, Frank has much changed these
+last few months. He is not as nice as he used to be. Excuse me talking
+like this, my dear. Something must be worrying him. Well, I said as well
+as I could while I was crying that the news was a shock to me. I tried to
+stop crying, but I couldn't. I sobbed. Frank threw down the paper and
+stamped on it, and he swore. He said: "I know you've always been in love
+with the brute, but you needn't make such a damn fuss about it." Oh, my
+dear, how can I tell you these things? That angered me. This was the
+first time in our married life that Crettell had been even referred to,
+and it seemed to me that Frank put all the hatred of fifteen years into
+that single sentence. Why was I angry? I didn't know. We had a scene.
+Frank lost his temper, for the first time that I remember, and then he
+recovered it. He said quietly he couldn't stand living with me any more;
+and that he had long since wanted to leave me. He said he would never see
+me again. And then one of the servants came in, and--'
+
+'What?'
+
+'Nothing. I sent her out. And--and--Fran didn't come home last night.'
+
+There was a silence. I could find nothing to say, and Mary had hidden her
+face. I utterly forgot myself and my own state in this extraordinary
+hazard of matrimony. I could only think of Mary's grief--a grief which,
+nevertheless, I did not too well comprehend.
+
+'Then you love him now?' I ventured at length.
+
+She made no reply.
+
+'You love him--is that so?' I pursued. 'Tell me honestly.'
+
+I spoke as gently as it was in me to speak.
+
+'Honestly!' she cried, looking up. 'Honestly! No! If I loved him, could I
+have been so upset about Crettell? But we have been together so long. We
+are husband and wife, Carlotta. We are so used to each other. And
+generally he is so good. We've got on very well, considering. And now
+he's left me. Think of the scandal! It will be terrible! terrible! A
+separation at my age! Carlotta, it's unthinkable! He's mad--that's the
+only explanation. Haven't I tried to be a good wife to him? He's never
+found fault with me--never! And I'm sure, as regards him, I've had
+nothing to complain of.'
+
+'He will come back,' I said. 'He'll think things over and see reason.'
+
+And it was just as though I heard some other person saying these words.
+
+'But he didn't come _home_ last night,' Mary insisted. 'What the servants
+are thinking I shouldn't like to guess.'
+
+'What does it matter what the servants think?' I said brusquely.
+
+'But it _does_ matter. He didn't come _home_. He must have slept at a
+hotel. Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for him! Oh,
+Carlotta, you're too young to understand what I feel! You're very clever,
+and you're very sympathetic; but you can't see things as I see them. Wait
+till you've been married fifteen years. The scandal! The shame! And me
+only too anxious to be a good wife, and to keep our home as it should be,
+and to help him as much as I can with my stupid brains in his business!'
+
+'I can understand perfectly,' I asserted. 'I can understand perfectly.'
+
+And I could. The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her
+ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her,
+was only too plainly apparent. She was--and naturally, sincerely,
+instinctively--the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the
+conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her
+quiet resentment. But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief
+and her resentment. Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her
+resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified.
+I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must
+always be inferior to emotion. I am intensely proud of my ability to see,
+then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary
+Ispenlove's attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural, exactly as
+free from artificiality, as my own. Can you go outside Nature? Is not the
+polity of Londoners in London as much a part of Nature as the polity of
+bees in a hive?
+
+'Not a word for fifteen years, and then an explosion like that!' she
+murmured, incessantly recurring to the core of her grievance. 'I did
+wrong to marry him, I know. But I _did_ marry him--I _did_ marry him! We
+are husband and wife. And he goes off and sleeps at a hotel! Carlotta, I
+wish I had never been born! What will people say? I shall never be able
+to look anyone in the face again.'
+
+'He will come back,' I said again.
+
+'Do you think so?'
+
+This time she caught at the straw.
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'And you will settle down gradually; and everything will
+be forgotten.'
+
+I said that because it was the one thing I could say. I repeat that I had
+ceased to think of myself. I had become a spectator.
+
+'It can never be the same between us again,' Mary breathed sadly.
+
+At that moment Emmeline Palmer plunged, rather than came, into my
+bedroom.
+
+'Oh, Miss Peel--' she began, and then stopped, seeing Mrs. Ispenlove by
+the fireplace, though she knew that Mrs. Ispenlove was with me.
+
+'Anything wrong?' I asked, affecting a complete calm.
+
+It was evident that the good creature had lost her head, as she sometimes
+did, when I gave her too much to copy, or when the unusual occurred in no
+matter what form. The excellent Emmeline was one of my mistakes.
+
+'Mr. Ispenlove is here,' she whispered.
+
+None of us spoke for a few seconds. Mary Ispenlove stared at me, but
+whether in terror or astonishment, I could not guess. This was one of the
+most dramatic moments of my life.
+
+'Tell Mr. Ispenlove that I can see nobody,' I said, glancing at the wall.
+
+She turned to go.
+
+'And, Emmeline,' I stopped her. 'Do not tell him anything else.'
+
+Surely the fact that Frank had called to see me before nine o'clock in
+the morning, surely my uneasy demeanour, must at length arouse suspicion
+even in the simple, trusting mind of his wife!
+
+'How does he know that I am here?' Mary asked, lowering her voice, when
+Emmeline had shut the door; 'I said nothing to the servants.'
+
+I was saved. Her own swift explanation of his coming was, of course, the
+most natural in the world. I seized on it.
+
+'Never mind how,' I answered. 'Perhaps he was watching outside your
+house, and followed you. The important thing is that he has come. It
+proves,' I went on, inventing rapidly, 'that he has changed his mind and
+recognises his mistake. Had you not better go back home as quickly as
+you can? It would have been rather awkward for you to see him here,
+wouldn't it?'
+
+'Yes, yes,' she said, her eyes softening and gleaming with joy. 'I will
+go. Oh, Carlotta! how can I thank you? You are my best friend.'
+
+'I have done nothing,' I protested. But I had.
+
+'You are a dear!' she exclaimed, coming impulsively to the bed.
+
+I sat up. She kissed me fervently. I rang the bell.
+
+'Has Mr. Ispenlove gone?' I asked Emmeline.
+
+'Yes,' said Emmeline.
+
+In another minute his wife, too, had departed, timorously optimistic,
+already denying in her heart that it could never be the same between them
+again. She assuredly would not find Frank at home. But that was nothing.
+I had escaped! I had escaped!
+
+'Will you mind getting dressed at once?' I said to Emmeline. 'I should
+like you to go out with a letter and a manuscript as soon as possible.'
+
+I got a notebook and began to write to Frank. I told him all that had
+happened, in full detail, writing hurriedly, in gusts, and abandoning
+that regard for literary form which the professional author is apt to
+preserve even in his least formal correspondence.
+
+'After this,' I said, 'we must give up what we decided last night. I have
+no good reason to offer you. The situation itself has not been changed by
+what I have learnt from your wife. I have not even discovered that she
+loves you, though in spite of what she says, which I have faithfully told
+you, I fancy she does--at any rate, I think she is beginning to. My ideas
+about the rights of love are not changed. My feelings towards you are not
+changed. Nothing is changed. But she and I have been through that
+interview, and so, after all, everything is changed; we must give it all
+up. You will say I am illogical. I am--perhaps. It was a mere chance
+that your wife came to me. I don't know why she did. If she had not come,
+I should have given myself to you. Supposing she had written--I should
+still have given myself to you. But I have been in her presence. I have
+been with her. And then the thought that you struck her, for my sake! She
+said nothing about that. That was the one thing she concealed. I could
+have cried when she passed it over. After all, I don't know whether it is
+sympathy for your wife that makes me change, or my self-respect--say my
+self-pride; I'm a proud woman. I lied to her through all that interview.
+
+'Oh, if I had only had the courage to begin by telling her outright and
+bluntly that you and I had settled that I should take her place! That
+would have stopped her. But I hadn't. And, besides, how could I foresee
+what she would say to me and how she would affect me? No; I lied to her
+at every point. My whole attitude was a lie. Supposing you and I had
+gone off together before I had seen her, and then I had met her
+afterwards, I could have looked her in the face--sorrowfully, with a
+heart bleeding--but I could have looked her in the face. But after this
+interview--no; it would be impossible for me to face her with you at
+my side! Don't I put things crudely, horribly! I know everything that
+you will say. You could not bring a single argument that I have not
+thought of.
+
+'However, arguments are nothing. It is how I feel. Fate is against us.
+Possibly I have ruined your life and mine without having done anything to
+improve hers; and possibly I have saved us all three from terrible
+misery. Possibly fate is with us. No one can say. I don't know what will
+happen in the immediate future; I won't think about it. If you do as I
+wish, if you have any desire to show me that I have any influence over
+you, you will go back to live with your wife. Where did you sleep last
+night? Or did you walk the streets? You must not answer this letter at
+present. Write to me later. Do not try to see me. I won't see you. We
+_mustn't_ meet. I am going away at once. I don't think I could stand
+another scene with your wife, and she would be sure to come again to me.
+
+'Try to resume your old existence. You can do it if you try. Remember
+that your wife is no more to blame than you are, or than I am. Remember
+that you loved her once. And remember that I act as I am acting because
+there is no other way for me. _C'est plus fort que moi,_ I am going to
+Torquay. I let you know this--I hate concealment; and anyway you would
+find out. But I shall trust you not to follow me. I shall trust you. You
+are saying that this is a very different woman from last night. It is. I
+haven't yet realized what my feelings are. I expect I shall realize them
+in a few days. I send with this a manuscript. It is nothing. I send it
+merely to put Emmeline off the scent, so that she shall think that it is
+purely business. Now I shall _trust_ you.--C. P.'
+
+I commenced the letter without even a 'Dear Frank,' and I ended it
+without an affectionate word.
+
+'I should like you to take these down to Mr. Ispenlove's office,' I said
+to Emmeline. 'Ask for him and give them to him yourself. There's no
+answer. He's pretty sure to be in. But if he isn't, bring them back. I'm
+going to Torquay by that eleven-thirty express--isn't it?'
+
+'Eleven-thirty-five,' Emmeline corrected me coldly.
+
+When she returned, she said she had seen Mr. Ispenlove and given him the
+letter and the parcel.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+I had acquaintances in Torquay, but I soon discovered that the place was
+impossible for me. Torquay is the chosen home of the proprieties, the
+respectabilities, and all the conventions. Nothing could dislodge them
+from its beautiful hills; the very sea, as it beats primly, or with a
+violence that never forgets to be discreet, on the indented shore,
+acknowledges their sway. Aphrodite never visits there; the human race is
+not continued there. People who have always lived within the conventions
+go there to die within the conventions. The young do not flourish there;
+they escape from the soft enervation. Since everybody is rich, there are
+no poor. There are only the rich, and the servitors, who get rich. These
+two classes never mix--even in the most modest villas they live on
+opposite sides of the house. The life of the town is a vast conspiracy on
+the part of the servitors to guard against any danger of the rich taking
+all their riches to heaven. You can, if you are keen enough, detect
+portions of this conspiracy in every shop. On the hills each abode stands
+in its own undulating grounds, is approached by a winding drive of at
+least ten yards, is wrapped about by the silence of elms, is flanked by
+greenhouses, and exudes an immaculate propriety from all its windows. In
+the morning the rich descend, the servitors ascend; the bosky and
+perfectly-kept streets on the hills are trodden with apologetic celerity
+by the emissaries of the servitors. The one interminable thoroughfare of
+the town is graciously invaded by the rich, who, if they have not walked
+down for the sake of exercise, step cautiously from their carriages,
+enunciate a string of orders ending with the name of a house, and
+cautiously regain their carriages. Each house has a name, and the pride
+of the true servitor is his ability to deduce instantly from the name of
+the house the name of its owner and the name of its street. In the
+afternoon a vast and complicated game of visiting cards is played. One
+does not begin to be serious till the evening; one eats then, solemnly
+and fully, to the faint accompaniment of appropriate conversation. And
+there is no relief, no surcease from utmost conventionality. It goes on
+night and day; it hushes one to sleep, and wakes one up. On all but the
+strongest minds it casts a narcotizing spell, so that thought is
+arrested, and originality, vivacity, individuality become a crime--a
+shame that must be hidden. Into this strange organism I took my wounded
+heart, imagining that an atmosphere of coma might help to heal it. But
+no! Within a week my state had become such that I could have cried out in
+mid Union Street at noon: 'Look at me with your dead eyes, you dead who
+have omitted to get buried, I am among you, and I am an adulteress in
+spirit! And my body has sinned the sin! And I am alive as only grief can
+be alive. I suffer the torture of vultures, but I would not exchange my
+lot with yours!'
+
+And one morning, after a fortnight, I thought of Monte Carlo. And the
+vision of that place, which I had never seen, too voluptuously lovely to
+be really beautiful, where there are no commandments, where
+unconventionality and conventionality fight it out on even terms, where
+the adulteress swarms, and the sin is for ever sinned, and wounded hearts
+go about gaily, where it is impossible to distinguish between virtue and
+vice, and where Toleration in fine clothes is the supreme social
+goddess--the vision of Monte Carlo, as a place of refuge from the
+exacerbating and moribund and yet eternal demureness of Torquay, appealed
+to me so persuasively that I was on my way to the Riviera in two hours.
+In that crisis of my life my moods were excessively capricious. Let me
+say that I had not reached Exeter before I began to think kindly of
+Torquay. What was Torquay but an almost sublime example of what the
+human soul can accomplish in its unending quest of an ideal?
+
+I left England on a calm, slate-coloured sea--sea that more than any
+other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes
+wonderful the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me
+the mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters
+of the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical
+curiosity concerning each other, and then, mutually forgotten, took wing,
+and spread out into the unknown. I think that as I stood near the hot
+funnel, breasting the wind, and vacantly staring at the smooth expanse
+that continually slipped from under us, I understood myself better than I
+had done before. My soul was at peace--the peace of ruin after a
+conflagration, but peace. Sometimes a little flame would dart out--flame
+of regret, revolt, desire--and I would ruthlessly extinguish it. I felt
+that I had nothing to live for, that no energy remained to me, no
+interest, no hope. I saw the forty years of probable existence in front
+of me flat and sterile as the sea itself. I was coldly glad that I had
+finished my novel, well knowing that it would be my last. And the immense
+disaster had been caused by a chance! Why had I been born with a vein of
+overweening honesty in me? Why should I have sacrificed everything to the
+pride of my conscience, seeing that consciences were the product of
+education merely? Useless to try to answer the unanswerable! What is, is.
+And circumstances are always at the mercy of character. I might have been
+wrong, I might have been right; no ethical argument could have bent my
+instinct. I did not sympathize with myself--I was too proud and
+stern--but I sympathized with Frank. I wished ardently that he might be
+consoled--that his agony might not be too terrible. I wondered where he
+was, what he was doing. I had received no letter from him, but then I had
+instructed that letters should not be forwarded to me. My compassion went
+out after him, followed him into the dark, found him (as I hoped), and
+surrounded him like an alleviating influence. I thought pityingly of the
+ravage that had been occasioned by our love. His home was wrecked. Our
+lives were equally wrecked. Our friends were grieved; they would think
+sadly of my closed flat. Even the serio-comic figure of Emmeline touched
+me; I had paid her three months' wages and dismissed her. Where would she
+go with her mauve _peignoir_? She was over thirty, and would not easily
+fall into another such situation. Imagine Emmeline struck down by a
+splinter from our passionate explosion! Only Yvonne was content at the
+prospect of revisiting France.
+
+'_Ah! Qu'on est bien ici, madame_!' she said, when we had fixed ourselves
+in the long and glittering _train de grand luxe_ that awaited us at
+Calais. Once I had enjoyed luxury, but now the futility of all this
+luxurious cushioned arrogance, which at its best only corresponded with a
+railway director's dreams of paradise, seemed to me pathetic. Could it
+detain youth, which is for ever flying? Could it keep out sorrow? Could
+it breed hope? As the passengers, so correct in their travelling
+costumes, passed to and fro in the corridors with the subdued murmurs
+always adopted by English people when they wish to prove that they are
+not excited, I thought: 'Does it matter how you and I go southwards? The
+pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs, what can it help
+us that this should be sated? We cannot leave our souls behind.' The
+history of many of these men and women was written on their faces. I
+wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the mirrors which
+were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had always seen.
+Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response. Was I not part
+of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life is good? On
+every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh flowers that had
+been torn from the South, and would return there dead, having ministered
+to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is good. I hated
+that. I could almost have wished that I was travelling southwards in a
+slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate does not wear a
+mask. Great grief is democratic, levelling--not downwards but upwards. It
+strips away the inessential, and makes brothers. It is impatient with all
+the unavailing inventions which obscure the brotherhood of mankind.
+
+I descended from the train restlessly--there were ten minutes to elapse
+before the departure--and walked along the platform, glimpsing the faces
+in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and napery in the
+two restaurant-cars: wistful all alike, I thought--flowers and faces! How
+fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was! Opposite the door of the first car
+stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery of the
+International Sleeping Car Company. He wore white gloves, like all the
+servants on the train: it was to foster the illusion; it was part of what
+we paid for.
+
+'When is luncheon served?' I asked him idly.
+
+He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs. He
+contemplated me for an instant. He seemed to add me up, antipathetically,
+as a product of Western civilization.
+
+'Soon as the train starts, madam,' he replied suavely, in good American,
+and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the platform.
+
+'Thank you!' I said.
+
+I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the
+African bush. I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression
+that had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it
+was. 'And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like
+me,' I mused. A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker were
+busy with coal and grease. 'Five minutes hence, and our lives, and our
+correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,' I said to
+myself. Strange world, the world of the _train de grand luxe_! But a
+world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as the
+inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.
+
+Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and
+varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all
+that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself
+up and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray
+landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a
+long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon;
+and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway
+director had received their most luscious expression--and had then been
+modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern
+flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes
+as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was
+finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car
+towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.
+
+'How do you do, Miss Kate?' I accosted her.
+
+It was the younger of Vicary's two maiden sisters. I guessed that the
+other could not be far away.
+
+She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had
+done.
+
+'Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?' she said distantly, with a nervous
+simper; and she passed on.
+
+This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world
+of my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from
+Miss Kate's attitude that something must have occurred, or something must
+have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a
+time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly.
+What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I
+left without delay and went back to my coupé; it would have been a pity
+to derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet
+it might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for.
+I read a little in the _Imitation of Christ_ which Aunt Constance had
+meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even
+Christianity itself. 'Think not that thou hast made any progress,' I
+read, 'unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far off
+thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be
+angry or indignant, with any except one's self.'
+
+Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its
+invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations,
+dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks
+through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored
+everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation
+seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after
+interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside,
+rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in
+the abandoned attitudes of fatigue--here and there a compartment with
+blinds discreetly drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and
+here and there a group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves
+nothing could affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train
+and every steamer a few such are to be found.
+
+More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we
+thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their façades
+occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under
+streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to
+see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to
+a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared
+haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to
+carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial
+quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations
+we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we
+trailed slowly our disgust.
+
+We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris
+would fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony
+magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we
+were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the
+splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by
+the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a _train de grand luxe_,
+while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms,
+guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at
+which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses
+Vicary had brought several pairs of white gloves in order to have me
+dismissed from the society of the train. A hand touched me. It was
+Yvonne's. I awoke to a renewal of the maddening vibration. We had quitted
+Paris long since. It was after seven o'clock. '_On dit que le diner est
+servi, madame_ said Yvonne. I told her to go, and I collected my wits to
+follow her. As I was emerging into the corridor, Miss Kate went by. I
+smiled faintly, perhaps timidly. She cut me completely. Then I went out
+into the corridor. A man was standing at the other end twirling his
+moustaches. He turned round.
+
+It was Frank.
+
+He came towards me, uncertainly swaying with the movement of the
+swaying train.
+
+'Good God!' he muttered, and stopped within a yard of me.
+
+I clung convulsively to the framework of the doorway. Our lives paused.
+
+'Why have you followed me, Frank?' I asked gloomily, in a whisper.
+
+I had meant to be severe, offended. I had not meant to put his name at
+the end of my question, much less to utter it tenderly, like an
+endearment. But I had little control over myself. I was almost breathless
+with a fatal surprise, shaken with terrible emotion.
+
+'I've not followed you,' he said. 'I joined the train at Paris. I'd no
+idea you were on the train till I saw you in the corner asleep, through
+the window of the compartment. I've been waiting here till you came out.'
+
+'Have you seen the Vicarys?'
+
+'Yes,' he answered.
+
+'Ah! You've been away from London all this time?'
+
+'I couldn't stay. I couldn't. I've been in Belgium and Holland. Then I
+went to Paris. And now--you see me.'
+
+'I'm going to Mentone,' I said. 'I had thought of Monte Carlo first, but
+I changed my mind. Where are you going to?'
+
+'Mentone,' he said.
+
+We talked in hard, strained tones, avoiding each other's eyes. A string
+of people passed along the car on their way to dinner. I withdrew into my
+compartment, and Frank flattened himself against a window.
+
+'Come in here a minute,' I said, when they were gone.
+
+He entered the compartment and sat down opposite to me and lifted his
+hand, perhaps unconsciously, to pull the door to.
+
+'No,' I said; 'don't shut it. Leave it like that.'
+
+He was dressed in a gray tourist suit. Never before had I seen him in any
+but the formal attire of London. I thought he looked singularly graceful
+and distinguished, even romantic, in that loose, soft clothing. But no
+matter what he wore, Frank satisfied the eye. We were both extremely
+nervous and excited and timid, fearing speech.
+
+'Carlotta,' he said at last--I had perceived that he was struggling to a
+resolution--'this is the best thing that could have happened. Whatever we
+do, everybody will believe that we are running off together.'
+
+'I think they have been believing that ever since we left London,' I
+said; and I told him about Miss Kate's treatment of me at lunch. 'But how
+can that affect us?' I demanded.
+
+'Mary will believe it--does believe, I'm sure. Long before this, people
+will have enlightened her. And now the Vicarys have seen us, it's all
+over. Our hand is forced, isn't it?'
+
+'Frank,' I said, 'didn't you think my letter was right?'
+
+'I obeyed it,' he replied heavily. 'I haven't even written to you. I
+meant to when I got to Mentone.'
+
+'But didn't you think I was right?'
+
+'I don't know. Yes--I suppose it was.' His lower lip fell. 'Of course I
+don't want you to do anything that you--'
+
+'Dinner, please,' said my negro, putting his head between us.
+
+We both informed the man that we should not dine, and I asked him to tell
+Yvonne not to wait for me.
+
+'There's your maid, too,' said Frank. 'How are we going to get out of it?
+The thing's settled for us.'
+
+'My dear, dear boy!' I exclaimed. 'Are we to outrage our consciences
+simply because people think we have outraged them?'
+
+'It isn't my conscience--it's yours,' he said.
+
+'Well, then--mine.'
+
+I drew down my veil; I could scarcely keep dry eyes.
+
+'Why are you so hard, Carlotta?' he cried. 'I can't understand you. I
+never could. But you'll kill me--that's what you'll do.'
+
+Impulsively I leaned forward; and he seized my hand. Our antagonism
+melted in tears. Oh the cruel joy of that moment! Who will dare to say
+that the spirit cannot burn with pleasure while drowning in grief? Or
+that tragedy may not be the highest bliss? That instant of renunciation
+was our true marriage. I realize it now--a union that nothing can soil
+nor impair.
+
+'I love you; you are fast and fast in my heart,' I murmured. 'But you
+must go back to Mary. There is nothing else.'
+
+And I withdrew my hand.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'You've no right, my dearest, to tell me to go back to Mary. I cannot.'
+
+'Forgive me,' I said. 'I have only the right to ask you to leave me.'
+
+'Then there is no hope?'
+
+His lips trembled. Ah! those lips!
+
+I made a sign that there was no hope. And we sat in silence, overcome.
+
+A servant came to arrange the compartment for sleeping, and we were
+obliged to assume nonchalance and go into the corridor. All the
+windows of the corridor were covered with frost traceries. The train
+with its enclosed heat and its gleaming lamps was plunging through an
+ice-gripped night. I thought of the engine-driver, perched on his
+shaking, snorting, monstrous machine, facing the weather, with our
+lives and our loves in his hand.
+
+'We'll leave each other now, Frank,' I said, 'before the people begin to
+come back from dinner. Go and eat something.'
+
+'But you?'
+
+'I shall be all right. Yvonne will get me some fruit. I shall stay in our
+compartment till we arrive.'
+
+'Yes. And when we do arrive--what then? What are your wishes? You see,
+I can't leave the train before we get to Mentone because of my
+registered luggage.'
+
+He spoke appealingly.
+
+The dear thing, with his transparent pretexts!
+
+'You can ignore us at the station, and then leave Mentone again
+during the day.'
+
+'As you wish,' he said.
+
+'Good-night!' I whispered. 'Good-bye!' And I turned to my compartment.
+
+'Carlotta!' he cried despairingly.
+
+But I shut the door and drew the blinds.
+
+Yvonne was discretion itself when she returned. She had surely seen
+Frank. No doubt she anticipated piquant developments at Mentone.
+
+All night I lay on my narrow bed, with Yvonne faintly snoring above me,
+and the harsh, metallic rattle of the swinging train beneath. I could
+catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow. The lamp burnt
+delicately within its green shade. I lay almost moveless, almost dead,
+shifting only at long intervals from side to side. Sometimes my brain
+would arouse itself, and I would live again through each scene of my
+relationship with Frank and Mary. I often thought of the engine-driver,
+outside, watching over us and unflinchingly dragging us on. I hoped that
+his existence had compensations.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Early on the second morning after that interview in the train I sat on
+my balcony in the Hôtel d'Écosse, full in the tremendous sun that had
+ascended over the Mediterranean. The shore road wound along beneath me
+by the blue water that never receded nor advanced, lopping always the
+same stones. A vivid yellow electric tram, like a toy, crept forward on
+my left from the direction of Vintimille and Italy, as it were swimming
+noiselessly on the smooth surface of the road among the palms of an
+intense green, against the bright blue background of the sea; and
+another tram advanced, a spot of orange, to meet it out of the
+variegated tangle of tinted houses composing the Old Town. High upon the
+summit of the Old Town rose the slim, rose-coloured cupola of the church
+in a sapphire sky. The regular smiting sound of a cracked bell,
+viciously rung, came from it. The eastern prospect was shut in by the
+last olive-clad spurs of the Alps, that tread violently and gigantically
+into the sea. The pathways of the hotel garden were being gently swept
+by a child of the sun, who could not have sacrificed his graceful
+dignity to haste; and many peaceful morning activities proceeded on the
+road, on the shore, and on the jetty. A procession of tawny
+fishing-boats passed from the harbour one after another straight into
+the eye of the sun, and were lost there. Smoke climbed up softly into
+the soft air from the houses and hotels on the level of the road. The
+trams met and parted, silently widening the distance between them which
+previously they had narrowed. And the sun rose and rose, bathing the
+blue sea and the rich verdure and the glaring white architecture in the
+very fluid of essential life. The whole azure coast basked in it like an
+immense cat, commencing the day with a voluptuous savouring of the fact
+that it was alive. The sun is the treacherous and tyrannical god of the
+South, and when he withdraws himself, arbitrary and cruel, the land and
+the people shiver and prepare to die.
+
+It was such a morning as renders sharp and unmistakable the division
+between body and soul--if the soul suffers. The body exults; the body
+cries out that nothing on earth matters except climate. Nothing can damp
+the glorious ecstasy of the body baptized in that air, caressed by that
+incomparable sun. It laughs, and it laughs at the sorrow of the soul. It
+imperiously bids the soul to choose the path of pleasure; it shouts aloud
+that sacrifice is vain and honour an empty word, full of inconveniences,
+and that to exist amply and vehemently, to listen to the blood as it
+beats strongly through the veins, is the end of the eternal purpose. Ah!
+how easy it is to martyrize one's self by some fatal decision made
+grandly in the exultation of a supreme moment! And how difficult to
+endure the martyrdom without regret! I regretted my renunciation. My body
+rebelled against it, and even my soul rebelled. I scorned myself for a
+fool, for a sentimental weakling--yes, and for a moral coward. Every
+argument that presented itself damaged the justice of my decision. After
+all, we loved, and in my secret dreams had I not always put love first,
+as the most sacred? The reality was that I had been afraid of what Mary
+would think. True, my attitude had lied to her, but I could not have
+avoided that. Decency would have forbidden me to use any other attitude;
+and more than decency--kindness. Ought the course of lives to be changed
+at the bidding of mere hazard? It was a mere chance that Mary had called
+on me. I bled for her grief, but nothing that I could do would assuage
+it. I felt sure that, in the impossible case of me being able to state my
+position to her and argue in its defence, I could force her to see that
+in giving myself to Frank I was not being false to my own ideals. What
+else could count? What other consideration should guide the soul on its
+mysterious instinctive way? Frank and I had a right to possess each
+other. We had a right to be happy if we could. And the one thing that had
+robbed us of that right was my lack of courage, caused partly by my
+feminine mentality (do we not realize sometimes how ignobly feminine we
+are?), and partly by the painful spectacle of Mary's grief.... And her
+grief, her most intimate grief, sprang not from thwarted love, but from
+a base and narrow conventionality.
+
+Thus I declaimed to myself in my heart, under the influence of the
+seductive temptations of that intoxicating atmosphere.
+
+'Come down,' said a voice firmly and quietly underneath me in the
+orange-trees of the garden.
+
+I started violently. It was Frank's voice. He was standing in the garden,
+his legs apart, and a broad, flat straw hat, which I did not admire, on
+his head. His pale face was puckered round about the eyes as he looked up
+at me, like the face of a person trying to look directly at the sun.
+
+'Why,' I exclaimed foolishly, glancing down over the edge of the balcony,
+and shutting my white parasol with a nervous, hurried movement,
+'have--have you come here?'
+
+He had disobeyed my wish. He had not left Mentone at once.
+
+'Come down,' he repeated persuasively, and yet commandingly.
+
+I could feel my heart beating against the marble parapet of the balcony.
+I seemed to be caught, to be trapped. I could not argue with him in that
+position. I could not leave him shouting in the garden. So I nodded to
+pacify him, and disappeared quickly from the balcony, almost scurrying
+away. And in the comparative twilight of my room I stopped and gave a
+glance in the mirror, and patted my hair, and fearfully examined the
+woman that I saw in the glass, as if to discern what sort of woman she
+truly was, and what was the root of her character. I hesitated and
+snatched up my gloves. I wanted to collect my thoughts, and I could not.
+It was impossible to think clearly. I moved in the room, dazed. I stood
+by the tumbled bed, fingering the mosquito curtains. They might have been
+a veil behind which was obscured the magic word of enlightenment I
+needed. I opened the door, shut it suddenly, and held the knob tight,
+defying an imagined enemy outside. 'Oh!' I muttered at last, angry with
+myself, 'what is the use of all this? You know you must go down to him.
+He's waiting for you. Show a little common-sense and go without so much
+fuss.' And so I descended the stairs swiftly and guiltily, relieved that
+no one happened to see me. In any case, I decided, nothing could induce
+me to yield to him after my letter and after what had passed in the
+train. The affair was beyond argument. I felt that I could not yield, and
+that though it meant the ruin of happiness by obstinacy, I could not
+yield. I shrank from yielding in that moment as men shrink from public
+repentance.
+
+He had not moved from his post in the garden. We shook hands. A band
+of Italian musicians wandered into the garden and began to sing Verdi
+to a vigorous thrumming of guitars. They sang as only Italians can
+sing--as naturally as they breathed, and with a rich and overflowing
+innocent joy in the art which Nature had taught them. They sang loudly,
+swingingly, glancing full of naive hope up at the windows of the vast,
+unresponsive hotel.
+
+'So you are still in Mentone,' I ventured.
+
+'Yes,' he said. 'Come for a walk.'
+
+'But--'
+
+'Come for a walk.'
+
+'Very well,' I consented. 'As I am?'
+
+'As you are. I saw you all in white on the balcony, and I was determined
+to fetch you out.'
+
+'But could you see who it was from the road?'
+
+'Of course I could. I knew in an instant.'
+
+We descended, he a couple of paces in front of me, the narrow zigzag path
+leading down between two other hotels to the shore road.
+
+'What will happen now?' I asked myself wildly. My head swam.
+
+It seemed that nothing would happen. We turned eastwards, walking slowly,
+and I began to resume my self-control. Only the simple and the humble
+were abroad at that early hour: purveyors of food, in cheerfully rattling
+carts, or hauling barrows with the help of grave and formidable dogs;
+washers and cleaners at the doors of highly-decorated villas, amiably
+performing their tasks while the mighty slept; fishermen and fat
+fisher-girls, industriously repairing endless brown nets on the other
+side of the parapet of the road; a postman and a little policeman; a
+porcelain mender, who practised his trade under the shadow of the wall; a
+few loafers; some stable-boys exercising horses; and children with
+adorable dirty faces, shouting in their high treble as they played at
+hopscotch. I felt very closely akin to these meek ones as we walked
+along. They were so human, so wistful. They had the wonderful simplicity
+of animals, uncomplicated by the disease of self-consciousness; they were
+the vital stuff without the embroidery. They preserved the customs of
+their ancestors, rising with the sun, frankly and splendidly enjoying the
+sun, looking up to it as the most important thing in the world. They
+never attempted to understand what was beyond them; they troubled not
+with progress, ideals, righteousness, the claims of society. They
+accepted humbly and uninquiringly what they found. They lived the life of
+their instincts, sometimes violent, often kindly, and always natural.
+Why should I have felt so near to them?
+
+A calm and gentle pleasure filled me, far from intense, but yet
+satisfying. I determined to enjoy the moment, or, perhaps, without
+determination, I gave myself up, gradually, to the moment. I forgot care
+and sorrow. I was well; I was with Frank; I was in the midst of
+enchanting natural beauty; the day was fair and fresh and virgin. I knew
+not where I was going. Shorewards a snowy mountain ridge rose above the
+long, wide slopes of olives, dotted with white dwellings. A single sail
+stood up seawards on the immense sheet of blue. The white sail appeared
+and disappeared in the green palm-trees as we passed eastwards. Presently
+we left the sea, and we lost the hills, and came into a street of poor
+little shops for simple folk, that naïvely exposed their cheap and tawdry
+goods to no matter what mightiness should saunter that way. And then we
+came to the end of the tram-line, and it was like the end of the world.
+And we saw in the distance abodes of famous persons, fabulously rich,
+defying the sea and the hills, and condescending from afar off to the
+humble. We crossed the railway, and a woman ran out from a cabin with a
+spoon in one hand and a soiled flag in the other, and waved the flag at
+a towering black engine that breathed stertorously in a cutting. Already
+we were climbing, and the road grew steeper, and then we came to
+custom-houses--unsightly, squalid, irregular, and mean--in front of which
+officials laughed and lounged and smoked.
+
+We talked scarcely at all.
+
+'You were up early this morning,' he said.
+
+'Yes; I could not sleep.'
+
+'It was the same with me.'
+
+We recovered the sea; but now it was far below us, and the footprints of
+the wind were marked on it, and it was not one blue, but a thousand
+blues, and it faded imperceptibly into the sky. The sail, making Mentone,
+was much nearer, and had developed into a two-masted ship. It seemed to
+be pushed, rather than blown, along by the wind. It seemed to have
+rigidity in all its parts, and to be sliding unwillingly over a vast
+slate. The road lay through craggy rocks, shelving away unseen on one
+hand, and rising steeply against the burning sky on the other. We mounted
+steadily and slowly. I did not look much at Frank, but my eye was
+conscious of his figure, striding leisurely along. Now and then, when I
+turned to glance behind, I saw our shadows there diagonally on the road,
+and again I did not care for his hat. I had not seen him in a straw hat
+till that morning. We arrived at a second set of French custom-houses,
+deserted, and then we saw that the gigantic side of the mountain was
+cleft by a fissure from base to summit. And across the gorge had been
+thrown a tiny stone bridge to carry the road. At this point, by the
+bridge, the face of the rock had been carved smooth, and a great black
+triangle painted on it. And on the road was a common milestone, with
+'France' on one side and 'Italia' on the other. And a very old man was
+harmlessly spreading a stock of picture postcards on the parapet of the
+bridge. My heart went out to that poor old man, whose white curls glinted
+in the sunlight. It seemed to me so pathetic that he should be just
+there, at that natural spot which the passions and the blood of men long
+dead had made artificial, tediously selling postcards in order to keep
+his worn and creaking body out of the grave.
+
+'Do give him something,' I entreated Frank.
+
+And while Frank went to him I leaned over the other parapet and
+listened for the delicate murmur of the stream far below. The split
+flank of the hill was covered with a large red blossom, and at the
+base, on the edge of the sea, were dolls' houses, each raising a
+slanted pencil of pale smoke.
+
+Then we were in Italy, and still climbing. We saw a row of narrow,
+slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched
+to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a
+rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged about
+four years and eight years, dirty, unkempt, delicious, shrill, their
+movements full of the ravishing grace of infancy. They attacked the laced
+soldier, chattering furiously, grumbling at him, intimidating him with
+the charming gestures of spoilt and pouting children. And he bent down
+stiffly in his superb uniform, and managed his long, heavy gun, and
+talked to them in a deep, vibrating voice. He reasoned with them till we
+could hear him no more. It was so touching, so exquisitely human!
+
+We reached the top of the hill, having passed the Italian customs,
+equally vile with the French. The terraced grounds of an immense deserted
+castle came down to the roadside; and over the wall, escaped from the
+garden, there bloomed extravagantly a tangle of luscious yellow roses,
+just out of our reach. The road was still and deserted. We could see
+nothing but the road and the sea and the hills, all steeped, bewitched,
+and glorious under the sun. The ship had nearly slid to Mentone. The
+curving coastline of Italy wavered away into the shimmering horizon. And
+there were those huge roses, insolently blooming in the middle of winter,
+the symbol of the terrific forces of nature which slept quiescent under
+the universal calm. Perched as it were in a niche of the hills, we were
+part of that tremendous and ennobling scene. Long since the awkward
+self-consciousness caused by our plight had left us. We did not use
+speech, but we knew that we thought alike, and were suffering the same
+transcendent emotion. Was it joy or sadness? Rather than either, it was
+an admixture of both, originating in a poignant sense of the grandeur of
+life and of the earth.
+
+'Oh, Frank,' I murmured, my spirit bursting, 'how beautiful it is!'
+
+Our eyes met. He took me and kissed me impetuously, as though my
+utterance had broken a spell which enchained him. And as I kissed him I
+wept, blissfully. Nature had triumphed.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+We departed from Mentone that same day after lunch. I could not remove to
+his hotel; he could not remove to mine, for this was Mentone. We went to
+Monte Carlo by road, our luggage following. We chose Monte Carlo partly
+because it was the nearest place, and partly because it has some of the
+qualities--incurious, tolerant, unprovincial--of a capital city. If we
+encountered friends there, so much the better, in the end. The great
+adventure, the solemn and perilous enterprise had begun. I sent Yvonne
+for a holiday to her home in Laroche. Why? Ah, why? Perhaps for the
+simple reason that I had not the full courage of my convictions. We
+seldom have--_nous autres_. I felt that, if she had remained, Yvonne
+would have been too near me in the enterprise. I could not at first have
+been my natural self with her. I told the astonished and dissatisfied
+Yvonne that I would write to her as soon as I wanted her. Yet in other
+ways I had courage, and I found a delicious pleasure in my courage. When
+I was finally leaving the hotel I had Frank by my side. I behaved to him
+as to a husband. I publicly called him 'dear.' I asked his advice in
+trifles. He paid my bill. He even provided the money necessary for
+Yvonne. My joy in the possession of this male creature, whose part it now
+was to do for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do
+for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's
+woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal
+significance of that word--I had a protector.
+
+Frank was able to get three rooms at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. I
+had only to approve them. We met in our sitting-room at half-past three,
+ready to go out for a walk. It would be inexact to say that we were not
+nervous. But we were happy. He had not abandoned his straw hat.
+
+'Don't wear that any more,' I said to him, smiling.
+
+'But why? It's quite new.'
+
+'It doesn't suit you,' I said.
+
+'Oh, that doesn't matter,' he laughed, and he put it on.
+
+'But I don't like to see you in it,' I persisted.
+
+'Well, you'll stand it this afternoon, my angel, and I'll get another
+to-morrow.'
+
+'Haven't you got another one here?' I asked, with discontent.
+
+'No,' and he laughed again.
+
+'But, dear--' I pouted.
+
+He seemed suddenly to realize that as a fact I did not like the hat.
+
+'Come here,' he said, charmingly grave; and he led me by the hand into
+his bedroom, which was littered with clothes, small parcels, boots, and
+brushes. One chair was overturned.
+
+'Heavens!' I muttered, pretending to be shocked at the disorder.
+
+He drew, me to a leather box of medium size.
+
+'You can open it,' he said.
+
+I opened it. The thing was rather a good contrivance, for a man. It
+held a silk hat, an opera hat, a bowler hat, some caps, and a soft
+Panama straw.
+
+'And you said you had no others!' I grumbled at him.
+
+'Well, which is it to be?' he demanded.
+
+'This, of course,' I said, taking the bowler. I reached up, removed the
+straw hat from his head, and put the bowler in its place. 'There!' I
+exclaimed, satisfied, giving the bowler a pat--there!'
+
+He laughed, immensely content, enraptured, foolishly blissful. We were
+indeed happy. Before opening the door leading to the corridor we stopped
+and kissed.
+
+On the seaward terrace of the vast, pale, floriated Casino, so
+impressive in its glittering vulgarity, like the bride-cake of a
+stockbroker's wedding, we strolled about among a multifarious crowd,
+immersed in ourselves. We shared a contempt for the architecture, the
+glaring flower-beds, and the false distinction of the crowd, and an
+enthusiasm for the sunshine and the hills and the sea, and whatever else
+had escaped the hands of the Casino administration. We talked lightly
+and freely. Care seemed to be leaving us; we had no preoccupations save
+those which were connected with our passion. Then I saw, standing in an
+attitude of attention, the famous body-servant of Lord Francis Alcar,
+and I knew that Lord Francis could not be far away. We spoke to the
+valet; he pointed out his master, seated at the front of the terrace,
+and told us, in a discreet, pained, respectful voice, that our venerable
+friend had been mysteriously unwell at Monte Carlo, and was now taking
+the air for the first time in ten days. I determined that we should go
+boldly and speak to him.
+
+'Lord Francis,' I said gently, after we had stood some seconds by his
+chair, unremarked.
+
+He was staring fixedly at the distance of the sea. He looked amazingly
+older than when I had last talked with him. His figure was shrunken, and
+his face rose thin and white out of a heavy fur overcoat and a large blue
+muffler. In his eyes there was such a sadness, such an infinite regret,
+such a profound weariness as can only be seen in the eyes of the senile.
+He was utterly changed.
+
+'Lord Francis,' I repeated, 'don't you know me?'
+
+He started slightly and looked at me, and a faint gleam appeared in his
+eyes. Then he nodded, and took a thin, fragile alabaster hand out of
+the pocket of his overcoat. I shook it. It was like shaking hands with
+a dead, starved child. He carefully moved the skin and bone back into
+his pocket.
+
+'Are you pretty well?' I said.
+
+He nodded. Then the faint gleam faded out of his eyes; his head fell a
+little, and he resumed his tragic contemplation of the sea. The fact of
+my presence had dropped like a pebble into the strange depths of that
+aged mind, and the waters of the ferocious egotism of senility had closed
+over it, and it was forgotten. His rapt and yet meaningless gaze
+frightened me. It was as if there was more desolation and disillusion in
+that gaze than I had previously imagined the whole earth to contain.
+Useless for Frank to rouse him for the second time. Useless to explain
+ourselves. What was love to him, or the trivial conventions of a world
+which he was already quitting?
+
+We walked away. From the edge of the terrace I could see a number of
+boats pulling to and fro in the water.
+
+'It's the pigeon-shooting,' Frank explained. 'Come to the railings and
+you'll be able to see.'
+
+I had already heard the sharp popping of rifles. I went to the railings,
+and saw a number of boxes arranged in a semicircle on a green, which was,
+as it were, suspended between the height of the terrace and the sea.
+Suddenly one of the boxes collapsed with a rattle, and a bird flew out of
+the ruin of it. There were two reports of a gun; the bird, its curving
+flight cut short, fell fluttering to the grass; a dog trotted out from
+the direction of the gun unseen beneath us, and disappeared again with
+the mass of ruffled feathers in its mouth. Then two men showed
+themselves, ran to the collapsed box, restored it, and put in it a fresh
+victim, and disappeared after the dog. I was horrified, but I could not
+remove my eyes from the green. Another box fell flat, and another bird
+flew out; a gun sounded; the bird soared far away, wavered, and sank on
+to the surface of the sea, and the boats converged towards it in furious
+haste. So the game proceeded. I saw a dozen deaths on the green; a few
+birds fell into the sea, and one escaped, settling ultimately on the roof
+of the Casino.
+
+'So that is pigeon-shooting,' I said coldly, turning to Frank. 'I suppose
+it goes on all day?'
+
+He nodded.
+
+'It's just as cruel as plenty of other sports, and no more,' he said, as
+if apologizing for the entire male sex.
+
+'I presume so,' I answered. 'But do you know, dear, if the idea once gets
+into my head that that is going on all day, I shan't be able to stop
+here. Let us have tea somewhere.'
+
+Not until dinner did I recover from the obsession of that continual
+slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the
+Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the
+mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot
+out all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now do I
+completely perceive how violent, how capricious and contradictory were
+my emotions in those unique and unforgettable hours.
+
+We dined late, because I had deprived myself of Yvonne. Already I was
+almost in a mind to send for her. The restaurant of the hotel was full,
+but we recognised no one as we walked through the room to our table.
+
+'There is one advantage in travelling about with you,' said Frank.
+
+'What is it?' I asked.
+
+'No matter where one is, one can always be sure of being with the most
+beautiful woman in the place.'
+
+I was content. I repaid him by being more than ever a man's woman. I
+knew that I was made for that. I understood why great sopranos have of
+their own accord given up even the stage on marriage. The career of
+literature seemed to me tedious and sordid in comparison with that of
+being a man's woman. In my rich black dress and my rings and bracelets I
+felt like an Eastern Empress; I felt that I could adequately reward
+homage with smiles, and love with fervid love. And I felt like a
+cat--idle, indolently graceful, voluptuously seeking warmth and
+caresses. I enveloped Frank with soft glances, I dazed him with glances.
+He ordered a wine which he said was fit for gods, and the waiter brought
+it reverently and filled our glasses, with a ritual of precautions.
+Later during the dinner Frank asked me if I would prefer champagne. I
+said, 'No, of course not.' But he said, 'I think you would,' and ordered
+some. 'Admit,' he said, 'that you prefer champagne.' 'Well, of course,'
+I replied. But I drank very little champagne, lest I should be too
+happy. Frank's wonderful face grew delicately flushed. The room
+resounded with discreet chatter, and the tinkle of glass and silver and
+porcelain. The upper part of it remained in shadow, but every table was
+a centre of rosy light, illuminating faces and jewels and napery. And in
+my sweet illusion I thought that every face had found the secret of joy,
+and that even the old had preserved it. Pleasure reigned. Pleasure was
+the sole goddess. And how satisfying then was the worship of her! Life
+had no inconveniences, no dark spots, no pitfalls. The gratification of
+the senses, the appeasing of appetites that instantly renewed
+themselves--this was the business of the soul. And as the wine sank
+lower in the bottles, and we cooled our tongues with ices, and the room
+began to empty, expectation gleamed and glittered in our eyes. At last,
+except a group of men smoking and talking in a corner, we were the only
+diners left.
+
+'Shall we go?' Frank said, putting a veil of cigarette smoke between us.
+
+I trembled. I was once more the young and timid girl. I could not
+speak. I nodded.
+
+In the hall was Vicary, talking to the head-porter. He saw us and
+started.
+
+'What! Vicary!' I murmured, suddenly cooled.
+
+'I want to speak to you,' said Vicary. 'Where can we go?'
+
+'This way,' Frank replied.
+
+We went to our sitting-room, silent and apprehensive.
+
+'Sit down,' said Vicary, shutting the door and standing against it.
+
+He was wearing a tourist suit, with a gray overcoat, and his grizzled
+hair was tumbling over his hard, white face.
+
+'What's the matter?' Frank asked. 'Anything wrong?'
+
+'Look here, you two,' said Vicary, 'I don't want to discuss your
+position, and I'm the last person in this world to cast the first stone;
+but it falls to me to do it. I was coming down to Nice to stay with my
+sisters, and I've come a little further. My sisters wired me they had
+seen you. I've been to Mentone, and driven here from there. I hoped I
+should get here earlier than the newspapers, and I have done, it seems.'
+
+'Earlier than the newspapers?' Frank repeated, standing up.
+
+'Try to keep calm,' Vicary continued. 'Your wife's body was found in the
+Thames at seven o'clock last night. The doctors say it had been in the
+water for forty-eight hours. Your servants thought she had gone to you.
+But doubtless some thoughtful person had told her that you two were
+wandering about Europe together.'
+
+'_My wife_' cried Frank.
+
+And the strange and terrible emphasis he put on the word 'wife' proved to
+me in the fraction of a second that in his heart I was not his wife. A
+fearful tragedy had swept away the structure of argument in favour of the
+rights of love which he had built over the original conventionality of
+his mind. Poor fellow!
+
+He fell back into his chair and covered his eyes.
+
+'I thank God my mother didn't live to see this!' he cried.
+
+And then he rushed to his bedroom and banged the door.
+
+'My poor girl!' said Vicary, approaching me. 'What can I--I'm awfully--'
+
+I waved him away.
+
+'What's that?' he exclaimed, in a different voice, listening.
+
+I ran to the bedroom, and saw Frank lifting a revolver.
+
+'You've brought me to this, Carlotta!' he shouted.
+
+I sprang towards him, but it was too late.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+When I came out of the house, hurried and angrily flushing, I perceived
+clearly that my reluctance to break a habit and my desire for physical
+comfort, if not my attachment to the girl, had led me too far. I was
+conscious of humiliation. I despised myself. The fact was that I had
+quarrelled with Yvonne--Yvonne, who had been with me for eight years,
+Yvonne who had remained sturdily faithful during my long exile. Now the
+woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with
+a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or
+both. Possibly I was both. I had permitted Yvonne too much liberty. I had
+spoilt her. She was fidelity itself, goodness itself; but her character
+had not borne the strain of realizing that she had acquired power over
+me, and that she had become necessary to me. So that morning we had
+differed violently; we had quarrelled as equals. The worst side of her
+had appeared suddenly, shockingly. And she had left me, demonstrating
+even as she banged the door that she was at least my mistress in
+altercation. All day I fought against the temptation to eat my pride, and
+ask her to return. It was a horrible, a deplorable, temptation. And
+towards evening, after seven hours of solitude in the hotel in the Avenue
+de Kleber, I yielded to it. I knew the address to which she had gone, and
+I took a cab and drove there, hating myself. I was received with
+excessive rudeness by a dirty and hag-like concierge, who, after refusing
+all information for some minutes, informed me at length that the young
+lady in question had quitted Paris in company with a gentleman.
+
+The insolence of the concierge, my weakness and my failure, the bitter
+sense of lost dignity, the fact that Yvonne had not hesitated even a few
+hours before finally abandoning me--all these things wounded me. But the
+sharpest stab of all was that during our stay in Paris Yvonne must have
+had secret relations with a man. I had hidden nothing from her; she,
+however, had not reciprocated my candour. I had imagined that she lived
+only for me....
+
+Well, the truth cannot be concealed that the years of wandering which had
+succeeded the fatal night at Monte Carlo had done little to improve me.
+What would you have? For months and months my ears rang with Frank's
+despairing shout: '_You've_ brought me to this, Carlotta!' And the
+profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of my
+immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my inmost
+soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem
+inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what
+it means to be broken--to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming
+calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the
+afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert
+me; I deserted them. For the second time in my career I tore myself up by
+the roots. I lived the nomad's life, in the usual European haunts of the
+nomad. And in five years I did not make a single new friend, scarcely an
+acquaintance. I lived in myself and on myself, nursing grief, nursing a
+rancour against fate, nursing an involuntary shame.... You know, the
+scandal of which I had been the centre was appalling; it touched the
+extreme. It must have nearly killed the excellent Mrs. Sardis. I did not
+dare to produce another novel. But after a year or so I turned to poetry,
+and I must admit that my poetry was accepted. But it was not enough to
+prevent me from withering--from shrivelling. I lost ground, and I was
+still losing it. I was becoming sinister, warped, peculiar, capricious,
+unaccountable. I guessed it then; I see it clearly now.
+
+The house of the odious concierge was in a small, shabby street off the
+Boulevard du Montparnasse. I looked in vain for a cab. Even on the wide,
+straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had
+been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great,
+glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession,
+but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither
+they went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car. Without a cab I was
+as helpless and as timid as a young girl, I who was thirty-one, and had
+travelled and lived and suffered! Never had I been alone in the streets
+of a large city at night. And the September night was sultry and
+forbidding. I was afraid--I was afraid of the men who passed me, staring
+at me. One man spoke to me, and I literally shook with fear as I hastened
+on. What would I have given to have had the once faithful Yvonne by my
+side! Presently I came to the crossing of the Boulevard Raspail, and this
+boulevard, equally long, uncharitable, and mournful with the other,
+endless, stretching to infinity, filled me with horror. Yes, with the
+horror of solitude in a vast city. Oh, you solitary, you who have felt
+that horror descending upon you, desolating, clutching, and chilling the
+heart, you will comprehend me!
+
+At the corner, of the two boulevards was a glowing cafe, the Café du
+Dome, with a row of chairs and little tables in front of its windows. And
+at one of these little tables sat a man, gazing absently at a green glass
+in a white saucer. I had almost gone past him when some instinct prompted
+me to the bravery of looking at him again. He was a stoutish man,
+apparently aged about forty-five, very fair, with a puffed face and
+melancholy eyes. And then it was as though someone had shot me in the
+breast. It was as if I must fall down and die--as if the sensations which
+I experienced were too acute--too elemental for me to support. I have
+never borne a child, but I imagine that the woman who becomes a mother
+may feel as I felt then, staggered at hitherto unsuspected possibilities
+of sensation. I stopped. I clung to the nearest table. There was ice on
+my shuddering spine, and a dew on my forehead.
+
+'Magda!' breathed the man.
+
+He had raised his eyes to mine.
+
+It was Diaz, after ten years.
+
+At first I had not recognised him. Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years
+older. I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the
+returned traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered
+landmarks. Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him.
+The magic of his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth
+reappeared.
+
+'It is I,' I murmured.
+
+He got up, and in doing so shook the table, and his glass was overturned,
+and scattered itself in fragments on the asphalte. At the noise a waiter
+ran out of the cafe, and Diaz, blushing and obviously making a great
+effort at self-control, gave him an order.
+
+'I should have known you anywhere,' said Diaz to me, taking my hand, as
+the waiter went.
+
+The ineptitude of the speech was such that I felt keenly sorry for him. I
+was not in the least hurt. My sympathy enveloped him. The position was so
+difficult, and he had seemed so pathetic, sitting there alone on the
+pavement of the vast nocturnal boulevard, so weighed down by sadness,
+that I wanted to comfort him and soothe him, and to restore him to all
+the brilliancy of his first period. It appeared to me unjust and cruel
+that the wheels of life should have crushed him too. And so I said,
+smiling as well as I could:
+
+'And I you.'
+
+'Won't you sit down here?' he suggested, avoiding my eyes.
+
+And thus I found myself seated outside a cafe, at night, conspicuous for
+all Montparnasse to see. We never know what may lie in store for us at
+the next turning of existence.
+
+'Then I am not much changed, you think?' he ventured, in an anxious tone.
+
+'No,' I lied. 'You are perhaps a little stouter. That's all.'
+
+How hard it was to talk! How lamentably self-conscious we were! How
+unequal to the situation! We did not know what to say.
+
+'You are far more beautiful than ever you were,' he said, looking at me
+for an instant. 'You are a woman; you were a girl--then.'
+
+The waiter brought another glass and saucer, and a second waiter
+followed him with a bottle, from which he poured a greenish-yellow
+liquid into the glass.
+
+'What will you have?' Diaz asked me.
+
+'Nothing, thank you,' I said quickly.
+
+To sit outside the cafe was already much. It would have been impossible
+for me to drink there.
+
+'Ah! as you please, as you please,' Diaz snapped. 'I beg your pardon.'
+
+'Poor fellow!' I reflected. 'He must be suffering from nervous
+irritability.' And aloud, 'I'm not thirsty, thank you,' as nicely
+as possible.
+
+He smiled beautifully; the irritability had passed.
+
+'It's awfully kind of you to sit down here with me,' he said, in a lower
+voice. 'I suppose you've heard about me?'
+
+He drank half the contents of the glass.
+
+'I read in the papers some years ago that you were suffering from
+neurasthenia and nervous breakdown,' I replied. 'I was very sorry.'
+
+'Yes,' he said; 'nervous breakdown--nervous breakdown.'
+
+'You haven't been playing lately, have you?'
+
+'It is more than two years since I played. And if you had heard me that
+time! My God!'
+
+'But surely you have tried some cure?'
+
+'Cure!' he repeated after me. 'There's no cure. Here I am! Me!'
+
+His glass was empty. He tapped on the window behind us, and the
+procession of waiters occurred again, and Diaz received a third glass,
+which now stood on three saucers.
+
+'You'll excuse me,' he said, sipping slowly. 'I'm not very well to-night.
+And you've--Why did you run away from me? I wanted to find you, but I
+couldn't.'
+
+'Please do not let us talk about that,' I stopped him. 'I--I must go.'
+
+'Oh, of course, if I've offended you--'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I'm not at all offended. But I think--'
+
+'Then, if you aren't offended, stop a little, and let me see you home.
+You're sure you won't have anything?'
+
+I shook my head, wishing that he would not drink so much. I thought it
+could not be good for his nerves.
+
+'Been in Paris long?' he asked me, with a slightly confused utterance.
+'Staying in this quarter? Many English and Americans here.'
+
+Then, in setting down the glass, he upset it, and it smashed on the
+pavement like the first one.
+
+'Damn!' he exclaimed, staring forlornly at the broken glass, as if in the
+presence of some irreparable misfortune. And before I could put in a
+word, he turned to me with a silly smile, and approaching his face to
+mine till his hat touched the brim of my hat, he said thickly: 'After
+all, you know, I'm the greatish pianist in the world.'
+
+The truth struck me like a blow. In my amazing ignorance of certain
+aspects of life I had not suspected it. Diaz was drunk. The ignominy of
+it! The tragedy of it! He was drunk. He had fallen to the beast. I drew
+back from that hot, reeking face.
+
+'You don't think I am?' he muttered. 'You think young What's-his-name can
+play Ch--Chopin better than me? Is that it?'
+
+I wanted to run away, to cease to exist, to hide with my shame in some
+deep abyss. And there I was on the boulevard, next to this animal,
+sharing his table and the degradation! And I could not move. There are
+people so gifted that in a dilemma they always know exactly the wisest
+course to adopt. But I did not know. This part of my story gives me
+infinite pain to write, and yet I must write it, though I cannot persuade
+myself to write it in full; the details would be too repulsive.
+Nevertheless, forget not that I lived it.
+
+He put his face to mine again, and began to stammer something, and I
+drew away.
+
+'You are ashamed of me, madam,' he said sharply.
+
+'I think you are not quite yourself--not quite well,' I replied.
+
+'You mean I am drunk.'
+
+'I mean what I say. You are not quite well. Please do not twist my
+words.'
+
+'You mean I am drunk,' he insisted, raising his voice. 'I am not drunk;
+I have never been drunk. That I can swear with my hand on my heart. But
+you are ashamed of being seen with me.'
+
+'I think you ought to go home,' I suggested.
+
+'That is only to get rid of me!' he cried.
+
+'No, no,' I appealed to him persuasively. 'Do not wound me. I will go
+with you as far as your house, if you like. You are too ill to be alone.'
+
+At that moment an empty open cab strolled by, and, without pausing for
+his answer, I signalled the driver. My heart beat wildly. My spirit was
+in an uproar. But I was determined not to desert him, not to abandon him
+to a public disgrace. I rose from my seat.
+
+'You're very good,' he said, in a new voice.
+
+The cab had stopped.
+
+'Come!' I entreated him.
+
+He rapped uncertainly on the window, and then, as the waiter did not
+immediately appear, he threw some silver on the table, and aimed himself
+in the direction of the cab. I got in. Diaz slipped on the step.
+
+'I've forgotten somethin',' he complained. 'What is it? My umbrella--yes,
+my umbrella--_pépin_ as they say here. 'Scuse me moment.'
+
+His umbrella was, in fact, lying under a chair. He stooped with
+difficulty and regained it, and then the waiter, who had at length
+arrived, helped him into the cab, and he sank like a mass of inert clay
+on my skirts.
+
+'Tell the driver the address,' I whispered.
+
+The driver, with head turned and a grin on his face, was waiting.
+
+'Rue de Douai,' said Diaz sullenly.
+
+'What number?' the driver asked.
+
+'Does that regard you?' Diaz retorted crossly in French. 'I will tell
+you later.'
+
+'Tell him now,' I pleaded.
+
+'Well, to oblige you, I will. Twenty-seven. But what I can't stand is the
+impudence of these fellows.'
+
+The driver winked at me.
+
+'Just so,' I soothed Diaz, and we drove off.
+
+I have never been happier than in unhappiness. Happiness is not joy, and
+it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more
+disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realization of one's
+secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence.
+As I crossed Paris with the drunken Diaz leaning clumsily against my
+shoulder, I was profoundly unhappy. I was desolated by the sight of this
+ruin, and yet I was happier than I had been since Frank died. I had
+glimpses and intimations of the baffling essence of our human lives here,
+strange, fleeting comprehensions of the eternal wonder and the eternal
+beauty.... In vain, professional writer as I am, do I try to express
+myself. What I want to say cannot be said; but those who have truly lived
+will understand.
+
+We passed over the Seine, lighted and asleep in the exquisite Parisian
+night, and the rattling of the cab on the cobble-stones roused Diaz from
+his stupor.
+
+'Where are we?' he asked.
+
+'Just going through the Louvre,' I replied.
+
+'I don't know how I got to the other s-side of the river,' he said.
+'Don't remember. So you're coming home with me, eh? You aren't
+'shamed of me?'
+
+'You are hurting me,' I said coldly, 'with your elbow.'
+
+'Oh, a thousand pardons! a thous' parnds, Magda! That isn't your real
+name, is it?'
+
+He sat upright and turned his face to glance at mine with a fatuous
+smile; but I would not look at him. I kept my eyes straight in
+front. Then a swerve of the carriage swung his body away from me,
+and he subsided into the corner. The intoxication was gaining on him
+every minute.
+
+'What shall I do with him?' I thought.
+
+I blushed as we drove up the Avenue de l'Opera and across the Grand
+Boulevard, for it seemed to me that all the gay loungers must observe
+Diaz' condition. We followed darker thoroughfares, and at last the cab,
+after climbing a hill, stopped before a house in a street that appeared
+rather untidy and irregular. I got out first, and Diaz stumbled after me,
+while two women on the opposite side of the road stayed curiously to
+watch us. Hastily I opened my purse and gave the driver a
+five-franc-piece, and he departed before Diaz could decide what to say. I
+had told him to go.
+
+I did not wish to tell the driver to go. I told him in spite of myself.
+
+Diaz, grumbling inarticulately, pulled the bell of the great door of the
+house. But he had to ring several times before finally the door opened;
+and each second was a year for me, waiting there with him in the street.
+And when the door opened he was leaning against it, and so pitched
+forward into the gloom of the archway. A laugh--the loud, unrestrained
+laugh of the courtesan--came from across the street.
+
+The archway was as black as night.
+
+'Shut the door, will you?' I heard Diaz' voice. 'I can't see it.
+Where are you?'
+
+But I was not going to shut the door.
+
+'Have you got a servant here?' I asked him.
+
+'She comes in the mornings,' he replied.
+
+'Then there is no one in your flat?'
+
+'Not a shoul,' said Diaz. 'Needn't be 'fraid.'
+
+I'm not afraid,' I said. 'But I wanted to know. Which floor is it?'
+
+'Third. I'll light a match.'
+
+Then I pushed to the door, whose automatic latch clicked. We were fast in
+the courtyard.
+
+Diaz dropped his matches in attempting to strike one. The metal box
+bounced on the tiles. I bent down and groped with both hands till I found
+it. And presently we began painfully to ascend the staircase, Diaz
+holding his umbrella and the rail, and I striking matches from time to
+time. We were on the second landing when I heard the bell ring again, and
+the banging of the front-door, and then voices at the foot of the
+staircase. I trembled lest we should be over-taken, and I would have
+hurried Diaz on, but he would not be hurried. Happily, as we were halfway
+between the second and third story, the man and the girl whose voices I
+heard stopped at the second. I caught sight of them momentarily through
+the banisters. The man was striking matches as I had been. '_C'est ici_,'
+the girl whispered. She was dressed in blue with a very large hat. She
+put a key in the door when they had stopped, and then our matches went
+out simultaneously. The door shut, and Diaz and I were alone on the
+staircase again. I struck another match; we struggled on.
+
+When I had taken his key from Diaz' helpless hand, and opened his door
+and guided him within, and closed the door definitely upon the outer
+world, I breathed a great sigh. Every turn of the stair had been a
+station of the cross for me. We were now in utter darkness. The classical
+effluvium of inebriety mingled with the classical odour of the furnished
+lodging. But I cared not. I had at last successfully hidden his shame. No
+one could witness it now but me. So I was glad.
+
+Neither of us said anything as, still with the aid of matches, I
+penetrated into the flat. Silently I peered about until I perceived a
+pair of candles, which I lighted. Diaz, with his hat on his head and his
+umbrella clasped tightly in his hand, fell into a chair. We glanced at
+each other.
+
+'You had better go to bed,' I suggested. 'Take your hat off. You will
+feel better without it.'
+
+He did not move, and I approached him and gently took his hat. I then
+touched the umbrella.
+
+'No, no, no!' he cried suddenly; 'I'm always losing this umbrella, and I
+won't let it out of my sight.'
+
+'As you wish,' I replied coldly.
+
+I was standing by him when he got up with a surprising lurch and put a
+hand on my shoulder. He evidently meant to kiss me. I kept him at arm's
+length, feeling a sort of icy anger.
+
+'Go to bed,' I repeated fiercely. 'It is the only place for you.'
+
+He made inarticulate noises in his throat, and ultimately achieved
+the remark:
+
+'You're very hard, Magda.'
+
+Then he bent himself towards the next room.
+
+'You will want a candle,' I said, with bitterness. 'No; I will carry it.
+Let me go first.'
+
+I preceded him through a tiny salon into the bedroom, and, leaving him
+there with one candle, came back into the first room. The whole place was
+deplorable, though not more deplorable than I had expected from the look
+of the street and the house and the stairs and the girl with the large
+hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless,
+and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel--a
+kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings
+and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with
+enormous red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once
+been a carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with
+actually a bed! It was the ready-made human kennel of commerce, which
+every large city supplies wholesale in tens of thousands to its victims.
+In that street there were hundreds such; in the house alone there were
+probably a score at least. Their sole virtue was their privacy. Ah the
+blessedness of the sacred outer door, which not even the tyrant concierge
+might violate! I thought of all the other interiors of the house, floor
+above floor, and serried one against another--vile, mean, squalid,
+cramped, unlovely, frowsy, fetid; but each lighted and intensely alive
+with the interplay of hearts; each cloistered, a secure ground where the
+instincts that move the world might show themselves naturally and in
+secret. There was something tragically beautiful in that.
+
+I had heard uncomfortable sounds from the bedroom. Then Diaz called out:
+
+'It's no use. Can't do it. Can't get into bed.' I went directly to him.
+He sat on the bed, still clasping the umbrella, one arm out of his coat.
+His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man who retires baffled
+from some tremendously complicated problem.
+
+'Put down your umbrella,' I said. 'Don't be foolish.'
+
+'I'm not foolish,' he retorted irritably. 'Don't want to loosh thish
+umbrella again.'
+
+'Well then,' I said, 'hold it in the other hand, and I will help you.'
+
+This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that
+revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He
+was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty
+centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should
+exist--there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened, shut
+in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted.
+Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his
+mother. I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed,
+clutching the umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it
+from both hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one
+clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left
+him to his inanimate companion.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was
+prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs
+alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to
+get out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a
+cab in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to
+walk even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was,
+seated in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself
+in the vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful,
+passionate city in the night--the night when the commonest noises seem to
+carry some mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth
+walks abroad naked and whispers her secrets.
+
+A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of
+the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night,
+the lamp was extinguished by a careful municipality, and I was left in
+utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and
+sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with
+difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow--as if the city had not
+been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was
+about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up,
+and I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound
+disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz' bedroom. As of old,
+he slept with the tranquillity of a child.
+
+And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished
+floor under the table. The night had passed, and it appeared to be almost
+a miracle that the night had passed, and that I had lived through it and
+was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed
+back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in
+blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom.
+She went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more
+sane, more astringent. And yet only a few hours--and it had been night,
+strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were
+warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dreaming souls. But
+that tall woman must go to bed in day, and rise to meet the first wind of
+the morning, and perhaps never have known the sweet poison of the night.
+I sank back into my chair....
+
+There was a sharp, decisive sound of a key in the lock of the
+entrance-door. I jumped up, fully awake, with beating heart and blushing
+face. Someone was invading the flat. Someone would catch me there.
+
+Of course it was his servant. I had entirely forgotten her.
+
+We met in the little passage. She was a stout creature and appeared to
+fill the flat. She did not seem very surprised at the sight of me, and
+she eyed me with the frigid disdain of one who conforms to a certain code
+for one who does not conform to it. She sat in judgment on my well-hung
+skirt and the rings on my fingers and the wickedness in my breast, and
+condemned me to everlasting obloquy.
+
+'Madame is going?' she asked coldly, holding open the door.
+
+'No, madame,' I said. 'Are you the _femme de ménage_ of monsieur?'
+
+'Yes, madame.'
+
+'Monsieur is ill,' I said, deciding swiftly what to do. 'He does not wish
+to be disturbed. He would like you to return at two o'clock.'
+
+Long before two I should have departed.
+
+'Monsieur knows well that I have another _ménage_ from twelve to two,'
+protested the woman.
+
+'Three o'clock, then,' I said.
+
+_Bien_, madame,' said she, and, producing the contents of a reticule:
+'Here are the bread, the butter, the milk, and the newspaper, madame.'
+
+'Thank you, madame.'
+
+I took the things, and she left, and I shut the door and bolted it.
+
+In anticipation, the circumstances of such an encounter would have caused
+me infinite trouble of spirit. 'But after all it was not so very
+dreadful,' I thought, as I fastened the door. 'Do I care for his _femme
+de ménage_?'
+
+The great door of the house would be open now, and the stairs no longer
+affrighting, and I might slip unobserved away. But I could not bring
+myself to leave until I had spoken with Diaz, and I would not wake him.
+It was nearly noon when he stirred. I heard his movements, and a slight
+moaning sigh, and he called me.
+
+'Are you there, Magda?'
+
+How feeble and appealing his voice!
+
+For answer I stepped into his bedroom.
+
+The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a quiver
+of the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is is the
+ordered and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be abhorrent,
+nothing blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In
+the presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we
+maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin and of justice? We are, and
+that is all we should dare to say. And yet, when I saw Diaz stretched on
+that wretched bed my first movement was one of physical disgust. He had
+not shaved for several days. His hair was like a doormat. His face was
+unclean and puffed; his lips full and cracked; his eyes all discoloured.
+If aught can be vile, he was vile. If aught can be obscene, he was
+obscene. His limbs twitched; his features were full of woe and desolation
+and abasement.
+
+He looked at me heavily, mournfully.
+
+'Diaz, Diaz!' said my soul. 'Have you come to this?'
+
+A great and overmastering pity seized me, and I went to him, and laid my
+hand gently on his. He was so nervous and tremulous that he drew away his
+hand as if I had burnt it.
+
+'Oh, Magda,' he murmured, 'my head! There was a piece of hot brick in my
+mouth, and I tried to take it out. But it was my tongue. Can I have some
+tea? Will you give me some cold water first?'
+
+Strange that the frank and simple way in which he accepted my presence
+there, and assumed my willingness to serve him, filled me with a new joy!
+He said nothing of the night. I think that Diaz was one of the few men
+who are strong enough never to regret the past. If he was melancholy, it
+was merely because he suffered bodily in the present.
+
+I gave him water, and he thanked me.
+
+'Now I will make some tea,' I said.
+
+And I went into the tiny kitchen and looked around, lifting my skirts.
+
+'Can you find the things?' he called out.
+
+'Yes,' I said.
+
+'What's all that splashing?' he inquired.
+
+'I'm washing a saucepan,' I said.
+
+'I never have my meals here,' he called. 'Only tea. There are two taps to
+the gas-stove--one a little way up the chimney.'
+
+Yes, I was joyous, actively so. I brought the tea to the bedroom with a
+glad smile. I had put two cups on the tray, which I placed on the
+night-table; and there were some biscuits. I sat at the foot of the bed
+while we drank. And the umbrella, unperceived by Diaz, lay with its
+handle on a pillow, ludicrous and yet accusing.
+
+'You are an angel,' said Diaz.
+
+'Don't call me that,' I protested.
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'Because I wish it,' I said. 'Angel' was Ispenlove's word.
+
+'Then, what shall I call you?'
+
+'My name is Carlotta Peel,' I said. 'Not Magdalen at all.'
+
+It was astounding, incredible, that he should be learning my name then
+for the first time.
+
+'I shall always call you Magda,' he responded.
+
+'And now I must go,' I stated, when I had explained to him about
+the servant.
+
+'But you'll come back?' he cried.
+
+No question of his coming to me! I must come to him!
+
+'To a place like this?' I demanded.
+
+Unthinkingly I put into my voice some of the distaste I felt for his
+deplorable apartments, and he was genuinely hurt. I believe that in all
+honesty he deemed his apartments to be quite adequate and befitting. His
+sensibilities had been so dulled.
+
+He threw up his head.
+
+'Of course,' he said, 'if you--'
+
+'No, no!' I stopped him quickly. 'I will come here. I was only teasing
+you. Let me see. I'll come back at four, just to see how you are. Won't
+you get up in the meantime?'
+
+He smiled, placated.
+
+'I may do,' he said. 'I'll try to. But in case I don't, will you take my
+key? Where did you put it last night?'
+
+'I have it,' I said.
+
+He summoned me to him just as I was opening the door.
+
+'Magda!'
+
+'What is it?'
+
+I returned.
+
+'You are magnificent,' he replied, with charming, impulsive eagerness,
+his eyes resting upon me long. He was the old Diaz again. 'I can't thank
+you. But when you come back I shall play to you.'
+
+I smiled.
+
+'Till four o'clock,' I said.
+
+'Magda,' he called again, just as I was leaving, 'bring one of your books
+with you, will you?'
+
+I hesitated, with my hand on the door. When I gave him my name he had
+made no sign that it conveyed to him anything out of the ordinary. That
+was exactly like Diaz.
+
+'Have you read any of them?' I asked loudly, without moving from the
+door.
+
+'No,' he answered. 'But I have heard of them.'
+
+'Really!' I said, keeping my tone free from irony. 'Well, I will not
+bring you one of my books.'
+
+'Why not?'
+
+I looked hard at the door in front of me.
+
+'For you I will be nothing but a woman,' I said.
+
+And I fled down the stairs and past the concierge swiftly into the
+street, as anxious as a thief to escape notice. I got a fiacre at once,
+and drove away. I would not analyze my heart. I could not. I could but
+savour the joy, sweet and fresh, that welled up in it as from some secret
+source. I was so excited that I observed nothing outside myself, and when
+the cab stopped in front of my hotel, it seemed to me that the journey
+had occupied scarcely a few seconds. Do you imagine I was saddened by the
+painful spectacle of Diaz' collapse in life? No! I only knew that he
+needed sympathy, and that I could give it to him with both hands. I could
+give, give! And the last thing that the egotist in me told me before it
+expired was that I was worthy to give. My longing to assuage the lot of
+Diaz became almost an anguish.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I returned at about half-past five, bright and eager, with vague
+anticipations. I seemed to have become used to the house. It no longer
+offended me, and I had no shame in entering it. I put the key into the
+door of Diaz' flat with a clear, high sense of pleasure. He had entrusted
+me with his key; I could go in as I pleased; I need have no fear of
+inconveniencing him, of coming at the wrong moment. It seemed wonderful!
+And as I turned the key and pushed open the door my sole wish was to be
+of service to him, to comfort him, to render his life less forlorn.
+
+'Here I am!' I cried, shutting the door.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+In the smaller of the two tiny sitting-rooms the piano, which had
+been closed, was open, and I saw that it was a Pleyel. But both rooms
+were empty.
+
+'Are you still in bed, then?' I said.
+
+There was still no answer.
+
+I went cautiously into the bedroom. It, too, was empty. The bed was made,
+and the flat generally had a superficial air of tidiness. Evidently the
+charwoman had been and departed; and doubtless Diaz had gone out, to
+return immediately. I sat down in the chair in which I had spent most of
+the night. I took off my hat and put it by the side of a tiny satchel
+which I had brought, and began to wait for him. How delicious it would be
+to open the door to him! He would notice that I had taken off my hat, and
+he would be glad. What did the future, the immediate future, hold for me?
+
+A long time I waited, and then I yawned heavily, and remembered that for
+several days I had had scarcely any sleep. I shut my eyes to relieve the
+tedium of waiting. When I reopened them, dazed, and startled into sudden
+activity by mysterious angry noises, it was quite dark. I tried to recall
+where I was, and to decide what the noises could be. I regained my
+faculties with an effort. The noises were a beating on the door.
+
+'It is Diaz,' I said to myself; 'and he can't get in!'
+
+And I felt very guilty because I had slept. I must have slept for hours.
+Groping for a candle, I lighted it.
+
+'Coming! coming!' I called in a loud voice.
+
+And I went into the passage with the candle and opened the door.
+
+It was Diaz. The gas was lighted on the stairs. Between that and my
+candle he stood conspicuous in all his details. Swaying somewhat, he
+supported himself by the balustrade, and was thus distant about two feet
+from the door. He was drunk--viciously drunk; and in an instant I knew
+the cruel truth concerning him, and wondered that I had not perceived it
+before. He was a drunkard--simply that. He had not taken to drinking as a
+consequence of nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdown was a euphemism for
+the result of alcoholic excess. I saw his slow descent as in a vision,
+and everything was explained. My heart leapt.
+
+'I can save him,' I said to myself. 'I can restore him.'
+
+I was aware of the extreme difficulty of curing a drunkard, of the
+immense proportion of failures. But, I thought, if a woman such as I
+cannot by the lavishing of her whole soul and body deliver from no matter
+what fiend a man such as Diaz, then the world has changed, and the
+eternal Aphrodite is dead.
+
+'I can save him!' I repeated.
+
+Oh, heavenly moment!
+
+'Aren't you coming in?' I addressed him quietly. 'I've been
+waiting for you.'
+
+'Have you?' he angrily replied. 'I waited long enough for you.'
+
+'Well,' I said, 'come in.'
+
+'Who is it?' he demanded. 'I inzizt--who is it?'
+
+'It's I,' I answered; 'Magda.'
+
+'That's no' wha' I mean,' he went on. 'And wha's more--you know it. Who
+is it addrezzes you, madame?'
+
+'Why,' I humoured him, 'it's you, of course--Diaz.'
+
+There was the sound of a door opening on one of the lower storeys, and I
+hoped I had pacified him, and that he would enter; but I was mistaken. He
+stamped his foot furiously on the landing.
+
+'Diaz!' he protested, shouting. 'Who dares call me Diaz? Wha's my
+full name?'
+
+'Emilio Diaz,' I murmured meekly.
+
+'That's better,' he grumbled. 'What am I?'
+
+I hesitated.
+
+'Wha' am I?' he roared; and his voice went up and down the echoing
+staircase. 'I won't put foot ev'n on doormat till I'm told wha' I am
+here.'
+
+'You are the--the master,' I said. 'But do come in.'
+
+'The mas'r! Mas'r of wha'?'
+
+'Master of the pianoforte,' I answered at once.
+
+He smiled, suddenly appeased, and put his foot unsteadily on the
+doormat.
+
+'Good!' he said. 'But, un'stan', I wouldn't ev'n have pu' foot on
+doormat--no, not ev'n on doormat--'
+
+And he came in, and I shut the door, and I was alone with my wild beast.
+
+'Kiss me,' he commanded.
+
+I kissed him on the mouth.
+
+'You don't put your arms roun' me,' he growled.
+
+So I deposited the candle on the floor, and put my arms round his neck,
+standing on tip-toe, and kissed him again.
+
+He went past me, staggering and growling, into the sitting-room at the
+end of the passage, and furiously banged down the lid of the piano, so
+that every cord in it jangled deafeningly.
+
+'Light the lamp,' he called out.
+
+'In one second,' I said.
+
+I locked the outer door on the inside, slipped the key into my pocket,
+and picked up the candle.
+
+'What were you doing out there?' he demanded.
+
+'Nothing,' I said. 'I had to pick the candle up.'
+
+He seized my hat from the table and threw it to the floor. Then
+he sat down.
+
+'Nex' time,' he remarked, 'you'll know better'n to keep me waiting.'
+
+I lighted a lamp.
+
+'I'm very sorry,' I said. 'Won't you go to bed?'
+
+'I shall go to bed when I want,' he answered. 'I'm thirsty. In the
+cupboard you'll see a bottle. I'll trouble you to give it me, with a
+glass and some water.'
+
+'This cupboard?' I said questioningly, opening a cupboard papered to
+match the rest of the wall.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'But surely you can't be thirsty, Diaz?' I protested.
+
+'Must I repea' wha' I said?' he glared at me. 'I'm thirsty. Give me
+the bottle.'
+
+I took out the bottle nearest to hand. It was of a dark green colour, and
+labelled 'Extrait d'Absinthe. Pernod fils.'
+
+'Not this one, Diaz?'
+
+'Yes,' he insisted. 'Give it me. And get a glass and some water.'
+
+'No,' I said firmly.
+
+'Wha'? You won't give it me?'
+
+'No.'
+
+He jumped up recklessly and faced me. His hat fell off the back
+of his head.
+
+'Give me that bottle!'
+
+His breath poisoned the room.
+
+I retreated in the direction of the window, and put my hand on the knob.
+
+'No,' I said.
+
+He sprang at me, but not before I had opened the window and thrown out
+the bottle. I heard it fall in the roadway with a crash and scattering of
+glass. Happily it had harmed no one. Diaz was momentarily checked. He
+hesitated. I eyed him as steadily as I could, closing the while the
+window behind me with my right hand.
+
+'He may try to kill me,' I thought.
+
+My heart was thudding against my dress, not from fear, but from
+excitement. My situation seemed impossible to me, utterly passing belief.
+Yesterday I had been a staid spinster, attended by a maid, in a hotel of
+impeccable propriety. Today I had locked myself up alone with a riotous
+drunkard in a vile flat in a notorious Parisian street. Was I mad? What
+force, secret and powerful, had urged me on?... And there was the foul
+drunkard, with clenched hands and fiery eyes, undecided whether or not to
+murder me. And I waited.
+
+He moved away, inarticulately grumbling, and resumed with
+difficulty his hat.
+
+'Ver' well,' he hiccupped morosely, 'ver' well; I'm going. Tha's all.'
+
+He lurched into the passage, and then I heard him fumbling a long time
+with the outer door. He left the door and went into his bedroom, and
+finally returned to me. He held one hand behind his back. I had sunk into
+a chair by the small table on which the lamp stood, with my satchel
+beside it.
+
+'Now!' he said, halting in front of me. 'You've locked tha' door. I
+can't go out.'
+
+'Yes,' I admitted.
+
+'Give me the key.'
+
+I shook my head.
+
+'Give me the key,' he cried. 'I mus' have the key.'
+
+I shook my head.
+
+Then he showed his right hand, and it held a revolver. He bent slightly
+over the table, staring down at me as I stared up at him. But as his chin
+felt the heat rising from the chimney of the lamp, he shifted a little to
+one side. I might have rushed for shelter into some other room; I might
+have grappled with him; I might have attempted to soothe him. But I could
+neither stir nor speak. Least of all, could I give him the key--for him
+to go and publish his own disgrace in the thoroughfares. So I just gazed
+at him, inactive.
+
+'I s'll kill you!' he muttered, and raised the revolver.
+
+My throat became suddenly dry. I tried to make the motion of swallowing,
+and could not. And looking at the revolver, I perceived in a swift
+revelation the vast folly of my inexperience. Since he was already drunk,
+why had I not allowed him to drink more, to drink himself into a stupor?
+Drunkards can only be cured when they are sober. To commence a course of
+moral treatment at such a moment as I had chosen was indeed the act of a
+woman. However, it was too late to reclaim the bottle from the street.
+
+I saw that he meant to kill me. And I knew that previously, during our
+encounter at the window, I had only pretended to myself that I thought
+there was a risk of his killing me. I had pretended, in order to increase
+the glory of my martyrdom in my own sight. Moreover, my brain, which was
+working with singular clearness, told me that for his sake I ought to
+give up the key. His exposure as a helpless drunkard would be infinitely
+preferable to his exposure as a murderer.
+
+Yet I could not persuade myself to relinquish the key. If I did so, he
+would imagine that he had frightened me. But I had no fear, and I could
+not bear that he should think I had.
+
+He fired.
+
+My ears sang. The room was full of a new odour, and a cloud floated
+reluctantly upwards from the mouth of the revolver. I sneezed, and then I
+grew aware that, firing at a distant of two feet, he had missed me. What
+had happened to the bullet I could not guess. He put the revolver down on
+the table with a groan, and the handle rested on my satchel.
+
+'My God, Magda!' he sighed, pushing back his hair with his
+beautiful hand.
+
+He was somewhat sobered. I said nothing, but I observed that the lamp was
+smoking, and I turned down the wick. I was so self-conscious, so
+irresolute, so nonplussed, that in sheer awkwardness, like a girl at a
+party who does not know what to do with her hands, I pushed the revolver
+off the satchel, and idly unfastened the catch of the satchel. Within it,
+among other things, was my sedative. I, too, had fallen the victim of a
+habit. For five years a bad sleeper, I had latterly developed into a very
+bad sleeper, and my sedative was accordingly strong.
+
+A notion struck me.
+
+'Drink a little of this, my poor Diaz!' I murmured.
+
+'What is it?' he asked.
+
+'It will make you sleep,' I said.
+
+With a convulsive movement he clutched the bottle and uncorked it, and
+before I could interfere he had drunk nearly the whole of its contents.
+
+'Stop!' I cried. 'You will kill yourself!'
+
+'What matter!' he exclaimed; and staggered off to the darkness of
+the bedroom.
+
+I followed him with the lamp, but he had already fallen on the bed, and
+seemed to be heavily asleep. I shook him; he made no response.
+
+'At any cost he must he roused,' I said aloud. 'He must be forced to
+walk.'
+
+There was a knocking at the outer door, low, discreet, and continuous. It
+sounded to me like a deliverance. Whoever might be there must aid me to
+waken Diaz. I ran to the door, taking the key out of my pocket, and
+opened it. A tall woman stood on the doormat. It was the girl that I had
+glimpsed on the previous night in the large hat ascending the stairs with
+a man. But now her bright golden head was uncovered, and she wore a blue
+_peignoir_, such as is sold ready made, with its lace and its ribbons, at
+all the big Paris shops.
+
+We both hesitated.
+
+'Oh, pardon, madame,' she said, in a thin, sweet voice in French. 'I was
+at my door, and it seemed to me that I heard--a revolver. Nothing serious
+has passed, then? Pardon, madame.'
+
+'Nothing, thank you. You are very amiable, madame,' I replied stiffly.
+
+'All my excuses, madame,' said she, turning away.
+
+'No, no!' I exclaimed. 'I am wrong. Do not go. Someone is ill--very ill.
+If you would--'
+
+She entered.
+
+'Where? What is it?' she inquired.
+
+'He is in the bedroom--here.'
+
+We both spoke breathlessly, hurrying to the bedroom, after I had
+fetched the lamp.
+
+'Wounded? He has done himself harm? Ah!'
+
+'No,' I said, 'not that.'
+
+And I explained to her that Diaz had taken at least six doses of my
+strong solution of trional.
+
+I seized the lamp and held it aloft over the form of the sleeper, which
+lay on its side cross-wise, the feet projecting a little over the edge
+of the bed, the head bent forward and missing the pillow, the arms
+stretched out in front--the very figure of abandoned and perfect
+unconsciousness. And the girl and I stared at Diaz, our shoulders
+touching, in the kennel.
+
+'He must be made to walk about,' I said. 'You would be extremely kind
+to help me.'
+
+'No, madame,' she replied. 'He will be very well like that. When one is
+alcoholic, one cannot poison one's self; it is impossible. All the
+doctors will tell you as much. Your friend will sleep for twenty
+hours--twenty-four hours--and he will waken himself quite
+re-established.'
+
+'You are sure? You know?'
+
+'I know, madame. Be tranquil. Leave him. He could not have done better.
+It is perfect.'
+
+'Perhaps I should fetch a doctor?' I suggested.
+
+'It is not worth the pain,' she said, with conviction. 'You would have
+vexations uselessly. Leave him.'
+
+I gazed at her, studying her, and I was satisfied. With her fluffly
+locks, and her simple eyes, and her fragile face, and her long hands,
+she had, nevertheless, the air of knowing profoundly her subject. She
+was a great expert on males and all that appertained to them, especially
+their vices. I was the callow amateur. I was compelled to listen with
+respect to this professor in the professor's garb. I was impressed, in
+spite of myself.
+
+'One might arrange him more comfortably,' she said.
+
+And we lifted the senseless victim, and put him on his back, and
+straightened his limbs, as though he had been a corpse.
+
+'How handsome he is!' murmured my visitor, half closing her eyes.
+
+'You think so?' I said politely, as if she had been praising one of my
+private possessions.
+
+'Oh yes. We are neighbours, madame. I have frequently remarked him, you
+understand, on the stairs, in the street.'
+
+'Has he been here long?' I asked.
+
+'About a year, madame. You have, perhaps, not seen him since a long time.
+An old friend?'
+
+'It is ten years ago,' I replied.
+
+'Ah! Ten years! In England, without doubt?'
+
+'In England, yes.'
+
+'Ten years!' she repeated, musing.
+
+'I am certain she has a kind heart,' I said to myself, and I decided to
+question her: 'Will you not sit down, madame?' I invited her.
+
+'Ah, madame! it is you who should sit down,' she said quickly. 'You must
+have suffered.'
+
+We both sat down. There were only two chairs in the room.
+
+'I would like to ask you,' I said, leaning forward towards her, 'have
+you ever seen him--drunk--before?'
+
+'No,' she replied instantly; 'never before yesterday evening.'
+
+'Be frank,' I urged her, smiling sadly.
+
+'Why should I not be frank, madame?' she said, with a grave,
+gentle appeal.
+
+It was as if she had said: 'We are talking woman to woman. I know one of
+your secrets. You can guess mine. The male is present, but he is deaf.
+What reason, therefore, for deceit?'
+
+'I am much obliged to you,' I breathed.
+
+'Not at all,' she said. 'Decidedly he is alcoholic--that sees itself,'
+she proceeded. 'But drunk--no!... He was always alone.'
+
+'Always alone?'
+
+'Always.'
+
+Her eyes filled. I thought I had never seen a creature more gentle,
+delicate, yielding, acquiescent, and fair. She was not beautiful, but she
+had grace and distinction of movement. She was a Parisienne. She had won
+my sympathy. We met in a moment when my heart needed the companionship of
+a woman's heart, and I was drawn to her by one of those sudden impulses
+that sometimes draw women to each other. I cared not what she was.
+Moreover, she had excited my curiosity. She was a novelty in my life.
+She was something that I had heard of, and seen--yes, and perhaps envied
+in secret, but never spoken with. And she shattered all my preconceptions
+about her.
+
+'You are an old tenant of this house?' I ventured.
+
+'Yes,' she said; 'it suits me. But the great heats are terrible here.'
+
+'You do not leave Paris, then?'
+
+'Never. Except to see my little boy.'
+
+I started, envious of her, and also surprised. It seemed strange that
+this ribboned and elegant and plastic creature, whose long, thin arms
+were used only to dalliance, should be a mother.
+
+'So you have a little boy?'
+
+'Yes; he lives with my parents at Meudon. He is four years old.
+
+'Excuse me,' I said. 'Be frank with me once again. Do you love your
+child, honestly? So many women don't, it appears.'
+
+'Do I love him?' she cried, and her face glowed with her love. 'I adore
+him!' Her sincerity was touching and overwhelming. 'And he loves me, too.
+If he is naughty, one has only to tell him that he will make his _petite
+mère_ ill, and he will be good at once. When he is told to obey his
+grandfather, because his grandfather provides his food, he says bravely:
+"No, not grandpapa; it is _petite mère_!" Is it not strange he should
+know that I pay for him? He has a little engraving of the Queen of Italy,
+and he says it is his _petite mère_. Among the scores of pictures he has
+he keeps only that one. He takes it to bed with him. It is impossible to
+deprive him of it.'
+
+She smiled divinely.
+
+'How beautiful!' I said. 'And you go to see him often?'
+
+'As often as I have time. I take him out for walks. I run with him till
+we reach the woods, where I can have him to myself alone. I never stop; I
+avoid people. No one except my parents knows that he is my child. One
+supposes he is a nurse-child, received by my parents. But all the world
+will know now,' she added, after a pause. 'Last Monday I went to Meudon
+with my friend Alice, and Alice wanted to buy him some sweets at the
+grocer's. In the shop I asked him if he would like _dragées_, and he said
+"Yes." The grocer said to him, "Yes who, young man?" "Yes, _petite
+mère_," he said, very loudly and bravely. The grocer understood. We all
+lowered our heads.'
+
+There was something so affecting in the way she half whispered the last
+phrase, that I could have wept; and yet it was comical, too, and she
+appreciated that.
+
+'You have no child, madame?' she asked me.
+
+'No,' I said. 'How I envy you!'
+
+'You need not,' she observed, with a touch of hardness. 'I have been so
+unhappy, that I can never be as unhappy again. Nothing matters now. All I
+wish is to save enough money to be able to live quietly in a little
+cottage in the country.'
+
+'With your child,' I put in.
+
+'My child will grow up and leave me. He will become a man, and he will
+forget his _petite mère.'_
+
+'Do not talk like that,' I protested.
+
+She glanced at me almost savagely. I was astonished at the sudden change
+in her face.
+
+'Why not?' she inquired coldly. 'Is it not true, then? Do you still
+believe that there is any difference between one man and another?
+They are all alike--all, all, all! I know. And it is we who suffer,
+we others.'
+
+'But surely you have some tender souvenir of your child's father?' I
+said.
+
+'Do I know who my child's father is?' she demanded. 'My child has
+thirty-six fathers!'
+
+'You seem very bitter,' I said, 'for your age. You are much younger
+than I am.'
+
+She smiled and shook her honey-coloured hair, and toyed with the ribbons
+of her _peignoir_.
+
+'What I say is true,' she said gently. 'But, there, what would you have?
+We hate them, but we love them. They are beasts! beasts! but we cannot do
+without them!'
+
+Her eyes rested on Diaz for a moment. He slept without the least sound,
+the stricken and futile witness of our confidences.
+
+'You will take him away from Paris soon, perhaps?' she asked.
+
+'If I can,' I said.
+
+There was a sound of light footsteps on the stair. They stopped at the
+door, which I remembered we had not shut. I jumped up and went into the
+passage. Another girl stood in the doorway, in a _peignoir_ the exact
+counterpart of my first visitor's, but rose-coloured. And this one, too,
+was languorous and had honey-coloured locks. It was as though the
+mysterious house was full of such creatures, each with her secret lair.
+
+'Pardon, madame,' said my visitor, following and passing me; and then to
+the newcomer: 'What is it, Alice?'
+
+'It is Monsieur Duchatel who is arrived.'
+
+'Oh!' with a disdainful gesture. '_Je m'en fiche._ Let him go.'
+
+'But it is the nephew, my dear; not the uncle.'
+
+'Ah, the nephew! I come. _Bon soir, madams, et bonne nuit_.'
+
+The two _peignoirs_ fluttered down the stairs together. I returned to my
+Diaz, and seeing his dressing-gown behind the door of the bedroom, I took
+it and covered him with it.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+His first words were:
+
+'Magda, you look like a ghost. Have you been sitting there like that all
+the time?'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I lay down.'
+
+'Where?'
+
+'By your side.'
+
+'What time is it?'
+
+'Tea-time. The water is boiling.
+
+'Was I dreadful last night?'
+
+'Dreadful? How?'
+
+'I have a sort of recollection of getting angry and stamping about. I
+didn't do anything foolish?'
+
+'You took a great deal too much of my sedative,' I answered.
+
+'I feel quite well,' he said; 'but I didn't know I had taken any
+sedative at all. I'm glad I didn't do anything silly last night.'
+
+I ran away to prepare the tea. The situation was too much for me.
+
+'My poor Diaz!' I said, when we had begun to drink the tea, and he was
+sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes full of sleep, his chin rough,
+and his hair magnificently disarranged, 'you did one thing that was silly
+last night.'
+
+'Don't tell me I struck you?' he cried.
+
+'Oh no!' and I laughed. 'Can't you guess what I mean?'
+
+'You mean I got vilely drunk.'
+
+I nodded.
+
+'Magda,' he burst out passionately, seeming at this point fully to arouse
+himself, to resume acutely his consciousness, 'why were you late? You
+said four o'clock. I thought you had deceived me. I thought I had
+disgusted you, and that you didn't mean to return. I waited more than an
+hour and a quarter, and then I went out in despair.'
+
+'But I came just afterwards,' I protested. 'You had only to wait a few
+more minutes. Surely you could have waited a few more minutes?'
+
+'You said four o'clock,' he repeated obstinately.
+
+'It was barely half-past five when I came,' I said.
+
+'I had meant never to drink again,' he went on.
+
+'You were so kind to me. But then, when you didn't come--'
+
+'You doubted me, Diaz. You ought to have been sure of me.'
+
+'I was wrong.'
+
+'No, no!' I said. 'It was I who was wrong. But I never thought that an
+hour and a half would make any difference.'
+
+There was a pause.
+
+'Ah, Magda, Magda!'--he suddenly began to weep; it was
+astounding--'remember that you had deserted me once before. Remember
+that. If you had not done that, my life might have been different. It
+_would_ have been different.'
+
+'Don't say so,' I pleaded.
+
+'Yes, I must say so. You cannot imagine how solitary my life has been.
+Magda, I loved you.'
+
+And I too wept.
+
+His accent was sincerity itself. I saw the young girl hurrying secretly
+out of the Five Towns Hotel. Could it be true that she had carried away
+with her, unknowing, the heart of Diaz? Could it be true that her panic
+flight had ruined a career? The faint possibility that it was true made
+me sick with vain grief.
+
+'And now I am old and forgotten and disgraced,' he said.
+
+'How old are you, Diaz?'
+
+'Thirty-six,' he answered.
+
+'Why,' I said, 'you have thirty years to live.'
+
+'Yes; and what years?'
+
+'Famous years. Brilliant years.'
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'I am done for--' he murmured, and his head sank.
+
+'Are you so weak, then?' I took his hand. 'Are you so weak? Look at me.'
+
+He obeyed, and his wet eyes met mine. In that precious moment I lived.
+
+'I don't know,' he said.
+
+'You could not have looked at me if you had not been strong, very
+strong,' I said firmly. 'You told me once that you had a house near
+Fontainebleau. Have you still got it?'
+
+'I suppose so.'
+
+'Let us go there, and--and--see.'
+
+'But--'
+
+'I should like to go,' I insisted, with a break in my voice.
+
+'My God!' he exclaimed in a whisper, 'my God!'
+
+I was sobbing violently, and my forehead was against the rough stuff
+of his coat.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+And one morning, long afterwards, I awoke very early, and the murmuring
+of the leaves of the forest came through the open window. I had known
+that I should wake very early, in joyous anticipation of that day. And
+as I lay he lay beside me, lost in the dreamless, boyish, natural sleep
+that he never sought in vain. He lay, as always, slightly on his right
+side, with his face a little towards me--his face that was young again,
+and from which the bane had passed. It was one of the handsomest,
+fairest faces in the world, one of the most innocent, and one of the
+strongest; the face of a man who follows his instincts with the direct
+simplicity of a savage or a child, and whose instincts are sane and
+powerful. Seen close, perfectly at rest, as I saw it morning after
+morning, it was full of a special and mysterious attraction. The fine
+curves of the nostrils and of the lobe of the ear, the masterful lines
+of the mouth, the contours of the cheek and chin and temples, the tints
+of the flesh subtly varying from rose to ivory, the golden crown of
+hair, the soft moustache. I had learned every detail by heart; my eyes
+had dwelt on them till they had become my soul's inheritance, till they
+were mystically mine, drawing me ever towards them, as a treasure draws.
+Gently moving, I would put my ear close, close, and listen to the breath
+of life as it entered regularly, almost imperceptibly, vivifying that
+organism in repose. There is something terrible in the still beauty of
+sleep. It is as though the spiritual fabric hangs inexplicably over the
+precipice of death. It seems impossible, or at least miraculous, that
+the intake and the expulsion upon which existence depends should
+continue thus, minute by minute, hour by hour. It is as though one stood
+on the very confines of life, and could one trace but one step more, one
+single step, one would unveil the eternal secret. I would not listen
+long; the torture was too sweet, too exquisite, and I would gently slide
+back to my place.... His hand was on the counterpane, near to my
+breast--the broad hand of the pianist, with a wrist of incredible force,
+and the fingers tapering suddenly at the end to a point. I let my own
+descend on it as softly as snow. Ah, ravishing contact! He did not move.
+And while my small hand touched his I gazed into the spaces of the
+bedroom, with its walls of faded blue tapestry and its white curtains,
+and its marble and rosewood, and they seemed to hold peace, as the
+hollows of a field hold dew; they seemed to hold happiness as a great
+tree holds sunlight in its branches; and outside was the murmuring of
+the leaves of the forest and the virginal freshness of the morning.
+
+Surely he must wake earlier that day! I pursed my lips and blew tenderly,
+mischievously, on his cheek, lying with my cheek full on the pillow, so
+that I could watch him. The muscles of his mouth twitched, his inner
+being appeared to protest. And then began the first instinctive blind
+movement of the day with him. His arms came forward and found my neck,
+and drew me forcibly to him, and then, just before our lips touched, he
+opened his eyes and shut them again. So it occurred every morning. Ere
+even his brain had resumed activity his heart had felt its need of me.
+This it was that was so wonderful, so overpowering! And the kiss, languid
+and yet warm, heavy with a human scent, with the scent of the night,
+honest, sensuous, and long--long! As I lay thus, clasped in his arms, I
+half closed my eyes, and looked into his eyes through my lashes, smiling,
+and all was a delicious blur....
+
+It was the summit of bliss! No! I have never mounted higher! I asked
+myself, astounded, what I had done that I should receive such happiness,
+what I had done that existence should have no flaw for me. And what _had_
+I done? I know not, I know not. It passes me. I am lost in my joy. For I
+had not even cured him. I had anticipated painful scenes, interminable
+struggles, perhaps a relapse. But nothing of the kind. He had simply
+ceased at once the habit--that was all. We never left each other. And his
+magnificent constitution had perfectly recovered itself in a few months.
+I had done nothing.
+
+'Magda,' he murmured indistinctly, drawing his mouth an inch away from
+mine, 'why can't your dark hair always be loose over your shoulders like
+that? It is glorious!'
+
+'What ideas you have!' I murmured, more softly than he. 'And do you know
+what it is to-day?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'You've forgotten?' I pouted.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Guess.'
+
+'No; you must tell me. Not your birthday? Not mine?'
+
+'It's just a year since I met you,' I whispered timidly.
+
+Our mouths met again, and, so enlocked, we rested, savouring the true
+savour of life. And presently my hand stole up to his head and stroked
+his curls.
+
+Every morning he began to practise at eight o'clock, and continued till
+eleven. The piano, a Steinway in a hundred Steinways, was in the further
+of the two drawing-rooms. He would go into the room smoking a cigarette,
+and when he had thrown away the cigarette I would leave him. And as soon
+as I had closed the door the first notes would resound, slow and solemn,
+of the five-finger exercises with which he invariably commenced his
+studies. That morning, as often, I sat writing in the enclosed garden. I
+always wrote in pencil on my knee. The windows of the drawing-room were
+wide open, and Diaz' music filled the garden. The sheer beauty of his
+tone was such that to hear him strike even an isolated note gave
+pleasure. He created beauty all the time. His five-finger exercises were
+lovely patterns of sound woven with exact and awful deliberation. It
+seemed impossible that these should be the same bald and meaningless
+inventions which I had been wont to repeat. They were transformed. They
+were music. The material in which he built them was music itself,
+enchanting the ear as much by the quality of the tone as by the
+impeccable elegance of the form. To hear Diaz play a scale, to catch that
+measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal
+splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born--this was to
+perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine
+magic that is the soul of the divinest art. I used to believe that
+nothing could surpass the beauty of a scale, until Diaz, after writing
+formal patterns in the still air innumerably, and hypnotizing me with
+that sorcery, would pass suddenly to the repetition of fragments of Bach.
+And then I knew that hitherto he had only been trying to be more purely
+and severely mechanical than a machine, and that now the interpreter was
+at work. I have heard him repeat a passage fifty times--and so
+slowly!--and each rendering seemed more beautiful than the last; and it
+was more beautiful than the last. He would extract the final drop of
+beauty from the most beautiful things in the world. Washed, drenched in
+this circumambient ether of beauty, I wrote my verse. Perhaps it may
+appear almost a sacrilege that I should have used the practising of a
+Diaz as a background for my own creative activity. I often thought so.
+But when one has but gold, one must put it to lowly use. So I wrote, and
+he passed from Bach to Chopin.
+
+Usually he would come out into the garden for five minutes at half-past
+nine to smoke a cigarette, but that morning it had struck ten before the
+music ceased. I saw him. He walked absent-minded along the terrace in
+the strange silence that had succeeded. He was wearing his
+riding-breeches, for we habitually rode at eleven. And that morning I did
+not hide my work when he came. It was, in fact, finished; the time had
+arrived to disclose it. He stopped in front of me in the sunlight,
+utterly preoccupied with himself and his labours. He had the rapt look on
+his face which results from the terrible mental and spiritual strain of
+practising as he practised.
+
+'Satisfied?' I asked him.
+
+He frowned.
+
+'There are times when one gets rather inspired,' he said, looking at me,
+as it were, without seeing me. 'It's as if the whole soul gets into one's
+hands. That's what's wanted.'
+
+'You had it this morning?'
+
+'A bit.'
+
+He smiled with candid joy.
+
+'While I was listening--' I began.
+
+'Oh!' he broke in impulsively, violently, 'it isn't you that have to
+listen. It's I that have to listen. It's the player that has to listen.
+He's got to do more than listen. He's got to be _in_ the piano with his
+inmost heart. If he isn't on the full stretch of analysis the whole
+blessed time, he might just as well be turning the handle of a
+barrel-organ.'
+
+He always talked about his work during the little 'recess' which he took
+in the middle of the morning. He pretended to be talking to me, but it
+was to himself that he talked. He was impatient if I spoke.
+
+'I shall be greater than ever,' he proceeded, after a moment. And his
+attitude towards himself was so disengaged, so apart and aloof, so
+critically appreciative, that it was impossible to accuse him of egoism.
+He was, perhaps, as amazed at his own transcendent gift as any other
+person could be, and he was incapable of hiding his sensations. 'Yes,' he
+repeated; 'I think I shall be greater than ever. You see, a Chopin player
+is born; you can't make him. With Chopin it's not a question of
+intellect. It's all tone with Chopin--_tone_, my child, even in the most
+bravura passages. You've got to get it.'
+
+'Yes,' I agreed.
+
+He gazed over the tree-tops into the blue sky.
+
+'I may be ready in six months,' he said.
+
+'I think you will,' I concurred, with a judicial air. But I honestly
+deemed him to be more than ready then.
+
+Twelve months previously he had said: 'With six hours' practice a day
+for two years I shall recover what I have lost.'
+
+He had succeeded beyond his hopes.
+
+'Are you writing in that book?' he inquired carelessly as he threw down
+the cigarette and turned away.
+
+'I have just finished something,' I replied.
+
+'Oh!' he said, 'I'm glad you aren't idle. It's so boring.'
+
+He returned to the piano, perfectly incurious about what I did,
+self-absorbed as a god. And I was alone in the garden, with the
+semicircle of trees behind me, and the façade of the old house and its
+terrace in front. And lying on the lawn, just under the terrace, was
+the white end of the cigarette which he had abandoned; it breathed
+upwards a thin spiral of blue smoke through the morning sunshine, and
+then it ceased to breathe. And the music recommenced, on a different
+plane, more brilliantly than before. It was as though, till then, he
+had been laboriously building the bases of a tremendous triumphal arch,
+and that now the two wings met, dazzlingly, soaringly, in highest
+heaven, and the completed arch became a rainbow glittering in the face
+of the infinite. He played two of his great concert pieces, and their
+intricate melodies--brocaded, embroidered, festooned--poured themselves
+through the windows into the garden in a procession majestic and
+impassioned, perturbing the intent soul of the solitary listener,
+swathing her in intoxicating sound. It was the unique virtuoso born
+again, proudly displaying the ultimate sublime end of all those
+slow-moving exercises to which he had subdued his fingers. Not for ten
+years had I heard him play so.
+
+When we first came into the house I had said bravely to myself: 'His
+presence shall not deter me from practising as I have always done.' And
+one afternoon I had sat down to the piano full of determination to
+practise without fear of him, without self-consciousness. But before my
+hands had touched the keys shame took me, unreasoning, terror-struck
+shame, and I knew in an instant that while he lived I should never more
+play the piano. He laughed lightly when I told him, and I called myself
+silly. Yet now, as I sat in the garden, I saw how right I had been. And I
+wondered that I should ever have had the audacity even to dream of
+playing in his house; the idea was grotesque. And he did not ask me to
+play, save when there arrived new orchestral music arranged for four
+hands. Then I steeled myself to the ordeal of playing with him, because
+he wished to try over the music. And he would thank me, and say that
+pianoforte duets were always very enjoyable. But he did not pretend that
+I was not an amateur, and he never--thank God!--suggested that we should
+attempt _Tristan_ again....
+
+At last he finished. And I heard distantly the bell which he had rung for
+his glass of milk. And, remembering that I was not ready for the ride, I
+ran with guilty haste into the house and upstairs.
+
+The two bay horses were waiting, our English groom at their heads, when I
+came out to the porch. Diaz was impatiently tapping his boot with his
+whip. He was not in the least a sporting man, but he loved the sensation
+of riding, and the groom would admit that he rode passably; but he loved
+more to strut in breeches, and to imitate in little ways the sporting
+man. I had learnt to ride in order to please him.
+
+'Come along,' he exclaimed.
+
+His eyes said: 'You are always late.' And I was. Some people always know
+exactly what point they have reached in the maze and jungle of the day,
+just as mariners are always aware, at the back of their minds, of the
+state of the tide. But I was not born so.
+
+Diaz helped me to mount, and we departed, jingling through the gate and
+across the road into a glade of the forest, one of those long sandy
+defiles, banked on either side, and over-shadowed with tall oaks, which
+pierce the immense forest like rapiers. The sunshine slanted through the
+crimsoning leafwork and made irregular golden patches on the dark sand to
+the furthest limit of the perspective. And though we could not feel the
+autumn wind, we could hear it in the tree-tops, and it had the sound of
+the sea. The sense of well-being and of joy was exquisite. The beauty of
+horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and irrational as young
+girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange is that their vast strength
+does not seem incongruous with it. To be above that proud and lovely
+organism, listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nervous far beyond the
+human, to feel one's self almost part of it by intimate contact, to yield
+to it, and make it yield, to draw from it into one's self some of its
+exultant vitality--in a word, to ride--yes, I could comprehend Diaz' fine
+enthusiasm for that! I could share it when he was content to let the
+horses amble with noiseless hoofs over the soft ways. But when he would
+gallop, and a strong wind sprang up to meet our faces, and the earth
+shook and thundered, and the trunks of the trees raced past us, then I
+was afraid. My fancy always saw him senseless at the foot of a tree while
+his horse calmly cropped the short grass at the sides of the path, or
+with his precious hand twisted and maimed! And I was in agony till he
+reined in. I never dared to speak to him of this fear, nor even hint to
+him that the joy was worth less than the peril. He would have been angry
+in his heart, and something in him stronger than himself would have
+forced him to increase the risks. I knew him! ... Ah! but when we went
+gently, life seemed to be ideal for me, impossibly perfect! It seemed to
+contain all that I could ever have demanded of it.
+
+I looked at him sideways, so noble and sane and self-controlled. And the
+days in Paris had receded, far and dim and phantom-like. Was it
+conceivable that they had once been real, and that we had lived through
+them? And was this Diaz, the world-renowned darling of capitals, riding
+by me, a woman whom he had met by fantastic chance? Had he really hidden
+himself in my arms from the cruel stare of the world and the insufferable
+curiosity of admirers who, instead of admiring, had begun to pity? Had I
+in truth saved him? Was it I who would restore him to his glory? Oh, the
+astounding romance that my life had been! And he was with me! He shared
+my life, and I his! I wondered what would happen when he returned to his
+bright kingdom. I was selfish enough to wish that he might never return
+to his kingdom, and that we might ride and ride for ever in the forest.
+
+And then we came to a circular clearing, with an iron cross in the
+middle, where roads met, a place such as occurs magically in some ballade
+of Chopin's. And here we drew rein on the leaf-strewn grass, breathing
+quickly, with reddened cheeks, and the horses nosed each other, with long
+stretchings of the neck and rattling of bits.
+
+'So you've been writing again?' said Diaz, smiling quizzically.
+
+'Yes,' I answered. 'I've been writing a long time, but I haven't let
+_you_ know anything about it; and just to-day I've finished it.'
+
+'What is it--another novel?'
+
+'No; a little drama in verse.'
+
+'Going to publish it?'
+
+'Why, naturally.'
+
+Diaz was aware that I enjoyed fame in England and America. He was
+probably aware that my books had brought me a considerable amount of
+money. He had read some of my works, and found them excellent--indeed, he
+was quite proud of my talent. But he did not, he could not, take
+altogether seriously either my talent or my fame. I knew that he always
+regarded me as a child gracefully playing at a career. For him there was
+only one sort of fame; all the other sorts were shadows. A supreme
+violinist might, perhaps, approach the real thing, in his generous mind;
+but he was incapable of honestly believing that any fame compared with
+that of a pianist. The other fames were very well, but they were paste to
+the precious stone, gewgaws to amuse simple persons. The sums paid to
+sopranos struck him as merely ridiculous in their enormity. He could not
+be called conceited; nevertheless, he was magnificently sure that he had
+been, and still was, the most celebrated person in the civilized world.
+Certainly he had no superiors in fame, but he would not admit the
+possibility of equals. Of course, he never argued such a point; it was a
+tacit assumption, secure from argument. And with that he profoundly
+reverenced the great composers. The death of Brahms affected him for
+years. He regarded it as an occasion for universal sorrow. Had Brahms
+condescended to play the piano, Diaz would have turned the pages for him,
+and deemed himself honoured--him whom queens had flattered!
+
+'Did you imagine,' I began to tease him, after a pause, 'that while you
+are working I spend my time in merely existing?'
+
+'You exist--that is enough, my darling,' he said. 'Strange that a
+beautiful woman can't understand that in existing she is doing her
+life's work!'
+
+And he leaned over and touched my right wrist below the glove.
+
+'You dear thing!' I murmured, smiling. 'How foolish you can be!'
+
+'What's the drama about?' he asked.
+
+'About La Vallière,' I said.
+
+'La Vallière! But that's the kind of subject I want for my opera!'
+
+'Yes,' I said; 'I have thought so.'
+
+'Could you turn it into a libretto, my child?'
+
+'No, dearest.'
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'Because it already is a libretto. I have written it as such.'
+
+'For me?'
+
+'For whom else?'
+
+And I looked at him fondly, and I think tears came to my eyes.
+
+'You are a genius, Magda!' he exclaimed. 'You leave nothing undone for
+me. The subject is the very thing to suit Villedo.'
+
+'Who is Villedo?'
+
+'My jewel, you don't know who Villedo is! Villedo is the director of the
+Opéra Comique in Paris, the most artistic opera-house in Europe. He used
+to beg me every time we met to write him an opera.'
+
+'And why didn't you?'
+
+'Because I had neither the subject nor the time. One doesn't write
+operas after lunch in hotel parlours; and as for a good libretto--well,
+outside Wagner, there's only one opera in the world with a good libretto,
+and that's _Carmen_.'
+
+Diaz, who had had a youthful operatic work performed at the Royal School
+of Music in London, and whose numerous light compositions for the
+pianoforte had, of course, enjoyed a tremendous vogue, was much more
+serious about his projected opera than I had imagined. He had frequently
+mentioned it to me, but I had not thought the idea was so close to his
+heart as I now perceived it to be. I had written the libretto to amuse
+myself, and perhaps him, and lo! he was going to excite himself; I well
+knew the symptoms.
+
+'You wrote it in that little book,' he said. 'You haven't got it in
+your pocket?'
+
+'No,' I answered. 'I haven't even a pocket.'
+
+He would not laugh.
+
+'Come,' he said--'come, let's see it.'
+
+He gathered up his loose rein and galloped off. He could not wait
+an instant.
+
+'Come along!' he cried imperiously, turning his head.
+
+'I am coming,' I replied; 'but wait for me. Don't leave me like
+that, Diaz.'
+
+The old fear seized me, but nothing could stop him, and I followed as
+fast as I dared.
+
+'Where is it?' he asked, when we reached home.
+
+'Upstairs,' I said.
+
+And he came upstairs behind me, pulling my habit playfully, in an effort
+to persuade us both that his impatience was a simulated one. I had to
+find my keys and unlock a drawer. I took the small, silk-bound volume
+from the back part of the drawer and gave it to him.
+
+'There!' I exclaimed. 'But remember lunch is ready.'
+
+He regarded the book.
+
+'What a pretty binding!' he said. 'Who worked it?'
+
+'I did.'
+
+'And, of course, your handwriting is so pretty, too!' he added, glancing
+at the leaves. '"La Vallière, an opera in three acts."'
+
+We exchanged a look, each of us deliciously perturbed, and then he ran
+off with the book.
+
+He had to be called three times from the garden to lunch, and he brought
+the book with him, and read it in snatches during the meal, and while
+sipping his coffee. I watched him furtively as he turned over the pages.
+
+'Oh, you've done it!' he said at length--'you've done it! You evidently
+have a gift for libretto. It is neither more nor less than perfect! And
+the subject is wonderful!'
+
+He rose, walked round the table, and, taking my head between his hands,
+kissed me.
+
+'Magda,' he said, 'you're the cleverest girl that was ever born.'
+
+'Then, do you think you will compose it?' I asked, joyous.
+
+'Do I think I will compose it! Why, what do you imagine? I've already
+begun. It composes itself. I'm now going to read it all again in the
+garden. Just see that I'm not worried, will you?'
+
+'You mean you don't want me there. You don't care for me any more.'
+
+It amused me to pretend to pout.
+
+'Yes,' he laughed; 'that's it. I don't care for you any more.'
+
+He departed.
+
+'Have no fear!' I cried after him. 'I shan't come into your horrid
+garden!'
+
+His habit was to resume his practice at three o'clock. The hour was then
+half-past one. I wondered whether he would allow himself to be seduced
+from the piano that afternoon by the desire to compose. I hoped not, for
+there could be no question as to the relative importance to him of the
+two activities. To my surprise, I heard the piano at two o'clock,
+instead of at three, and it continued without intermission till five.
+Then he came, like a sudden wind, on to the terrace where I was having
+tea. Diaz would never take afternoon tea. He seized my hand impulsively.
+
+'Come down,' he said--'down under the trees there.'
+
+'What for?'
+
+'I want you.'
+
+'But, Diaz, let me put my cup down. I shall spill the tea on my dress.'
+
+'I'll take your cup.'
+
+'And I haven't nearly finished my tea, either. And you're hurting me.'
+
+'I'll bring you a fresh cup,' he said. 'Come, come!'
+
+And he dragged me off, laughing, to the lower part of the garden, where
+were two chairs in the shade. And I allowed myself to be dragged.
+
+'There! Sit down. Don't move. I'll fetch your tea.'
+
+And presently he returned with the cup.
+
+'Now that you've nearly killed me,' I said, 'and spoilt my dress, perhaps
+you'll explain.'
+
+He produced the silk-bound book of manuscript from his pocket and put it
+in my unoccupied hand.
+
+'I want you to read it to me aloud, all of it,' he said.
+
+'Really?'
+
+'Really.'
+
+'What a strange boy you are!' I chided.
+
+Then I drank the tea, straightened my features into seriousness, and
+began to read.
+
+The reading occupied less than an hour. He made no remark when it was
+done, but held out his hand for the book, and went out for a walk. At
+dinner he was silent till the servants had gone. Then he said musingly:
+
+'That scene in the cloisters between Louise and De Montespan is a great
+idea. It will be magnificent; it will be the finest thing in the opera.
+What a subject you have found! what a subject!' His tone altered. 'Magda,
+will you do something to oblige me?'
+
+'If it isn't foolish.'
+
+'I want you to go to bed.'
+
+'Out of the way?' I smiled.
+
+'Go to bed and to sleep,' he repeated.
+
+'But why?'
+
+'I want to walk about this floor. I must be alone.'
+
+'Well,' I said, 'just to prove how humble and obedient I am, I will go.'
+
+And I held up my mouth to be kissed.
+
+Wondrous, the joy I found in playing the decorative, acquiescent,
+self-effacing woman to him, the pretty, pouting plaything! I liked him to
+dismiss me, as the soldier dismisses his charmer at the sound of the
+bugle. I liked to think upon his obvious conviction that the libretto was
+less than nothing compared to the music. I liked him to regard the whole
+artistic productivity of my life as the engaging foible of a pretty
+woman. I liked him to forget that I had brought him alive out of Paris. I
+liked him to forget to mention marriage to me. In a word, he was Diaz,
+and I was his.
+
+And as I lay in bed I even tried to go to sleep, in my obedience, because
+I knew he would wish it. But I could not easily sleep for anticipating
+his triumph of the early future. His habits of composition were extremely
+rapid. It might well occur that he would write the entire opera in a few
+months, without at all sacrificing the piano. And naturally any operatic
+manager would be loath to refuse an opera signed by Diaz. Villedo,
+apparently so famous, would be sure to accept it, and probably would
+produce it at once. And Diaz would have a double triumph, a dazzling and
+gorgeous re-entry into the world. He might give his first recital in the
+same week as the _première_ of the opera. And thus his shame would never
+be really known to the artistic multitude. The legend of a nervous
+collapse could be insisted on, and the opera itself would form a
+sufficient excuse for his retirement.... And I should be the secret cause
+of all this glory--I alone! And no one would ever guess what Diaz owed to
+me. Diaz himself would never appreciate it. I alone, withdrawn from the
+common gaze, like a woman of the East, Diaz' secret fountain of strength
+and balm--I alone should be aware of what I had done. And my knowledge
+would be enough for me.
+
+I imagine I must have been dreaming when I felt a hand on my cheek.
+
+'Magda, you aren't asleep, are you?'
+
+Diaz was standing over me.
+
+'No, no!' I answered, in a voice made feeble by sleep. And I looked
+up at him.
+
+'Put something on and come downstairs, will you?'
+
+'What time is it?'
+
+'Oh, I don't know. One o'clock.'
+
+'You've been working for over three hours, then!'
+
+I sat up.
+
+'Yes,' he said proudly. 'Come along. I want to play you my notion of the
+overture. It's only in the rough, but it's there.'
+
+'You've begun with the overture?'
+
+'Why not, my child? Here's your dressing-gown. Which is the top
+end of it?'
+
+I followed him downstairs, and sat close by him at the piano, with one
+limp hand on his shoulder. There was no light in the drawing-rooms, save
+one candle on the piano. My slipper escaped off my bare foot. As Diaz
+played he looked at me constantly, demanding my approval, my enthusiasm,
+which I gave him from a full heart. I thought the music charming, and, of
+course, as he played it...!
+
+'I shall only have three motives,' he said. 'That's the La Vallière
+motive. Do you see the idea?'
+
+'You mean she limps?'
+
+'Precisely. Isn't it delightful?'
+
+'She won't have to limp much, you know. She didn't.'
+
+'Just the faintest suggestion. It will be delicious. I can see Morenita
+in the part. Well, what do you think of it?'
+
+I could not speak. His appeal, suddenly wistful, moved me so. I leaned
+forward and kissed him.
+
+'Dear girl!' he murmured.
+
+Then he blew out the candle. He was beside himself with excitement.
+
+'Diaz,' I cried, 'what's the matter with you? Do have a little sense.
+And you've made me lose my slipper.'
+
+'I'll carry you upstairs,' he replied gaily.
+
+A faint illumination came from the hall, so that we could just see each
+other. He lifted me off the chair.
+
+'No!' I protested, laughing. 'And my slipper.... The servants!'
+
+'Stuff!'
+
+I was a trifle in those arms.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+The triumphal re-entry into the world has just begun, and exactly as Diaz
+foretold. And the life of the forest is over. We have come to Paris, and
+he has taken Paris, and already he is leaving it for other shores, and I
+am to follow. At this moment, while I write because I have not slept and
+cannot sleep, his train rolls out of St. Lazare.
+
+Last night! How glorious! But he is no longer wholly mine. The world has
+turned his face a little from my face....
+
+It was as if I had never before realized the dazzling significance of
+the fame of Diaz. I had only once seen him in public. And though he
+conquered in the Jubilee Hall of the Five Towns, his victory, personal
+and artistic, at the Opera Comique, before an audience as exacting,
+haughty, and experienced as any in Europe, was, of course, infinitely
+more striking--a victory worthy of a Diaz.
+
+I sat alone and hidden at the back of a _baignoire_ in the auditorium. I
+had drawn up the golden grille, by which the occupants of a _baignoire_
+may screen themselves from the curiosity of the _parterre_. I felt like
+some caged Eastern odalisque, and I liked so to feel. I liked to exist
+solely for him, to be mysterious, and to baffle the general gaze in order
+to be more precious to him. Ah, how I had changed! How he had changed me!
+
+It was Thursday, a subscription night, and, in addition, all Paris was in
+the theatre, a crowded company of celebrities, of experts, and of
+perfectly-dressed women. And no one knew who I was, nor why I was there.
+The vogue of a musician may be universal, but the vogue of an English
+writer is nothing beyond England and America. I had not been to a
+rehearsal. I had not met Villedo, nor even the translator of my verse. I
+had wished to remain in the background, and Diaz had not crossed me. Thus
+I gazed through the bars of my little cell across the rows of bald heads,
+and wonderful coiffures, and the waving arms of the conductor, and the
+restless, gliding bows of the violinists, and saw a scene which was
+absolutely strange and new to me. And it seemed amazing that these
+figures which I saw moving and chanting with such grace in a palace
+garden, authentic to the last detail of historical accuracy, were my La
+Vallière and my Louis, and that this rich and coloured music which I
+heard was the same that Diaz had sketched for me on the piano, from
+illegible scraps of ruled paper, on the edge of the forest. The full
+miracle of operatic art was revealed to me for the first time.
+
+And when the curtain fell on the opening act, the intoxicating human
+quality of an operatic success was equally revealed to me for the first
+time. How cold and distant the success of a novelist compared to this!
+The auditorium was suddenly bathed in bright light, and every listening
+face awoke to life as from an enchantment, and flushed and smiled, and
+the delicatest hands in France clapped to swell the mighty uproar that
+filled the theatre with praise. Paris, upstanding on its feet, and
+leaning over balconies and cheering, was charmed and delighted by the
+fable and the music, in which it found nothing but the sober and pretty
+elegance that it loves. And Paris applauded feverishly, and yet with a
+full sense of the value of its applause--given there in the only French
+theatre where the claque has been suppressed. And then the curtain rose,
+and La Vallière and Louis tripped mincingly forward to prove that after
+all they were Morenita and Montfériot, the darlings of their dear Paris,
+and utterly content with their exclusively Parisian reputation. Three
+times they came forward. And then the applause ceased, for Paris is not
+Naples, and it is not Madrid, and the red curtain definitely hid the
+stage, and the theatre hummed with animated chatter as elegant as Diaz'
+music, and my ear, that loves the chaste vivacity of the French tongue,
+was caressed on every side by its cadences.
+
+'This is the very heart of civilization,' I said to myself. 'And even in
+the forest I could not breathe more freely.'
+
+I stared up absently at Benjamin Constant's blue ceiling, meretricious
+and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of Paris, and
+my eyes moistened because the world is so beautiful in such various ways.
+
+Then the door of the _baignoire_ opened. It was Diaz himself who
+appeared. He had not forgotten me in the excitements of the stage and
+the dressing-rooms. He put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and I
+glanced at him.
+
+'Well?' he murmured, and gave me a box of bonbons elaborately tied with
+rich ribbons.
+
+And I murmured, 'Well?'
+
+The glory of his triumph was upon him. But he understood why my eyes were
+wet, and his fingers moved soothingly on my shoulder.
+
+'You won't come round?' he asked. 'Both Villedo and Morenita are dying to
+meet you.'
+
+I shook my head, smiling.
+
+'You're satisfied?'
+
+'More than satisfied,' I answered. 'The thing is wonderful.'
+
+'I think it's rather charming,' he said. 'By the way, I've just had an
+offer from New York for it, and another from Rome.'
+
+I nodded my appreciation.
+
+'You don't want anything?'
+
+'Nothing, thanks,' I said, opening the box of bonbons, 'except these.
+Thanks so much for thinking of them.'
+
+'Well--'
+
+And he left me again.
+
+In the second act the legend--has not the tale of La Vallière acquired
+almost the quality of a legend?--grew in persuasiveness and in
+magnificence. It was the hour of La Vallière's unwilling ascendancy, and
+it foreboded also her fall. The situations seemed to me to be poignantly
+beautiful, especially that in which La Vallière and Montespan and the
+Queen found themselves together. And Morenita had perceived my meaning
+with such a sure intuition. I might say that she showed me what I had
+meant. Diaz, too, had given to my verse a voice than which it appeared
+impossible that anything could be more appropriate. The whole effect was
+astonishing, ravishing. And within me--far, far within the recesses of my
+glowing heart--a thin, clear whisper spoke and said that I, and I alone,
+was the cause of that beauty of sight and sound. Not Morenita, and not
+Montfériot, not Diaz himself, but Magda, the self-constituted odalisque,
+was its author. I had thought of it; I had schemed it; I had fashioned
+it; I had evoked the emotion in it. The others had but exquisitely
+embroidered my theme. Without me they must have been dumb and futile. On
+my shoulders lay the burden and the glory. And though I was amazed,
+perhaps naively, to see what I had done, nevertheless I had done it--I!
+The entire opera-house, that complicated and various machine, was simply
+a means to express me. And it was to my touch on their heartstrings that
+the audience vibrated. With all my humility, how proud I was--coldly and
+arrogantly proud, as only the artist can be! I wore my humility as I wore
+my black gown. Even Diaz could not penetrate to the inviolable place in
+my heart, where the indestructible egoism defied the efforts of love to
+silence it. And yet people say there is nothing stronger than love.
+
+At the close of the act, while the ringing applause, much more
+enthusiastic than before, gave certainty of a genuine and extraordinary
+success, I could not help blushing. It was as if I was in danger of being
+discovered as the primal author of all that fleeting loveliness, as if my
+secret was bound to get about, and I to be forced from my seclusion in
+order to receive the acclamations of Paris. I played nervously and
+self-consciously with my fan, and I wrapped my humility closer round me,
+until at length the tumult died away, and the hum of charming, eager
+chatter reassured my ears again.
+
+Diaz did not come. The entr'acte stretched out long, and the chatter lost
+some of its eagerness, and he did not come. Perhaps he could not come.
+Perhaps he was too much engaged, too much preoccupied, to think of the
+gallantry which he owed to his mistress. A man cannot always be dreaming
+of his mistress. A mistress must be reconciled to occasional neglect; she
+must console herself with chocolates. And they were chocolates from
+Marquis's, in the Passage des Panoramas....
+
+Then he came, accompanied.
+
+A whirl of high-seasoned, laughing personalities invaded my privacy.
+Diaz, smiling humorously, was followed by a man and a cloaked woman.
+
+'Dear lady,' he said, with an intimate formality, 'I present Mademoiselle
+Morenita and Monsieur Villedo. They insisted on seeing you. Mademoiselle,
+Monsieur--Mademoiselle Peel.'
+
+I stood up.
+
+'All our excuses,' said Villedo, in a low, discreet voice, as he
+carefully shut the door. 'All our excuses, madame. But it was necessary
+that I should pay my respects--it was stronger than I.'
+
+And he came forward, took my hand, and raised it to his lips. He is a
+little finicking man, with a little gray beard, and the red rosette in
+his button-hole, and a most consummate ease of manner.
+
+'Monsieur,' I replied, 'you are too amiable. And you, madame. I cannot
+sufficiently thank you both.'
+
+Morenita rushed at me with a swift, surprising movement, her cloak
+dropping from her shoulders, and taking both my hands, she kissed me
+impulsively.
+
+'You have genius,' she said; 'and I am proud. I am ashamed that I cannot
+read English; but I have the intention to learn in order to read your
+books. Our Diaz says wonderful things of them.'
+
+She is a tall, splendidly-made, opulent creature, of my own age, born for
+the footlights, with an extremely sweet and thrilling voice, and that
+slight coarseness or exaggeration of gesture and beauty which is the
+penalty of the stage. She did not in the least resemble a La Vallière as
+she stood there gazing at me, with her gleaming, pencilled eyes and
+heavy, scarlet lips. It seemed impossible that she could refine herself
+to a La Vallière. But that woman is the drama itself. She would act no
+matter what. She has always the qualities necessary to a rôle. And the
+gods have given her green eyes, so that she may be La Vallière to the
+very life.
+
+I began to thank her for her superb performance.
+
+'It is I who should thank you,' she answered. 'It will be my greatest
+part. Never have I had so many glorious situations in a part. Do you
+like my limp?'
+
+She smiled, her head on one side. Success glittered in those orbs.
+
+'You limp adorably,' I said.
+
+'It is my profession to make compliments,' Villedo broke in; and then,
+turning to Morenita, '_N'est-ce pas, ma belle créature_? But really'--he
+turned to me again--'but very sincerely, all that there is of most
+sincerely, dear madame, your libretto is made with a virtuosity
+astonishing. It is _du théâtre_. And with that a charm, an emotion...!
+One would say--'
+
+And so it continued, the flattering stream, while Diaz listened, touched,
+and full of pride.
+
+'Ah!' I said. 'It is not I who deserve praise.'
+
+An electric bell trembled in the theatre.
+
+Morenita picked up her cloak.
+
+'_Mon ami_,' she warned Villedo. 'I must go. Diaz, _mon petit_! you will
+persuade Mademoiselle Peel to come to the room of the Directeur later.
+Madame, a few of us will meet there--is it not so, Villedo? We shall
+count on you, madame. You have hidden yourself too long.'
+
+I glanced at Diaz, and he nodded. As a fact, I wished to refuse; but I
+could not withstand the seduction of Morenita. She had a physical
+influence which was unique in my experience.
+
+'I accept,' I said.
+
+'_A tout à l'heure_, then,' she twittered gaily; and they left as they
+had come, Villedo affectionately toying with Morenita's hand.
+
+Diaz remained behind a moment.
+
+'I am so glad you didn't decline,' he said. 'You see, here in this
+theatre Morenita is a queen. I wager she has never before in all her life
+put herself out of the way as she has done for you to-night.'
+
+'Really!' I faltered.
+
+And, indeed, as I pondered over it, the politeness of these people
+appeared to be marvellous, and so perfectly accomplished. Villedo, who
+has made a European reputation and rejuvenated his theatre in a dozen
+years, is doubtless, as he said, a professional maker of compliments. In
+his position a man must be. But, nevertheless, last night's triumph is
+officially and very genuinely Villedo's. While as for Morenita and Diaz,
+the mere idea of these golden stars waiting on me, the librettist,
+effacing themselves, rendering themselves subordinate at such a moment,
+was fantastic. It passed the credible.... A Diaz standing silent and
+deferential, while an idolized prima donna stepped down from her throne
+to flatter me in her own temple! All that I had previously achieved of
+renown seemed provincial, insular.
+
+But Diaz took his own right place in the spacious salon of Villedo
+afterwards, after all the applause had ceased, and the success had been
+consecrated, and the enraptured audience had gone, and the lights were
+extinguished in the silent auditorium. It is a room that seems to be
+furnished with nothing but a grand piano and a large, flat writing-table
+and a few chairs. On the walls are numberless signed portraits of singers
+and composers, and antique playbills of the Opéra Comique, together with
+strange sinister souvenirs of the great fires which have destroyed the
+house and its patrons in the past. When Diaz led me in, only Villedo and
+the principal artists and Pouvillon, the conductor, were present.
+Pouvillon, astonishingly fat, was sitting on the table, idly swinging the
+electric pendant over his head; while Morenita occupied Villedo's
+armchair, and Villedo talked to Montfériot and another man in a corner.
+But a crowd of officials of the theatre ventured on Diaz' heels. And then
+came Monticelli, the _première danseuse_, in a coat and skirt, and then
+some of her rivals. And as the terrible Director did not protest, the
+room continued to fill until it was full to the doors, where stood a
+semicircle of soiled, ragged scene-shifters and a few fat old women, who
+were probably dressers. Who could protest on such a night? The democracy
+of a concerted triumph reigned. Everybody was joyous, madly happy.
+Everybody had done something; everybody shared the prestige, and the rank
+and file might safely take generals by the hand.
+
+Diaz was then the centre of attraction. It was recognised that he had
+entered that sphere from a wider one, bringing with him a radiance
+brighter than he found there. He was divine last night. All felt that he
+was divine. He spoke to everyone with an admirable modesty, gaily, his
+eyes laughing. Several women kissed him, including Morenita. Not that I
+minded. In the theatre the code is different, coarser, more banal. He
+alone raised this crowd above its usual level and gave it distinction.
+
+Someone suggested that, as the piano was there, he should play, and
+the demand ran from mouth to mouth. Villedo, appreciating its
+audacity, made a gesture to indicate that such a thing could not be
+asked. But Diaz instantly said that, if it would give pleasure, he
+would play with pleasure.
+
+And he sat down to the piano, and looked round, smiling, and the room was
+hushed in a moment, and each face was turned towards him.
+
+'What?' he ejaculated. And then, as no definite recommendation was
+offered, he said: 'Do you wish that I improvise?'
+
+The idea was accepted with passionate, noisy enthusiasm.
+
+A cold perspiration broke out over my whole body. I must have turned
+very pale.
+
+'You are not ill, madame?' asked that ridiculous fop, Montfèriot, who
+had been presented to me, and was whispering the most fatuous
+compliments.
+
+'No, I thank you.'
+
+The fact was that Diaz, since his retirement, had not yet played to
+anyone except myself. This was his first appearance. I was afraid for
+him. I trembled for him. I need not have done. He was absolutely master
+of his powers. His fingers announced, quite simply, one of the most
+successful airs from _La Vallière_, and then he began to decorate it with
+an amazing lacework of variations, and finished with a bravura display
+such as no pianist could have surpassed. The performance, marvellous in
+itself, was precisely suited to that audience, and it electrified the
+audience; it electrified even me. Diaz fought his way through kisses and
+embraces to Villedo, who stood on his toes and wept and put his arms
+round Diaz' neck.
+
+'_Cher maître_,' he cried, 'you overwhelm us!'
+
+'You are too kind, all of you,' said Diaz. 'I must ask permission to
+retire. I have to conduct Mademoiselle Peel to her hotel, and there is
+much for me to do during the night. You know I start very early
+to-morrow.'
+
+'_Hélas!_ Morenita sighed.
+
+I had blushed. Decidedly I behaved like a girl last night. But, indeed,
+the new, swift realization, as Diaz singled me out of that multitude,
+that after all he utterly belonged to me, that he was mine alone, was
+more than I could bear with equanimity. I was the proudest woman in the
+universe. I scorned the lot of all other women.
+
+The adieux were exchanged, and there were more kisses. '_Au revoir! Bon
+voyage_! Much success over there.'
+
+The majority of these good, generous souls were in tears.
+
+Villedo opened a side-door, and we escaped into a corridor, only Morenita
+and one or two others accompanying us to the street.
+
+And on the pavement a carpet had been laid. The electric brougham was
+waiting. I gathered up my skirt and sprang in. Diaz followed, smiling at
+me. He put his head out of the window and said a few words. Morenita blew
+a kiss. Villedo bowed profoundly. The carriage moved in the direction of
+the boulevard.... I had carried him off. Oh, the exquisite dark intimacy
+of the interior of that smooth-rolling brougham! When, after the theatre,
+a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory
+in the fact that she is his? Is it not the most delicious of avowals?
+There is something in the enforced bend of one's head as one steps in.
+And when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap--
+
+I wondered idly what Morenita and Villedo thought of our relations. They
+must surely guess.
+
+We went down the boulevard and by the Rue Royale into the Place de la
+Concorde, where vehicles flitted mysteriously in a maze of lights under
+the vast dome of mysterious blue. And Paris, in her incomparable toilette
+of a June night, seemed more than ever the passionate city of love that
+she is, recognising candidly, with the fearless intellectuality of the
+Latin temperament, that one thing only makes life worth living. How soft
+was the air! How languorous the pose of the dim figures that passed us
+half hidden in other carriages! And in my heart was the lofty joy of work
+done, definitely accomplished, and a vista of years of future pleasure.
+My happiness was ardent and yet calm--a happiness beyond my hopes, beyond
+what a mortal has the right to dream of. Nothing could impair it, not
+even Diaz' continued silence as to a marriage between us, not even the
+imminent brief separation that I was to endure.
+
+'My child,' said Diaz suddenly, 'I'm very hungry. I've never been
+so hungry.'
+
+'You surely didn't forget to have your dinner?' I exclaimed.
+
+'Yes, I did,' he admitted like a child; 'I've just remembered.'
+
+'Diaz!' I pouted, and for some strange reason my bliss was intensified,
+'you are really terrible! What can I do with you? You will eat before
+you leave me. I must see to that. We can get something for you at the
+hotel, perhaps.'
+
+'Suppose we go to a supper restaurant?' he said.
+
+Without waiting for my reply, he seized the dangling end of the
+speaking-tube and spoke to the driver, and we swerved round and regained
+the boulevard.
+
+And in the private room of a great, glittering restaurant, one of a long
+row of private rooms off a corridor, I ate strawberries and cream and
+sipped champagne while Diaz went through the entire menu of a supper.
+
+'Your eyes look sad,' he murmured, with a cigar between his teeth. 'What
+is it? We shall see each other again in a fortnight.'
+
+He was to resume his career by a series of concerts in the United States.
+A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents,
+had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and
+fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played
+at no concert before he played in New York. And in order to reach New
+York in time for the first concert, it was imperative that he should
+catch the _Touraine_ at Havre. I was to follow in a few days by a
+Hamburg-American liner. Diaz had judged it more politic that we should
+not travel together. In this he was undoubtedly right.
+
+I smiled proudly.
+
+'I am both sad and happy,' I answered.
+
+He moved his chair until it touched mine, and put his arm round my neck,
+and brought my face close to his.
+
+'Look at me,' he said.
+
+And I looked into his large, splendid eyes.
+
+'You mustn't think,' he whispered, 'that, because I don't talk about it,
+I don't feel that I owe everything to you.'
+
+I let my face fall on his breast. I knew I had flushed to the ears.
+
+'My poor boy,' I sobbed, 'if you talk about that I shall never
+forgive you.'
+
+It was heaven itself. No woman has ever been more ecstatically happy than
+I was then.
+
+He rang for the bill.
+
+We parted at the door of my hotel. In the carriage we had exchanged one
+long, long kiss. At the last moment I wanted to alter the programme, go
+with him to his hotel to assist in his final arrangements, and then see
+him off at early morning at the station. But he refused. He said he could
+not bear to part from me in public. Perhaps it was best so. Just as I
+turned away he put a packet into my hand. It contained seven banknotes
+for ten thousand francs each, money that it had been my delight to lend
+him from time to time. Foolish, vain, scrupulous boy! I knew not where he
+had obtained--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is now evening. Diaz is on the sea. While writing those last lines I
+was attacked by fearful pains in the right side, and cramp, so that I
+could not finish. I can scarcely write now. I have just seen the old
+English doctor. He says I have appendicitis, perhaps caused by pips of
+strawberries. And that unless I am operated on at once--And that even
+if--He is telephoning to the hospital. Diaz! No; I shall come safely
+through the affair. Without me Diaz would fall again. I see that now. And
+I have had no child. I must have a child. Even that girl in the blue
+_peignoir_ had a--Chance is a strange--
+
+_Extract translated from 'Le Temps,' the Paris Evening Paper_.
+
+OBSEQUIES OF MISS PELL (_sic_).
+
+The obsequies of Mademoiselle Pell, the celebrated English poetess, and
+author of the libretto of _La Vallière_, were celebrated this morning at
+eleven o'clock in the Church of St. Honoré d'Eylau.
+
+The chief mourners were the doctor who assisted at the last moments of
+Mademoiselle Pell, and M. Villedo, director of the Opéra-Comique.
+
+Among the wreaths we may cite those of the Association of Dramatic
+Artists, of Madame Morenita, of the management of the Opéra-Comique, and
+of the artists of the Opéra-Comique.
+
+Mass was said by a vicar of the parish, and general absolution given by
+M. le Curé Marbeau.
+
+During the service there was given, under the direction of M. Lêtang,
+chapel-master, the _Funeral March_ of Beethoven, the _Kyrie_ of
+Neidermeyer, the _Pie Jesu_ of Stradella, the _Ego Sum_ of Gounod, the
+_Libera Me_ of S. Rousseau.
+
+M. Deep officiated at the organ.
+
+After the ceremony the remains were transported to the cemetery of
+Père-Lachaise and cremated.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11360 ***
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+    <title>
+      Sacred and Profane Love, by Arnold Bennett
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11360 ***</div>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      A Novel In Three Episodes
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      By Arnold Bennett
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1905
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      TO MY FRIEND EDEN PHILLPOTTS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Novelist For Whom Man And Nature Are Inseparable With Profound Respect
+      For The Classical Dignity Of His Aim And Equal Admiration For The Austere
+      Splendour Of His Performance
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> PART I &mdash; IN THE NIGHT </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> PART II &mdash; THREE HUMAN HEARTS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> PART III &mdash; THE VICTORY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <i>&lsquo;How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women
+        of the <br /> past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have
+        opened for the <br /> kiss, and who are dead! The kiss&mdash;it is
+        immortal! It passes from lip to <br /> lip, from century to century, from
+        age to age. Men gather it, give it <br /> back, and die.&lsquo;</i>&mdash;GUY
+        DE MAUPASSANT. <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART I &mdash; IN THE NIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love&mdash;and by love I
+      mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul,
+      fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level
+      of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of my
+      twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in amorous
+      dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the
+      piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to
+      conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me:
+      warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round
+      on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and I
+      asked myself: &lsquo;Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?&rsquo;
+      For even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and
+      the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at
+      the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of those
+      rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort of
+      beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian room,
+      large and stately and symmetrical, full&mdash;but not too full&mdash;of
+      twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes, gilt
+      tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and here and
+      there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, recalled the Empire period and
+      the deserted Napoleonic palaces of France. The expanse of yellow and green
+      carpet had been married to the floor by two generations of decorous feet,
+      and the meaning of its tints was long since explained away. Never have I
+      seen a carpet with less individuality of its own than that carpet; it was
+      so sweetly faded, amiable, and flat, that its sole mission in the world
+      seemed to be to make things smooth for the chairs. The wall-paper looked
+      like pale green silk, and the candles were reflected in it as they were
+      reflected in the crystals of the chandelier. The grand piano, a Collard
+      and Collard, made a vast mass of walnut in the chamber, incongruous,
+      perhaps, but still there was something in its mild and indecisive tone
+      that responded to the furniture. It, too, spoke of Evangelicalism, the
+      Christian Year, and a dignified reserved confidence in Christ&rsquo;s
+      blood. It, too, defied the assault of time and the invasion of ideas. It,
+      too, protested against Chopin and romance, and demanded Thalberg&rsquo;s
+      variations on &lsquo;Home, Sweet Home.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My great-grandfather, the famous potter&mdash;second in renown only to
+      Wedgwood&mdash;had built that Georgian house, and my grandfather had
+      furnished it; and my parents, long since dead, had placidly accepted it
+      and the ideal that it stood for; and it had devolved upon my Aunt
+      Constance, and ultimately it would devolve on me, the scarlet woman in a
+      dress of virginal white, the inexplicable offspring of two changeless and
+      blameless families, the secret revolutionary, the living lie! How had I
+      come there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to the window, and, pulling the curtain aside, looked vaguely out
+      into the damp, black garden, from which the last light was fading. The
+      red, rectangular house stood in the midst of the garden, and the garden
+      was surrounded by four brick walls, which preserved it from four streets
+      where dwelt artisans of the upper class. The occasional rattling of a cart
+      was all we caught of the peaceable rumour of the town; but on clear nights
+      the furnaces of Cauldon Bar Ironworks lit the valley for us, and we were
+      reminded that our refined and inviolate calm was hemmed in by rude
+      activities. On the east border of the garden was a row of poplars, and
+      from the window I could see the naked branches of the endmost. A gas-lamp
+      suddenly blazed behind it in Acre Lane, and I descried a bird in the tree.
+      And as the tree waved its plume in the night-wind, and the bird swayed on
+      the moving twig, and the gas-lamp burned meekly and patiently beyond, I
+      seemed to catch in these simple things a glimpse of the secret meaning of
+      human existence, such as one gets sometimes, startlingly, in a mood of
+      idle receptiveness. And it was so sad and so beautiful, so full of an
+      ecstatic melancholy, that I dropped the curtain. And my thought ranged
+      lovingly over our household&mdash;prim, regular, and perfect: my old aunt
+      embroidering in the breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in the
+      impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion that
+      Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in fancy
+      all over the house&mdash;the attics, my aunt&rsquo;s bedroom so
+      miraculously neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the
+      corridors where clocks ticked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had the sense of the curious compact organism of which my aunt was the
+      head, and into which my soul had strayed by some caprice of fate. What I
+      felt was that the organism was suspended in a sort of enchantment,
+      lifelessly alive, unconsciously expectant of the magic touch which would
+      break the spell, and I wondered how long I must wait before I began to
+      live. I know now that I was happy in those serene preliminary years, but
+      nevertheless I had the illusion of spiritual woe. I sighed grievously as I
+      went back to the piano, and opened the volume of Mikuli&rsquo;s Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as I was beginning to play, Rebecca came into the room. She was a
+      maid of forty years, and stout; absolutely certain of a few things, and
+      quite satisfied in her ignorance of all else; an important person in our
+      house, and therefore an important person in the created universe, of which
+      our house was for her the centre. She wore the white cap with distinction,
+      and when an apron was suspended round her immense waist it ceased to be an
+      apron, and became a symbol, like the apron of a Freemason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, Rebecca?&rsquo; I said, without turning my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I guessed urgency, otherwise Rebecca would have delegated Lucy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If you please, Miss Carlotta, your aunt is not feeling well, and she will
+      not be able to go to the concert to-night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not be able to go to the concert!&rsquo; I repeated mechanically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, miss.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will come downstairs.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I were you, I shouldn&rsquo;t, miss. She&rsquo;s dozing a bit just
+      now.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Very well.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went on playing. But Chopin, who was the chief factor in my emotional
+      life; who had taught me nearly all I knew of grace, wit, and tenderness;
+      who had discovered for me the beauty that lay in everything, in sensuous
+      exaltation as well as in asceticism, in grief as well as in joy; who had
+      shown me that each moment of life, no matter what its import, should be
+      lived intensely and fully; who had carried me with him to the dizziest
+      heights of which passion is capable; whose music I spiritually
+      comprehended to a degree which I felt to be extraordinary&mdash;Chopin had
+      almost no significance for me as I played then the most glorious of his
+      compositions. His message was only a blurred sound in my ears. And
+      gradually I perceived, as the soldier gradually perceives who has been hit
+      by a bullet, that I was wounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shock was of such severity that at first I had scarcely noticed it.
+      What? My aunt not going to the concert? That meant that I could not go.
+      But it was impossible that I should not go. I could not conceive my
+      absence from the concert&mdash;the concert which I had been anticipating
+      and preparing for during many weeks. We went out but little, Aunt
+      Constance and I. An oratorio, an amateur operatic performance, a ballad
+      concert in the Bursley Town Hall&mdash;no more than that; never the
+      Hanbridge Theatre. And now Diaz was coming down to give a pianoforte
+      recital in the Jubilee Hall at Hanbridge; Diaz, the darling of European
+      capitals; Diaz, whose name in seven years had grown legendary; Diaz, the
+      Liszt and the Rubenstein of my generation, and the greatest interpreter of
+      Chopin since Chopin died&mdash;Diaz! Diaz! No such concert had ever been
+      announced in the Five Towns, and I was to miss it! Our tickets had been
+      taken, and they were not to be used! Unthinkable! A photograph of Diaz
+      stood in a silver frame on the piano; I gazed at it fervently. I said:
+      &lsquo;I will hear you play the Fantasia this night, if I am cut in pieces
+      for it to-morrow!&rsquo; Diaz represented for me, then, all that I desired
+      of men. All my dreams of love and freedom crystallized suddenly into Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran downstairs to the breakfast-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You aren&rsquo;t going to the concert, auntie?&rsquo; I almost sobbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat in her rocking-chair, and the gray woollen shawl thrown round her
+      shoulders mingled with her gray hair. Her long, handsome face was a little
+      pale, and her dark eyes darker than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t feel well enough,&rsquo; she replied calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not observed the tremor in my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what&rsquo;s the matter?&rsquo; I insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing in particular, my dear. I do not feel equal to the exertion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, auntie&mdash;then I can&rsquo;t go, either.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m very sorry, dear,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;We will go to the
+      next concert.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz will never come again!&rsquo; I exclaimed passionately. &lsquo;And
+      the tickets will be wasted.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear,&rsquo; my Aunt Constance repeated, &lsquo;I am not equal to it.
+      And you cannot go alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was utterly selfish in that moment. I cared nothing whatever for my aunt&rsquo;s
+      indisposition. Indeed, I secretly accused her of maliciously choosing that
+      night of all nights for her mysterious fatigue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, auntie,&rsquo; I said, controlling myself, &lsquo;I must go, really.
+      I shall send Lucy over with a note to Ethel Ryley to ask her to go with
+      me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do,&rsquo; said my aunt, after a considerable pause, &lsquo;if you are
+      bent on going.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have often thought since that during that pause, while we faced each
+      other, my aunt had for the first time fully realized how little she knew
+      of me; she must surely have detected in my glance a strangeness, a
+      contemptuous indifference, an implacable obstinacy, which she had never
+      seen in it before. And, indeed, these things were in my glance. Yet I
+      loved my aunt with a deep affection. I had only one grievance against her.
+      Although excessively proud, she would always, in conversation with men,
+      admit her mental and imaginative inferiority, and that of her sex. She
+      would admit, without being asked, that being a woman she could not see
+      far, that her feminine brain could not carry an argument to the end, and
+      that her feminine purpose was too infirm for any great enterprise. She
+      seemed to find a morbid pleasure in such confessions. As regards herself,
+      they were accurate enough; the dear creature was a singularly good judge
+      of her own character. What I objected to was her assumption, so calm and
+      gratuitous, that her individuality, with all its confessed limitations,
+      was, of course, superior&mdash;stronger, wiser, subtler than mine. She
+      never allowed me to argue with her; or if she did, she treated my remarks
+      with a high, amused tolerance. &lsquo;Wait till you grow older,&rsquo; she
+      would observe, magnificently ignorant of the fact that my soul was already
+      far older than hers. This attitude naturally made me secretive in all
+      affairs of the mind, and most affairs of the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We took in the county paper, the <i>Staffordshire Recorder,</i> and the <i>Rock</i>
+      and the <i>Quiver</i>. With the help of these organs of thought, which I
+      detested and despised, I was supposed to be able to keep discreetly and
+      sufficiently abreast of the times. But I had other aids. I went to the
+      Girls&rsquo; High School at Oldcastle till I was nearly eighteen. One of
+      the mistresses there used to read continually a red book covered with
+      brown paper. I knew it to be a red book because the paper was gone at the
+      corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in
+      the book&mdash;she would pick it up at every spare moment&mdash;excited in
+      me an ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on
+      the title-page, <i>Introduction to the Study of Sociology</i>, by Herbert
+      Spencer. Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that
+      astonished and charmed me. I said: &lsquo;Why are not our school histories
+      like this?&rsquo; The owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it
+      to me, but she would not, nor would she give me any reason for declining.
+      Soon afterwards I left school. I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free
+      Library at the Wedgwood Institution. But the book was not in the
+      catalogue. (How often, in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the
+      reading-room, where men read the daily papers and the magazines, without
+      daring to enter!) At length I audaciously decided to buy the book. I
+      ordered it, not at our regular stationer&rsquo;s in Oldcastle Street, but
+      at a little shop of the same kind in Trafalgar Road. In three days it
+      arrived. I called for it, and took it home secretly in a cardboard
+      envelope-box. I went to bed early, and I began to read. I read all night,
+      thirteen hours. O book with the misleading title&mdash;for you have
+      nothing to do with sociology, and you ought to have been called <i>How to
+      Think Honestly</i>&mdash;my face flushed again and again as I perused your
+      ugly yellowish pages! Again and again I exclaimed: &lsquo;But this is
+      marvellous!&rsquo; I had not guessed that anything so honest, and so
+      courageous, and so simple, and so convincing had ever been written. I am
+      capable now of suspecting that Spencer was not a supreme genius; but he
+      taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing is sacred that
+      will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory. The next morning after
+      breakfast I fell asleep in a chair. &lsquo;My dear!&rsquo; protested Aunt
+      Constance. &lsquo;Ah,&rsquo; I thought, &lsquo;if you knew, Aunt
+      Constance, if you had the least suspicion, of the ideas that are surging
+      and shining in my head, you would go mad&mdash;go simply mad!&rsquo; I did
+      not care much for deception, but I positively hated clumsy concealment,
+      and the red book was in the house; at any moment it might be seized. On a
+      shelf of books in my bedroom was a novel called <i>The Old Helmet</i>,
+      probably the silliest novel in the world. I tore the pages from the
+      binding and burnt them; I tore the binding from Spencer and burnt it; and
+      I put my treasure in the covers of <i>The Old Helmet</i>. Once Rebecca, a
+      person privileged, took the thing away to read; but she soon brought it
+      back. She told me she had always understood that <i>The Old Helmet</i> was
+      more, interesting than that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, I discovered <i>The Origin of Species</i> in the Free Library. It
+      finished the work of corruption. Spencer had shown me how to think; Darwin
+      told me what to think. The whole of my upbringing went for naught
+      thenceforward. I lived a double life. I said nothing to my aunt of the
+      miracle wrought within me, and she suspected nothing. Strange and uncanny,
+      is it not, that such miracles can escape the observation of a loving
+      heart? I loved her as much as ever, perhaps more than ever. Thank Heaven
+      that love can laugh at reason!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for my intellectual inner life. My emotional inner life is less
+      easy to indicate. I became a woman at fifteen&mdash;years, interminable
+      years, before I left school. I guessed even then, vaguely, that my nature
+      was extremely emotional and passionate. And I had nothing literary on
+      which to feed my dreams, save a few novels which I despised, and the Bible
+      and the plays and poems of Shakespeare. It is wonderful, though, what good
+      I managed to find in those two use-worn volumes. I knew most of the Song
+      of Solomon by heart, and many of the sonnets; and I will not mince the
+      fact that my favourite play was <i>Measure for Measure</i>. I was an
+      innocent virgin, in the restricted sense in which most girls of my class
+      and age are innocent, but I obtained from these works many a lofty pang of
+      thrilling pleasure. They illustrated Chopin for me, giving precision and
+      particularity to his messages. And I was ashamed of myself. Yes; at the
+      bottom of my heart I was ashamed of myself because my sensuous being
+      responded to the call of these masterpieces. In my ignorance I thought I
+      was lapsing from a sane and proper ideal. And then&mdash;the second
+      miracle in my career, which has been full of miracles&mdash;I came across
+      a casual reference, in the <i>Staffordshire Recorder</i>, of all places,
+      to the <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i> of Théophile Gautier. Something in
+      the reference, I no longer remember what, caused me to guess that the book
+      was a revelation of matters hidden from me. I bought it. With the
+      assistance of a dictionary, I read it, nightly, in about a week. Except <i>Picciola</i>,
+      it was the first French novel I had ever read. It held me throughout; it
+      revealed something on nearly every page. But the climax dazzled and
+      blinded me. It was exquisite, so high and pure, so startling, so bold,
+      that it made me ill. When I recovered I had fast in my heart&rsquo;s
+      keeping the new truth that in the body, and the instincts of the body,
+      there should be no shame, but rather a frank, joyous pride. From that
+      moment I ceased to be ashamed of anything that I honestly liked. But I
+      dared not keep the book. The knowledge of its contents would have killed
+      my aunt. I read it again; I read the last pages several times, and then I
+      burnt it and breathed freely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was I, as I forced my will on my aunt in the affair of the concert.
+      And I say that she who had never suspected the existence of the real me,
+      suspected it then, when we glanced at each other across the
+      breakfast-room. Upon these apparent trifles life swings, as upon a pivot,
+      into new directions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat with my aunt while Lucy went with the note. She returned soon with
+      the reply, and the reply was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So sorry I can&rsquo;t accept your kind invitation. I should have liked
+      to go awfully. But Fred has got the toothache, and I must not leave him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The toothache! And my very life, so it seemed to me, hung in the balance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not hesitate one second.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hurrah!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;She can go. I am to call for her in the
+      cab.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I crushed the note cruelly, and threw it in the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell him to call at Ryleys&rsquo;,&rsquo; I said to Rebecca as she was
+      putting me and my dress into the cab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she told the cabman with that sharp voice of hers, always arrogant
+      towards inferiors, to call at Ryleys.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put my head out of the cab window as soon as we were in Oldcastle
+      Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Drive straight to Hanbridge,&rsquo; I ordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing was done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He was like his photograph, but the photograph had given me only the most
+      inadequate idea of him. The photograph could not render his extraordinary
+      fairness, nor the rich gold of his hair, nor the blue of his dazzling
+      eyes. The first impression was that he was too beautiful for a man, that
+      he had a woman&rsquo;s beauty, that he had the waxen beauty of a doll; but
+      the firm, decisive lines of the mouth and chin, the overhanging brows, and
+      the luxuriance of his amber moustache, spoke more sternly. Gradually one
+      perceived that beneath the girlish mask, beneath the contours and the
+      complexion incomparably delicate, there was an individuality intensely and
+      provocatively male. His body was rather less than tall, and it was
+      muscular and springy. He walked on to the platform as an unspoilt man
+      should walk, and he bowed to the applause as if bowing chivalrously to a
+      woman whom he respected but did not love. Diaz was twenty-six that year;
+      he had recently returned from a tour round the world; he was filled full
+      of triumph, renown, and adoration. As I have said, he was already
+      legendary. He had become so great and so marvellous that those who had
+      never seen him were in danger of forgetting that he was a living human
+      being, obliged to eat and drink, and practise scales, and visit his tailor&rsquo;s.
+      Thus it had happened to me. During the first moments I found myself
+      thinking, &lsquo;This cannot be Diaz. It is not true that at last I see
+      him. There must be some mistake.&rsquo; Then he sat down leisurely to the
+      piano; his gaze ranged across the hall, and I fancied that, for a second,
+      it met mine. My two seats were in the first row of the stalls, and I could
+      see every slightest change of his face. So that at length I felt that Diaz
+      was real, and that he was really there close in front of me, a seraph and
+      yet very human. He was all alone on the great platform, and the ebonized
+      piano seemed enormous and formidable before him. And all around was the
+      careless public&mdash;ignorant, unsympathetic, exigent, impatient, even
+      inimical&mdash;two thousand persons who would get value for their money or
+      know the reason why. The electric light and the inclement gaze of society
+      rained down cruelly upon that defenceless head. I wanted to protect it.
+      The tears rose to my eyes, and I stretched out towards Diaz the hands of
+      my soul. My passionate sympathy must have reached him like a beneficent
+      influence, of which, despite the perfect self-possession and
+      self-confidence of his demeanour, it seemed to me that he had need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had risked much that night. I had committed an enormity. No one but a
+      grown woman who still vividly remembers her girlhood can appreciate my
+      feelings as I drove from Bursley to Hanbridge in the cab, and as I got out
+      of the cab in the crowd, and gave up my ticket, and entered the glittering
+      auditorium of the Jubilee Hall. I was alone, at night, in the public
+      places, under the eye of the world. And I was guiltily alone. Every fibre
+      of my body throbbed with the daring and the danger and the romance of the
+      adventure. The horror of revealing the truth to Aunt Constance, as I was
+      bound to do&mdash;of telling her that I had lied, and that I had left my
+      maiden&rsquo;s modesty behind in my bedroom, gripped me at intervals like
+      some appalling and exquisite instrument of torture. And yet, ere Diaz had
+      touched the piano with his broad white hand, I was content, I was
+      rewarded, and I was justified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The programme began with Chopin&rsquo;s first Ballade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an imperative summons, briefly sustained, which developed into
+      an appeal and an invocation, ascending, falling, and still higher
+      ascending, till it faded and expired, and then, after a little pause, was
+      revived; then silence, and two chords, defining and clarifying the
+      vagueness of the appeal and the invocation. And then, almost before I was
+      aware of it, there stole forth from under the fingers of Diaz the song of
+      the soul of man, timid, questioning, plaintive, neither sad nor joyous,
+      but simply human, seeking what it might find on earth. The song changed
+      subtly from mood to mood, expressing that which nothing but itself could
+      express; and presently there was a low and gentle menace, thrice repeated
+      under the melody of the song, and the reply of the song was a proud cry, a
+      haughty contempt of these furtive warnings, and a sudden winged leap into
+      the empyrean towards the Eternal Spirit. And then the melody was lost in a
+      depth, and the song became turgid and wild and wilder, hysteric,
+      irresolute, frantically groping, until at last it found its peace and its
+      salvation. And the treasure was veiled in a mist of arpeggios, but one by
+      one these were torn away, and there was a hush, a pause, and a
+      preparation; and the soul of man broke into a new song of what it had
+      found on earth&mdash;the magic of the tenderness of love&mdash;an air so
+      caressing and so sweet, so calmly happy and so mournfully sane, so bereft
+      of illusions and so naïve, that it seemed to reveal in a few miraculous
+      phrases the secret intentions of God. It was too beautiful; it told me too
+      much about myself; it vibrated my nerves to such an unbearable spasm of
+      pleasure that I might have died had I not willed to live.... It gave place
+      momentarily to the song of the question and the search, but only to
+      return, and to return again, with a more thrilling and glorious assurance.
+      It was drowned in doubt, but it emerged triumphantly, covered with noble
+      and delicious ornaments, and swimming strongly on mysterious waves. And
+      finally, with speed and with fire, it was transformed and caught up into
+      the last ecstasy, the ultimate passion. The soul swept madly between earth
+      and heaven, fell, rose; and there was a dreadful halt. Then a loud blast,
+      a distortion of the magic, an upward rush, another and a louder blast, and
+      a thunderous fall, followed by two massive and terrifying chords....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was standing up and bowing to his public. What did they understand?
+      Did they understand anything? I cannot tell. But I know that they felt. A
+      shudder of feeling had gone through the hall. It was in vain that people
+      tried to emancipate themselves from the spell by the violence of their
+      applause. They could not. We were all together under the enchantment. Some
+      may have seen clearly, some darkly, but we were equal before the throne of
+      that mighty enchanter. And the enchanter bowed and bowed with a grave,
+      sympathetic smile, and then disappeared. I had not clapped my hands; I had
+      not moved. Only my full eyes had followed him as he left the platform; and
+      when he returned&mdash;because the applause would not cease&mdash;my eyes
+      watched over him as he came back to the centre of the platform. He stood
+      directly in front of me, smiling more gaily now. And suddenly our glances
+      met! Yes; I could not be mistaken. They met, and mine held his for several
+      seconds.... Diaz had looked at me. Diaz had singled me out from the crowd.
+      I blushed hotly, and I was conscious of a surpassing joy. My spirit was
+      transfigured. I knew that such a man was above kings. I knew that the
+      world and everything of loveliness that it contained was his. I knew that
+      he moved like a beautiful god through the groves of delight, and that what
+      he did was right, and whom he beckoned came, and whom he touched was
+      blessed. And my eyes had held his eyes for a little space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The enchantment deepened. I had read that the secret of playing Chopin had
+      died with Chopin; but I felt sure that evening, as I have felt sure since,
+      that Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have received
+      Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a superior. For Diaz
+      had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of the keyboard that
+      Chopin could not have possessed. Diaz had come to the front in a
+      generation of pianists who had lifted technique to a plane of which
+      neither Liszt nor Rubinstein dreamed. He had succeeded primarily by his
+      gigantic and incredible technique. And then, when his technique had
+      astounded the world, he had invited the world to forget it, as the glass
+      is forgotten through which is seen beauty. And Diaz&rsquo;s gift was now
+      such that there appeared to intervene nothing between his conception of
+      the music and the strings of the piano, so perfected was the mechanism.
+      Difficulties had ceased to exist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if they
+      were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they should
+      fall off. It was not so with Diaz. When Diaz played you experienced the
+      pure emotions caused by the unblurred contemplation of that beauty which
+      the great masters had created, and which Diaz had tinted with the rare
+      dyes of his personality. You forgot all but beauty. The piano was not a
+      piano; it was an Arabian magic beyond physical laws, and it, too, had a
+      soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Diaz laid upon us the enchantment of Chopin and of himself. Mazurkas,
+      nocturnes, waltzes, scherzos, polonaises, preludes, he exhibited to us in
+      groups those manifestations of that supreme spirit&mdash;that spirit at
+      once stern and tender, not more sad than joyous, and always sane, always
+      perfectly balanced, always preoccupied with beauty. The singular myth of a
+      Chopin decadent, weary, erratic, mournful, hysterical, at odds with fate,
+      was completely dissipated; and we perceived instead the grave artist
+      nourished on Bach and studious in form, and the strong soul that had dared
+      to look on life as it is, and had found beauty everywhere. Ah! how the air
+      trembled and glittered with visions! How melody and harmony filled every
+      corner of the hall with the silver and gold of sound! How the world was
+      changed out of recognition! How that which had seemed unreal became real,
+      and that which had seemed real receded to a horizon remote and
+      fantastic!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was playing the fifteenth Prelude in D flat now, and the water was
+      dropping, dropping ceaselessly on the dead body, and the beautiful calm
+      song rose serenely in the dream, and then lost itself amid the presaging
+      chords of some sinister fate, and came again, exquisite and fresh as ever,
+      and then was interrupted by a high note like a clarion; and while Diaz
+      held that imperious, compelling note, he turned his face slightly from the
+      piano and gazed at me. Several times since the first time our eyes had
+      met, by accident as I thought. But this was a deliberate seeking on his
+      part. Again I flushed hotly. Again I had the terrible shudder of joy. I
+      feared for a moment lest all the Five Towns was staring at me, thus
+      singled out by Diaz; but it was not so: I had the wit to perceive that no
+      one could remark me as the recipient of that hurried and burning glance.
+      He had half a dozen bars to play, yet his eyes did not leave mine, and I
+      would not let mine leave his. He remained moveless while the last chord
+      expired, and then it seemed to me that his gaze had gone further, had
+      passed through me into some unknown. The applause startled him to his
+      feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My thought was: &lsquo;What can he be thinking of me?... But hundreds of
+      women must have loved him!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the interval an attendant came on to the platform and altered the
+      position of the piano. Everybody asked: &lsquo;What&rsquo;s that for?&rsquo;
+      For the new position was quite an unusual one; it brought the tail of the
+      piano nearer to the audience, and gave a better view of the keyboard to
+      the occupants of the seats in the orchestra behind the platform. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+      a question of the acoustics, that&rsquo;s what it is,&rsquo; observed a
+      man near me, and a woman replied: &lsquo;Oh, I see!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Diaz returned and seated himself to play the Berceuse, I saw that he
+      could look at me without turning his head. And now, instead of flushing, I
+      went cold. My spine gave way suddenly. I began to be afraid; but of what I
+      was afraid I had not the least idea. I fixed my eyes on my programme as he
+      launched into the Berceuse. Twice I glanced up, without, however, moving
+      my head, and each time his burning blue eyes met mine. (But why did I
+      choose moments when the playing of the piece demanded less than all his
+      attention?) The Berceuse was a favourite. In sentiment it was simpler than
+      the great pieces that had preceded it. Its excessive delicacy attracted;
+      the finesse of its embroidery swayed and enraptured the audience; and the
+      applause at the close was mad, deafening, and peremptory. But Diaz was
+      notorious as a refuser of encores. It had been said that he would see a
+      hall wrecked by an angry mob before he would enlarge his programme. Four
+      times he came forward and acknowledged the tribute, and four times he went
+      back. At the fifth response he halted directly in front of me, and in his
+      bold, grave eyes I saw a question. I saw it, and I would not answer. If he
+      had spoken aloud to me I could not have more clearly understood. But I
+      would not answer. And then some power within myself, hitherto unsuspected
+      by me, some natural force, took possession of me, and I nodded my head....
+      Diaz went to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, brushing lightly the keys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The Prelude in F sharp,&rsquo; my thought ran. &lsquo;If he would play
+      that!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And instantly he broke into that sweet air, with its fateful hushed
+      accompaniment&mdash;the trifle which Chopin threw off in a moment of his
+      highest inspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is the thirteenth Prelude,&rsquo; I reflected. I was disturbed,
+      profoundly troubled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next piece was the last, and it was the Fantasia, the masterpiece of
+      Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Fantasia there speaks the voice of a spirit which has attained all
+      that humanity may attain: of wisdom, of power, of pride and glory. And now
+      it is like the roll of an army marching slowly through terrific defiles;
+      and now it is like the quiet song of royal wanderers meditating in vast
+      garden landscapes, with mossy masonry and long pools and cypresses, and a
+      sapphire star shining in the purple sky on the shoulder of a cypress; and
+      now it is like the cry of a lost traveller, who, plunging heavily through
+      a virgin forest, comes suddenly upon a green circular sward, smooth as a
+      carpet, with an antique statue of a beautiful nude girl in the midst; and
+      now it is like the oratory of richly-gowned philosophers awaiting death in
+      gorgeous and gloomy palaces; and now it is like the upward rush of winged
+      things that are determined to achieve, knowing well the while that the
+      ecstasy of longing is better than the assuaging of desire. And though the
+      voice of this spirit speaking in the music disguises itself so variously,
+      it is always the same. For it cannot, and it would not, hide the strange
+      and rare timbre which distinguishes it from all others&mdash;that quality
+      which springs from a pure and calm vision, of life. The voice of this
+      spirit says that it has lost every illusion about life, and that life
+      seems only the more beautiful. It says that activity is but another form
+      of contemplation, pain but another form of pleasure, power but another
+      form of weakness, hate but another form of love, and that it is well these
+      things should be so. It says there is no end, only a means; and that the
+      highest joy is to suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will
+      but live, it cries, that grave but yet passionate voice&mdash;if you will
+      but live! Were there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more
+      than live. The true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and
+      lose, and weep and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to
+      live, and blind your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of
+      existence....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, no; I cannot&mdash;I cannot describe further the experiences of my
+      soul while Diaz played. When words cease, music has scarcely begun. I know
+      now&mdash;I did not know it then&mdash;that Diaz was playing as perhaps he
+      had never played before. The very air was charged with exquisite emotion,
+      which went in waves across the hall, changing and blanching faces,
+      troubling hearts, and moistening eyes.... And then he finished. It was
+      over. In every trembling breast was a pang of regret that this spell, this
+      miracle, this divine revolution, could not last into eternity.... He stood
+      bowing, one hand touching the piano. And as the revolution he had
+      accomplished in us was divine, so was he divine. I felt, and many another
+      woman in the audience felt, that no reward could be too great for the
+      beautiful and gifted creature who had entranced us and forced us to see
+      what alone in life was worth seeing: that the whole world should be his
+      absolute dominion; that his happiness should be the first concern of
+      mankind; that if a thousand suffered in order to make him happy for a
+      moment, it mattered not; that laws were not for him; that if he sinned,
+      his sin must not be called a sin, and that he must be excused from remorse
+      and from any manner of woe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The applauding multitude stood up, and moved slightly towards the exits,
+      and then stopped, as if ashamed of this readiness to desert the sacred
+      temple. Diaz came forward three times, and each time the applause
+      increased to a tempest; but he only smiled&mdash;smiled gravely. I could
+      not see distinctly whether his eyes had sought mine, for mine were full of
+      tears. No persuasions could induce him to show himself a fourth time, and
+      at length a middle-aged man appeared and stated that Diaz was extremely
+      gratified by his reception, but that he was also extremely exhausted and
+      had left the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We departed, we mortals; and I was among the last to leave the auditorium.
+      As I left the lights were being extinguished over the platform, and an
+      attendant was closing the piano. The foyer was crowded with people waiting
+      to get out. The word passed that it was raining heavily. I wondered how I
+      should find my cab. I felt very lonely and unknown; I was overcome with
+      sadness&mdash;with a sense of the futility and frustration of my life.
+      Such is the logic of the soul, and such the force of reaction. Gradually
+      the foyer emptied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ‘You think I am happy,&rsquo; said Diaz, gazing at me with a smile
+      suddenly grave; &lsquo;but I am not. I seek something which I cannot find.
+      And my playing is only a relief from the fruitless search; only that. I am
+      forlorn.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You!&rsquo; I exclaimed, and my eyes rested on his, long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, we had met. Perhaps it had been inevitable since the beginning of
+      time that we should meet; but it was none the less amazing. Perhaps I had
+      inwardly known that we should meet; but, none the less, I was astounded
+      when a coated and muffled figure came up swiftly to me in the emptying
+      foyer, and said: &lsquo;Ah! you are here! I cannot leave without thanking
+      you for your sympathy. I have never before felt such sympathy while
+      playing.&rsquo; It was a golden voice, pitched low, and the words were
+      uttered with a very slight foreign accent, which gave them piquancy. I
+      could not reply; something rose in my throat, and the caressing voice
+      continued: &lsquo;You are pale. Do you feel ill? What can I do? Come with
+      me to the artists&rsquo; room; my secretary is there.&rsquo; I put out a
+      hand gropingly, for I could not see clearly, and I thought I should reel
+      and fall. It touched his shoulder. He took my arm, and we went; no one had
+      noticed us, and I had not spoken a word. In the room to which he guided
+      me, through a long and sombre corridor, there was no sign of a secretary.
+      I drank some water. &lsquo;There, you are better!&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;Thank
+      you,&rsquo; I said, but scarcely whispering. ‘How fortunate I ventured to
+      come to you just at that moment! You might have fallen&rsquo;; and he
+      smiled again. I shook my head. I said: &lsquo;It was your coming&mdash;that&mdash;that&mdash;made
+      me dizzy!&rsquo; &lsquo;I profoundly regret&mdash;&rsquo; he began. ‘No,
+      no,&rsquo; I interrupted him; and in that instant I knew I was about to
+      say something which society would, justifiably, deem unpardonable in a
+      girl situated as I was. &lsquo;I am so glad you came&rsquo;; and I smiled,
+      courageous and encouraging. For once in my life&mdash;for the first time
+      in my adult life&mdash;I determined to be my honest self to another.
+      &lsquo;Your voice is exquisitely beautiful,&rsquo; he murmured. I
+      thrilled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of what use to chronicle the steps, now halting, now only too hasty, by
+      which our intimacy progressed in that gaunt and echoing room? He asked me
+      no questions as to my identity. He just said that he would like to play to
+      me in private if that would give me pleasure, and that possibly I could
+      spare an hour and would go with him.... Afterwards his brougham would be
+      at my disposal. His tone was the perfection of deferential courtesy. Once
+      the secretary came in&mdash;a young man rather like himself&mdash;and they
+      talked together in a foreign language that was not French nor German; then
+      the secretary bowed and retired.... We were alone.... There can be no sort
+      of doubt that unless I was prepared to flout the wisdom of the ages, I
+      ought to have refused his suggestion. But is not the wisdom of the ages a
+      medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I was prepared to flout it, as in
+      our highest and our lowest moments we often are. Moreover, how many women
+      in my place, confronted by that divine creature, wooed by that wondrous
+      personality, intoxicated by that smile and that voice, allured by the
+      appeal of those marvellous hands, would have found the strength to resist?
+      I did not resist, I yielded; I accepted. I was already in disgrace with
+      Aunt Constance&mdash;as well be drowned in twelve feet of water as in six!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we drove rapidly away in the brougham, through the miry,
+      light-reflecting streets of Hanbridge in the direction of Knype. And the
+      raindrops ran down the windows of the brougham, and in the cushioned
+      interior we could see each other darkly. He did his best to be at ease,
+      and he almost succeeded. My feeling towards him, as regards the external
+      management, the social guidance, of the affair, was as though we were at
+      sea in a dangerous storm, and he was on the bridge and I was a mere
+      passenger, and could take no responsibility. Who knew through what
+      difficult channels we might not have to steer, and from what lee-shores we
+      might not have to beat away? I saw that he perceived this. When I offered
+      him some awkward compliment about his good English, he seized the chance
+      of a narrative, and told me about his parentage: how his mother was
+      Scotch, and his father Danish, and how, after his father&rsquo;s death,
+      his mother had married Emilio Diaz, a Spanish teacher of music in
+      Edinburgh, and how he had taken, by force of early habit, the name of his
+      stepfather. The whole world was familiar with these facts, and I was
+      familiar with them; but their recital served our turn in the brougham,
+      and, of course, Diaz could add touches which had escaped the <i>Staffordshire
+      Recorder</i>, and perhaps all other papers. He was explaining to me that
+      his secretary was his stepfather&rsquo;s son by another wife, when we
+      arrived at the Five Towns Hotel, opposite Knype Railway Station. I might
+      have foreseen that that would be our destination. I hooded myself as well
+      as I could, and followed him quickly to the first-floor. I sank down into
+      a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my cloak, and
+      then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table were some
+      glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that the
+      secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly departed.
+      My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its full
+      enormity. &lsquo;Oh,&rsquo; I sighed, &lsquo;if I were a man like you!&rsquo;
+      Then it was that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was
+      not happy, that he was forlorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; &lsquo;I am
+      profoundly dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year
+      it is a homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You
+      do not know how I hate a strange piano. That one&rsquo;&mdash;he pointed
+      to a huge instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially
+      for him&mdash;&lsquo;is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only
+      yesterday, and after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across
+      the world, and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a
+      museum, and bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But have you no friends?&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who can tell?&rsquo; he replied. &lsquo;If I have, I scarcely ever see
+      them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And no home?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I loathe
+      it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you loathe it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! For what it has witnessed&mdash;for what it has witnessed.&rsquo; He
+      sighed. ‘Suppose we discuss something else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in
+      social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know
+      that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath
+      that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious, dazzling
+      haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new being,
+      excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for
+      love of you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let me guess at your history,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You have lived much
+      alone with your thoughts, and you have read a great deal of the finest
+      romantic poetry, and you have been silent, especially with men. You have
+      seen little of men.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I understand them,&rsquo; I answered boldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I believe you do,&rsquo; he admitted; and he laughed. &lsquo;So I needn&rsquo;t
+      explain to you that a thousand women dying of love for one man will not
+      help that man to happiness, unless he is dying of love for the thousand
+      and first.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And have you never loved?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words came of themselves out of my mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have deceived myself&mdash;in my quest of sympathy,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you be sure that, in your quest of sympathy, you are not deceiving
+      yourself tonight?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he cried quickly, &lsquo;I can.&rsquo; And he sprang up and
+      almost ran to the piano. &lsquo;You remember the D flat Prelude?&rsquo; he
+      said, breaking into the latter part of the air, and looking at me the
+      while. &lsquo;When I came to that note and caught your gaze&rsquo;&mdash;he
+      struck the B flat and held it&mdash;&lsquo;I knew that I had found
+      sympathy. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Do you remember?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Remember what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The way we looked at each other.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I breathed, &lsquo;I remember.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How can I thank you? How can I thank you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed to be meditating. His simplicity, his humility, his kindliness
+      were more than I could bear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Please do not speak like that,&rsquo; I entreated him, pained. &lsquo;You
+      are the greatest artist in the world, and I am nobody&mdash;nobody at all.
+      I do not know why I am here. I cannot imagine what you have seen in me.
+      Everything is a mystery. All I feel is that I am in your presence, and
+      that I am not worthy to be. No matter how long I live, I shall never
+      experience again the joy that I have now. But if you talk about thanking
+      me, I must run away, because I cannot stand it&mdash;and&mdash;and&mdash;you
+      haven&rsquo;t played for me, and you said you would.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He approached me, and bent his head towards mine, and I glanced up through
+      a mist and saw his eyes and the short, curly auburn locks on his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most
+      lasting things,&rsquo; he said softly, &lsquo;are often mysterious and
+      inexplicable and sudden. And let me tell you that you do not know how
+      lovely you are. You do not know the magic of your voice, nor the grace of
+      your gestures. But time and man will teach you. What shall I play?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was very close to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Bach,&rsquo; I ejaculated, pointing impatiently to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancied that Bach would spread peace abroad in my soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He resumed his place at the piano, and touched the keys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Another thing that makes me more sure that I am not deceiving myself
+      to-night,&rsquo; he said, taking his fingers off the keys, but staring at
+      the keyboard, &lsquo;is that you have not regretted coming here. You have
+      not called yourself a wicked woman. You have not even accused me of taking
+      advantage of your innocence.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And ere I could say a word he had begun the Chromatic Fantasia, smiling
+      faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I had hoped for peace from Bach! I had often suspected that deep
+      passion was concealed almost everywhere within the restraint and the
+      apparent calm of Bach&rsquo;s music, but the full force of it had not been
+      shown to me till this glorious night. Diaz&rsquo; playing was tenfold more
+      impressive, more effective, more revealing in the hotel parlour than in
+      the great hall. The Chromatic Fantasia seemed as full of the magnificence
+      of life as that other Fantasia which he had given an hour or so earlier.
+      Instead of peace I had the whirlwind; instead of tranquillity a riot;
+      instead of the poppy an alarming potion. The rendering was masterly to the
+      extreme of masterliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had finished I rose and passed to the fireplace in silence; he did
+      not stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you always play like that?&rsquo; I asked at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;only when you are there. I have never played
+      the Chopin Fantasia as I played it to-night. The Chopin was all right; but
+      do not be under any illusion: what you have just heard is Bach played by a
+      Chopin player.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he left the piano and went to the small table where the glasses were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You must be in need of refreshment,&rsquo; he whispered gaily. &lsquo;Nothing
+      is more exhausting than listening to the finest music.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is you who ought to be tired,&rsquo; I replied; &lsquo;after that long
+      concert, to be playing now.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have the physique of a camel,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I am never tired
+      so long as I am sure of my listeners. I would play for you till breakfast
+      to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The decanter contained a fluid of a pleasant green tint. He poured very
+      carefully this fluid to the depth of half an inch in one glass and
+      three-quarters of an inch in another glass. Then he filled both glasses to
+      the brim with water, accomplishing the feat with infinite pains and
+      enjoyment, as though it had been part of a ritual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; he said, offering me in his steady hand the glass which had
+      received the smaller quantity of the green fluid. &lsquo;Taste.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what is it?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Taste,&rsquo; he repeated, and he himself tasted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I obeyed. At the first mouthful I thought the liquid was somewhat sinister
+      and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my opinion, and
+      found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet not strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you like it?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and drank again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is wonderful,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;What do you call it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Men call it absinthe,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t be frightened,&rsquo; he soothed me. &lsquo;I know what you
+      were going to say. You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of
+      all poisons, that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most
+      terrible of all drunkards. So it is; so it does. But not as we are
+      drinking it; not as I invariably drink it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; I said, proudly confident in him. &lsquo;You would not
+      have offered it to me otherwise.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course I should not,&rsquo; he agreed. &lsquo;I give you my word that
+      a few drops of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and
+      the least harmful stimulant in the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am sure of it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But drink slowly,&rsquo; he advised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I refused the sandwiches. I had no need of them. I felt sufficient unto
+      myself. I no longer had any apprehension. My body, my brain, and my soul
+      seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency. The fear of being
+      maladroit departed from me. Ideas&mdash;delicate and subtle ideas&mdash;welled
+      up in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them. I began
+      to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric
+      interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still stood
+      by the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, he said, &lsquo;that is very interesting.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What does the Fantasia mean to you?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense.
+      You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
+      forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
+      emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it
+      can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the greatest
+      of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas. Literature
+      can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its
+      language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the
+      soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the Fantasia is that
+      it moves me profoundly. I <i>know how</i> it moves me, but I cannot tell
+      you; I cannot even tell myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, do go on,&rsquo; I entreated him. &lsquo;Tell me more about music. Do
+      you not think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do,
+      since you always play him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art.
+      When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes
+      impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No
+      one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The
+      whole last act of <i>The Twilight of the Gods</i> is not greater than a
+      little song of Grieg&rsquo;s.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I see,&rsquo; I murmured humbly. &lsquo;<i>The Twilight of the Gods</i>&mdash;that
+      is Wagner, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Don&rsquo;t you know your Wagner?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No. I&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t know <i>Tristan</i>?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He jumped up, excited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How could I know it?&rsquo; I expostulated. &lsquo;I have never seen any
+      opera. I know the marches from <i>Tannhäuser</i> and <i>Lohengrin</i>, and
+      &ldquo;O Star of Eve!&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is impossible that you don&rsquo;t know <i>Tristan</i>!&rsquo; he
+      exclaimed. &lsquo;The second act of <i>Tristan</i> is the greatest piece
+      of love-music&mdash;No, it isn&rsquo;t.&rsquo; He laughed. &lsquo;I must
+      not contradict myself. But it is marvellous&mdash;marvellous! You know the
+      story?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Play me some of it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will play the Prelude,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gulped down the remaining drops in my glass and crossed the room to a
+      chair where I could see his face. And he played the Prelude to the most
+      passionately voluptuous opera ever written. It was my first real
+      introduction to Wagner, my first glimpse of that enchanted field. I was
+      ravished, rapt away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wagner was a great artist in spite of himself,&rsquo; said Diaz, when he
+      had finished. &lsquo;He assigned definite and precise ideas to all those
+      melodies. Nothing could be more futile. I shall not label them for you.
+      But perhaps you can guess the love-motive for yourself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I can,&rsquo; I said positively. &lsquo;It is this.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried to hum the theme, but my voice refused obedience. So I came to the
+      piano, and played the theme high up in the treble, while Diaz was still
+      sitting on the piano-stool. I trembled even to touch the piano in his
+      presence; but I did it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have guessed right,&rsquo; he said; and then he asked me in a casual
+      tone: ‘Do you ever play pianoforte duets?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Often,&rsquo; I replied unsuspectingly, &lsquo;with my aunt. We play the
+      symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and overtures, and so
+      on.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Awfully good fun, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo; he smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Splendid!&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve got <i>Tristan</i> here arranged for pianoforte duet,&rsquo;
+      he said. ‘Tony, my secretary, enjoys playing it. You shall play part of
+      the second act with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Me! With you!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Certainly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Impossible! I should never dare! How do you know I can play at all?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have just proved it to me,&rsquo; said he. &lsquo;Come; you will not
+      refuse me this!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to leave the vicinity of the piano. I felt that, once out of the
+      immediate circle of his tremendous physical influence, I might manage to
+      escape the ordeal which he had suggested. But I could not go away. The
+      silken nets of his personality had been cast, and I was enmeshed. And if I
+      was happy, it was with a dreadful happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, really, I can&rsquo;t play with you,&rsquo; I said weakly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His response was merely to look up at me over his shoulder. His beautiful
+      face was so close to mine, and it expressed such a naïve and strong
+      yearning for my active and intimate sympathy, and such divine frankness,
+      and such perfect kindliness, that I had no more will to resist. I knew I
+      should suffer horribly in spoiling by my coarse amateurishness the
+      miraculous finesse of his performance, but I resigned myself to suffering.
+      I felt towards him as I had felt during the concert: that he must have his
+      way at no matter what cost, that he had already earned the infinite
+      gratitude of the entire world&mdash;in short, I raised him in my soul to a
+      god&rsquo;s throne; and I accepted humbly the great, the incredible honour
+      he did me. And I was right&mdash;a thousand times right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the same moment he was like a charming child to me: such is always
+      in some wise the relation between the creature born to enjoy and the
+      creature born to suffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll try,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;but it will be appalling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I laughed and shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We shall see how appalling it will be,&rsquo; he murmured, as he got the
+      volume of music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fetched a chair for me, and we sat down side by side, he on the stool
+      and I on the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m afraid my chair is too low,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I&rsquo;m sure this stool is too high,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Suppose
+      we exchange.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we both rose to change the positions of the chair and the stool, and
+      our garments touched and almost our faces, and at that very moment there
+      was a loud rap at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I darted away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s that?&rsquo; I cried, low in a fit of terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who&rsquo;s there?&rsquo; he called quietly; but he did not stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We gazed at each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who&rsquo;s there?&rsquo; Diaz demanded again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to the door,&rsquo; I whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor. Diaz
+      went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the corridor,
+      and looked into the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Curious!&rsquo; he commented tranquilly. &lsquo;I see no one.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby to
+      shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of our
+      own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on the
+      small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a
+      half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other room;
+      one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ball, which
+      caught the light of the candle on the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were startled,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You must have a little more of
+      our cordial&mdash;just a spoonful.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He poured out for me an infinitesimal quantity, and the same for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling
+      incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and
+      that did not leave me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat down a second time to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You understand,&rsquo; he explained, staring absently at the double page
+      of music, &lsquo;this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is
+      dark in the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king,
+      her husband, has just gone off hunting&mdash;you will hear the horns dying
+      in the distance&mdash;and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch
+      is burning in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the
+      signal by extinguishing it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment
+      when they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that
+      you will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers.
+      Are you ready?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous. I
+      was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes. The
+      notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was the big
+      black letters at the top, &lsquo;Zweiter Aufzug.&rsquo; And furthermore,
+      on that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the bass
+      of the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and
+      closed my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can&rsquo;t,&rsquo; I whispered, &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t. I would if I
+      could.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gently took my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear companion,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;tell me your name.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason,
+      flashed through my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magdalen,&rsquo; I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and
+      sincere that he believed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see that he was taken aback.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is a holy name and a good name,&rsquo; he said, after a pause. &lsquo;Magda,
+      you are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read
+      it, won&rsquo;t you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me,
+      and play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The
+      influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had
+      resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and
+      lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and
+      dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in
+      conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing
+      out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had
+      ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I
+      abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not
+      disgrace myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Unless it was Chopin,&rsquo; whispered Diaz. &lsquo;No one could ever see
+      two things at once as well as Wagner.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the
+      page, and then the hunters&rsquo; horns were heard departing from the
+      garden of love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a
+      scarce-heard drone, out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the
+      horns died away, so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the
+      future. I surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty
+      which we were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once
+      feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of
+      modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of
+      heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I
+      might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and
+      complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam about
+      our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a
+      background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they
+      were the emotions of love&mdash;the sense of the splendour of love, the
+      headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the
+      finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the
+      universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: &lsquo;Where love is,
+      there is God also.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be
+      approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy, but
+      I held on, and the climax arrived&mdash;a climax which touched the limits
+      of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in coming
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tristan has come into the garden,&rsquo; I muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We plunged forward into the love-scene itself&mdash;the scene in which the
+      miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all
+      miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then
+      occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces,
+      what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what
+      sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what
+      dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous
+      hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common
+      lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more fully than
+      I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a supreme
+      experience, and that another such could not be contained in my life....
+      And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on the
+      music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the left
+      hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar, and
+      becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air
+      fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of
+      the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The
+      whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought gently
+      and persistently against the rhythm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hear the beating of their hearts,&rsquo; Diaz&rsquo; whisper floated over
+      the chords.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the
+      vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands
+      fell from the keyboard. He looked at me&mdash;and with what a glance!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can bear no more,&rsquo; I cried wildly. &lsquo;It is too beautiful,
+      too beautiful!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my
+      face in my hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to me, and bent over me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he whispered, &lsquo;show me your face.&rsquo; With his
+      hands he delicately persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to
+      look on him. &lsquo;How dark and splendid you are, Magda!&rsquo; he said,
+      still holding my hands. &lsquo;How humid and flashing your eyes! And those
+      eyelashes, and that hair&mdash;dark, dark! And that bosom, with its rise
+      and fall! And that low, rich voice, that is like dark wine! And that dress&mdash;dark,
+      and full of mysterious shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known
+      each other in a previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this
+      moment is the fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You
+      were to be mine. You are mine, Magda!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny
+      to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief
+      instant, to this noble and glorious creature, on whom the gods had
+      showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not
+      already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of
+      society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the resistless
+      tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable, and
+      everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we were
+      together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in contact. He
+      held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at once that
+      those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was proud and
+      glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that point I
+      ceased to have volition....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I woke up, perplexed at first, but gradually remembering where I was,
+      and what had occurred to me, the realistic and uncompromising light of
+      dawn had commenced its pitiless inquiry, and it fell on the brass knob,
+      which I had noticed a few hours before, from the other room, and on
+      another brass knob a few feet away. My eyes smarted; I had disconcerting
+      sensations at the back of my head; my hair was brittle, and as though
+      charged with a dull electricity; I was conscious of actual pain, and an
+      incubus, crushing but intangible, lay heavily, like a physical weight, on
+      my heart. After the crest of the wave the trough&mdash;it must be so; but
+      how profound the instinct which complains! I listened. I could hear his
+      faint, regular breathing. I raised myself carefully on one elbow and
+      looked at him. He was as beautiful in sleep as in consciousness; his lips
+      were slightly parted, his cheek exquisitely flushed, and nothing could
+      disarrange that short, curly hair. He slept with the calmness of the
+      natural innocent man, to whom the assuaging of desires brings only
+      content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt that I must go, and hastily, frantically. I could not face him when
+      he woke; I should not have known what to say; I should have been abashed,
+      timid, clumsy, unequal to myself. And, moreover, I had the egoist&rsquo;s
+      deep need to be alone, to examine my soul, to understand it intimately and
+      utterly. And, lastly, I wanted to pay the bill of pleasure at once. I
+      could never tolerate credit; I was like my aunt in that. Therefore, I must
+      go home and settle the account in some way. I knew not how; I knew only
+      that the thing must be done. Diaz had nothing to do with that; it was not
+      his affair, and I should have resented his interference. Ah! when I was in
+      the bill-paying mood, how hard I could be, how stony, how blind! And that
+      morning I was like a Malay running amok.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Think not that when I was ready to depart I stopped and stooped to give
+      him a final tender kiss. I did not even scribble a word of adieu or of
+      explanation. I stole away on tiptoe, without looking at him. This sounds
+      brutal, but it is a truth of my life, and I am writing my life&mdash;at
+      least, I am writing those brief hours of my existence during which I
+      lived. I had always a sort of fierce courage; and as I had proved the
+      courage of my passion in the night, so I proved the courage of my&mdash;not
+      my remorse, not my compunction, not my regret&mdash;but of my intellectual
+      honesty in the morning. Proud and vain words, perhaps. Who can tell? No
+      matter what sympathies I alienate, I am bound to say plainly that, though
+      I am passionate, I am not sentimental. I came to him out of the void, and
+      I went from him into the void. He found me, and he lost me. Between the
+      autumn sunset and the autumn sunrise he had learnt to know me well, but he
+      did not know my name nor my history; he had no clue, no cord to pull me
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I passed into the sitting-room, dimly lighted through the drawn curtains,
+      and there was the score of <i>Tristan</i> open on the piano. Yes; and if I
+      were the ordinary woman I would add that there also were the ashes in the
+      cold grate, and so symbolize the bitterness of memory and bring about a
+      pang. But I have never regretted what is past. The cinders of that fire
+      were to me cinders of a fire and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the doorway I halted. To go into the corridor was like braving the
+      blast of the world, and I hesitated. Possibly I hesitated for a very
+      little thing. Only the women among you will guess it. My dress was dark
+      and severe. I had a simple, dark cloak. But I had no hat. I had no hat,
+      and the most important fact in the universe for me then was that I had no
+      hat. My whole life was changed; my heart and mind were in the throes of a
+      revolution. I dared not imagine what would happen between my aunt and me;
+      but this deficiency in my attire distressed me more than all else. At the
+      other end of the obscure corridor was a chambermaid kneeling down and
+      washing the linoleum. Ah, maid! Would I not have exchanged fates with you,
+      then! I walked boldly up to her. She seemed to be surprised, but she
+      continued to wring out a cloth in her pail as she looked at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it, please?&rsquo; I asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Better than half-past six, ma&rsquo;am,&rsquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was young and emaciated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you got a hat you can lend me? Or I&rsquo;ll buy it from you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘A hat, ma&rsquo;am?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, a hat,&rsquo; I repeated impatiently. And I flushed. &lsquo;I must
+      go out at once, and I&rsquo;ve&mdash;I&rsquo;ve no hat And I can&rsquo;t&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is extraordinary how in a crisis one&rsquo;s organism surprises one. I
+      had thought I was calm and full of self-control, but I had almost no
+      command over my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve got a boat-shaped straw, ma&rsquo;am, if that&rsquo;s any use
+      to you,&rsquo; said the girl kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What she surmised or what she knew I could not say. But I have found out
+      since in my travels, that hotel chambermaids lose their illusions early.
+      At any rate her tone was kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Get it me, there&rsquo;s a good girl,&rsquo; I entreated her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when she brought it, I drew out the imitation pearl pins and put them
+      between my teeth, and jammed the hat on my head and skewered it savagely
+      with the pins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Is that right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It suits you better than it does me, ma&rsquo;am, I do declare,&rsquo;
+      she said. ‘Oh, ma&rsquo;am, this is too much&mdash;I really couldn&rsquo;t!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had given her five shillings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nonsense! I am very much obliged to you,&rsquo; I whispered hurriedly,
+      and ran off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a good girl. I hope she has never suffered. And yet I would not
+      like to think she had died of consumption before she knew what life meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hastened from the hotel. A man in a blue waistcoat with shining black
+      sleeves was moving a large cocoa-nut mat in the hall, and the pattern of
+      the mat was shown in dust on the tiles where the mat had been. He glanced
+      at me absently as I flitted past; I encountered no other person. The
+      square between the hotel and the station was bathed in pure sunshine&mdash;such
+      sunshine as reaches the Five Towns only after a rain-storm has washed the
+      soot out of the air. I felt, for a moment, obscene in that sunshine; but I
+      had another and a stronger feeling. Although there was not a soul in the
+      square, I felt as if I was regarding the world and mankind with different
+      eyes from those of yesterday. Then I knew nothing; to-day I knew
+      everything&mdash;so it seemed to me. It seemed to me that I understood all
+      sorts of vague, subtle things that I had not understood before; that I had
+      been blind and now saw; that I had become kinder, more sympathetic, more
+      human. What these things were that I understood, or thought I understood,
+      I could not have explained. All I felt was that a radical change of
+      attitude had occurred in me. &lsquo;Poor world!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor humanity! My heart melts for you!&rsquo; Thus spoke my soul, pouring
+      itself out. The very stone facings of the station and the hotel seemed
+      somehow to be humanized and to need my compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked with eyes downcast into the station. I had determined to take the
+      train from Knype to Shawport, a distance of three miles, and then to walk
+      up the hill from Shawport through Oldcastle Street to Bursley. I hoped
+      that by such a route at such an hour, I should be unlikely to meet
+      acquaintances, of whom, in any case, I had few. My hopes appeared to be
+      well founded, for the large booking-hall at the station was thronged with
+      a multitude entirely strange to me&mdash;workmen and workwomen and
+      workgirls crowded the place. The first-class and second-class
+      booking-windows were shut, and a long tail of muscular men, pale men,
+      stout women, and thin women pushed to take tickets at the other window. I
+      was obliged to join them, and to wait my turn amid the odour of corduroy
+      and shawl, and the strong odour of humanity; my nostrils were peculiarly
+      sensitive that morning. Some of the men had herculean arms and necks, and
+      it was these who wore pieces of string tied round their trousers below the
+      knee, disclosing the lines of their formidable calves. The women were
+      mostly pallid and quiet. All carried cans, or satchels, or baskets; here
+      and there a man swung lightly on his shoulder a huge bag of tools, which I
+      could scarcely have raised from the ground. Everybody was natural, direct,
+      and eager; and no one attempted to be genteel or refined; no one pretended
+      that he did not toil with his hands for dear life. I anticipated that I
+      should excite curiosity, but I did not. The people had a preoccupied,
+      hurried air. Only at the window itself, when the ticket-clerk, having made
+      me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of his lair to get my ticket,
+      did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and inimical interest in this
+      drone who caused delay to busy people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same
+      on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I
+      could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full
+      tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they
+      employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains
+      generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at
+      one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of
+      <i>our</i> wealth and luxury!&rsquo; I thought; for I was just beginning,
+      at that period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social
+      organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on
+      paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep
+      of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable directness.
+      They frightened me with their vivid humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a
+      compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls
+      were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her
+      dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.
+      From the young man&rsquo;s soiled white jacket under his black coat, I
+      gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and
+      left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession of
+      compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people. None of
+      my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance. It was
+      uncanny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained
+      prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn,
+      musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life.
+      ‘Ah,&rsquo; I thought, &lsquo;you little know what I know! I may appear a
+      butterfly, but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence. I am above
+      you, beyond you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by
+      the turmoil in my heart!&rsquo; And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that
+      they probably knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten
+      more than I had ever learnt. I remembered an absorbing correspondence
+      about the manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the <i>Staffordshire
+      Recorder</i>&mdash;a correspondence which had driven Aunt Constance to
+      conceal the paper after the second week. I guessed that they might smile
+      at the simplicity of my heart could they see it. Meaning of existence!
+      Why, they were reared in it! The naturalness of natural people and of
+      natural acts struck me like a blow, and I withdrew, whipped, into myself.
+      My adventure grew smaller. But I recalled its ecstasies. I dwelt on the
+      romantic perfection of Diaz. It seemed to me amazing, incredible, that
+      Diaz, the glorious and incomparable Diaz, had loved me&mdash;<i>me</i>!
+      out of all the ardent, worshipping women that the world contained. I
+      wondered if he had wakened up, and I felt sorry for him. So far, I had not
+      decided how soon, if at all, I should communicate with him. My mind was
+      incapable of reaching past the next few hours&mdash;the next hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We stopped at a station surrounded by the evidences of that tireless,
+      unceasing, and tremendous manufacturing industry which distinguishes the
+      Five Towns, and I was left alone in the compartment. The train rumbled on
+      through a landscape of fiery furnaces, and burning slag-heaps, and foul
+      canals reflecting great smoking chimneys, all steeped in the mild
+      sunshine. Could the toil-worn agents of this never-ending and gigantic
+      productiveness find time for love? Perhaps they loved quickly and forgot,
+      like animals. Thoughts such as these lurked sinister and carnal, strange
+      beasts in the jungle of my poor brain. Then the train arrived at Shawport,
+      and I was obliged to get out. I say &lsquo;obliged,&rsquo; because I
+      violently wished not to get out. I wished to travel on in that train to
+      some impossible place, where things were arranged differently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The station clock showed only five minutes to seven. I was astounded. It
+      seemed to me that all the real world had been astir and busy for hours.
+      And this extraordinary activity went on every morning while Aunt Constance
+      and I lay in our beds and thought well of ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shivered, and walked quickly up the street. I had positively not noticed
+      that I was cold. I had scarcely left the station before Fred Ryley
+      appeared in front of me. I saw that his face was swollen. My heart
+      stopped. Of course, he would tell Ethel.... He passed me sheepishly
+      without stopping, merely raising his hat, and murmuring the singular
+      words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We&rsquo;re both very, very sorry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What in the name of Heaven could they possibly know, he and Ethel? And
+      what right had he to ...? Did he smile furtively? Fred Ryley had sometimes
+      a strange smile. I reddened, angry and frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The distance between the station and our house proved horribly short. And
+      when I arrived in front of the green gates, and put my hand on the latch,
+      I knew that I had formed no plan whatever. I opened the right-hand gate
+      and entered the garden. The blinds were still down, and the house looked
+      so decorous and innocent in its age. My poor aunt! What a night she must
+      have been through! It was inconceivable that I should tell her what had
+      happened to me. Indeed, under the windows of that house it seemed
+      inconceivable that the thing had happened which had happened.
+      Inconceivable! Grotesque! Monstrous!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But could I lie? Could I rise to the height of some sufficient and kindly
+      lie?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hand drew slightly aside the blind of the window over the porch. I
+      sighed, and went wearily, in my boat-shaped straw, up the gravelled path
+      to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rebecca met me at the door. It was so early that she had not yet put on an
+      apron. She looked tired, as if she had not slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come in, miss,&rsquo; she said weakly, holding open the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me that I did not need this invitation from a servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose you&rsquo;ve all been fearfully upset, wondering where I was,&rsquo;
+      I began, entering the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My adventure appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this
+      buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything one
+      hundredth part so dreadful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, miss; I wasn&rsquo;t upset on account of you. You&rsquo;re always so
+      sensible like. You always know what to do. I knew as you must have stopped
+      the night with friends in Hanbridge on account of the heavy rain, and
+      perhaps that there silly cabman not turning up, and them tramcars all
+      crowded; and, of course, you couldn&rsquo;t telegraph.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This view that I was specially sagacious and equal to emergencies rather
+      surprised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But auntie?&rsquo; I demanded, trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, miss!&rsquo; cried Rebecca, glancing timidly over her shoulder,
+      &lsquo;I want you to come with me into the dining-room before you go
+      upstairs.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She snuffled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the dining-room I went at once to the window to draw up the blinds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not that, not that!&rsquo; Rebecca appealed, weeping. &lsquo;For pity&rsquo;s
+      sake!&rsquo; And she caught my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I then noticed that Lucy was standing in the doorway, also weeping.
+      Rebecca noticed this too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lucy, you go to your kitchen this minute,&rsquo; she said sharply, and
+      then turned to me and began to cry again. &lsquo;Miss Peel&mdash;how can I
+      tell you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you call me Miss Peel?&rsquo; I asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I knew why. The thing flashed over me instantly. My dear aunt was
+      dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve got no aunt,&rsquo; said Rebecca. &lsquo;My poor dear! And
+      you at the concert!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dropped my head and my bosom on the bare mahogany table and cried. Never
+      before, and never since, have I spilt such tears&mdash;hot, painful drops,
+      distilled plenteously from a heart too crushed and torn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There, there!&rsquo; muttered Rebecca. &lsquo;I wish I could have told
+      you different&mdash;less cruel; but it wasn&rsquo;t in me to do it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And she&rsquo;s lying upstairs this very moment all cold and stiff,&rsquo;
+      a wailing voice broke in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Lucy, who could not keep herself away from us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Will you go to your kitchen, my girl!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rebecca drove her off. &lsquo;And the poor thing&rsquo;s not stiff either.
+      Her poor body&rsquo;s as soft as if she was only asleep, and doctor says
+      it will be for a day or two. It&rsquo;s like that when they&rsquo;re took
+      off like that, he says. Oh, Miss Carlotta&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell me all about it before I go upstairs,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had recovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Your poor aunt went to bed just as soon as you were gone, miss,&rsquo;
+      said Rebecca. &lsquo;She would have it she was quite well, only tired. I
+      took her up a cup of cocoa at ten o&rsquo;clock, and she seemed all right,
+      and then I sends Lucy to bed, and I sits up in the kitchen to wait for
+      you. Not a sound from your poor aunt. I must have dropped asleep, miss, in
+      my chair, and I woke up with a start like, and the kitchen clock was near
+      on one. Thinks I, perhaps Miss Carlotta&rsquo;s been knocking and ringing
+      all this time and me not heard, and I rushes to the front door. But of
+      course you weren&rsquo;t there. The porch was nothing but a pool o&rsquo;
+      water. I says to myself she&rsquo;s stopping somewhere, I says. And I felt
+      it was my duty to go and tell your aunt, whether she was asleep or whether
+      she wasn&rsquo;t asleep.... Well, and there she was, miss, with her eyes
+      closed, and as soft as a child. I spoke to her, loud, more than once.
+      &ldquo;Miss Carlotta a&rsquo;n&rsquo;t come,&rdquo; I says. &ldquo;Miss
+      Carlotta a&rsquo;n&rsquo;t come, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; I says. She never
+      stirred. Thinks I, this is queer this is. And I goes up to her and touches
+      her. Chilly! Then I takes the liberty of pushing back your poor aunt&rsquo;s
+      eyelids, and I could but see the whites of her eyes; the eyeballs was gone
+      up, and a bit outwards. Yes; and her poor dear chin was dropped. Thinks I,
+      here&rsquo;s trouble, and Miss Carlotta at the concert. I runs to our
+      bedroom, and I tells Lucy to put a cloak on and fetch Dr. Roycroft.
+      &ldquo;Who for?&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;Never you mind who for!&rdquo; I
+      says, says I. &ldquo;You up and quick. But you can tell the doctor it&rsquo;s
+      missis as is took.&rdquo; And in ten minutes he was here, miss. But it&rsquo;s
+      only across the garden, like. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;she&rsquo;s
+      been dead an hour or more. Failure of the heart&rsquo;s action,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;She died in her sleep,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Thank God she
+      died in her sleep if she was to die, the pure angel!&rdquo; I says. I told
+      the doctor as you were away for the night, miss. And I laid her out, miss,
+      and your poor auntie wasn&rsquo;t my first, either. I&rsquo;ve seen
+      trouble&mdash;I&rsquo;ve&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Rebecca&rsquo;s tears overcame her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll go upstairs with you, miss,&rsquo; she struggled out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thought that flew across my mind was that Doctor Roycroft was very
+      intimate with the Ryleys, and had doubtless somehow informed them of my
+      aunt&rsquo;s death. This explained Fred Ryley&rsquo;s strange words and
+      attitude to me on the way from the station. The young man had been too
+      timid to stop me. The matter was a trifle, but another idea that struck me
+      was not a trifle, though I strove to make it so. My aunt had died about
+      midnight, and it was at midnight that Diaz and I had heard the mysterious
+      knock on his sitting-room door. At the time I had remarked how it
+      resembled my aunt&rsquo;s knock. Occasionally, when the servants overslept
+      themselves, Aunt Constance would go to their rooms in her pale-blue
+      dressing-gown and knock on their door exactly like that. Could it be that
+      this was one of those psychical manifestations of which I had read? Had my
+      aunt, in passing from this existence to the next, paused a moment to warn
+      me of my terrible danger? My intellect replied that a disembodied soul
+      could not knock, and that the phenomenon had been due simply to some guest
+      or servant of the hotel who had mistaken the room, and discovered his
+      error in time. Nevertheless, the instinctive part of me&mdash;that part of
+      us which refuses to fraternize with reason, and which we call the
+      superstitious because we cannot explain it&mdash;would not let go the
+      spiritualistic theory, and during all my life has never quite surrendered
+      it to the attacks of my brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I will go upstairs alone;&rsquo; and I went,
+      leaving my cloak and hat with Rebecca.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already, to my hypersensitive nostrils, there was a slight odour in the
+      darkened bedroom. What lay on the bed, straight and long and thin,
+      resembled almost exactly my aunt as she lived. I forced myself to look on
+      it. Except that the face was paler than usual, and had a curious
+      transparent, waxy appearance, and that the cheeks were a little hollowed,
+      and the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth somewhat deepened,
+      there had been no outward change.... And <i>this</i> once was she! I
+      thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved
+      me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling,
+      sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The shaft
+      of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the same hour,
+      and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled and quailed.
+      I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul also was
+      solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not a moral
+      coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at that calm
+      and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much I had lost.
+      At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt Constance at
+      over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among men for interminable
+      years, and never <i>known</i>! It seemed impossible, shockingly against
+      Nature, that my aunt&rsquo;s existence should have been so! I pitied her
+      profoundly. I felt that essentially she was girlish compared to me. And
+      yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;that which she had kept and which I had given away
+      was precious, too&mdash;indefinably and wonderfully precious! The price of
+      knowledge and of ecstasy seemed heavy to me then. The girl that had gone
+      with Diaz into that hotel apartment had come out no more. She had expired
+      there, and her extinction was the price, Oh, innocence! Oh, divine
+      ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered
+      you! And herein is the woman&rsquo;s tragedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There in that mausoleum I decided that I must never see Diaz again. He was
+      fast in my heart, a flashing, glorious treasure, but I must never see him
+      again. I must devote myself to memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the dressing-table lay a brown-paper parcel which seemed out of place
+      there. I opened it, and it contained a magnificently-bound copy of <i>The
+      Imitation of Christ</i>. Upon the flyleaf was written: &lsquo;To dearest
+      Carlotta on attaining her majority. With fondest love. C.P.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too much; it was overwhelming. I wept again. Soul so kind and pure!
+      The sense of my loss, the sense of the simple, proud rectitude of her
+      life, laid me low.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the
+      conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or
+      flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains
+      loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy, wandering
+      about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of existence;
+      trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the air of your
+      own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night with your
+      yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave the night
+      behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that carry bread
+      and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of fresh water;
+      trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through the landscapes
+      and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting, formidable, and
+      yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your arrogance and your
+      pathos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That little journey from Knype to Shawport had implanted itself painfully
+      in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of
+      life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months had
+      elapsed&mdash;three months of growing misery and despair; three months of
+      tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the
+      exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange
+      fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs of
+      wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy, and no
+      interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there by my
+      secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of the
+      Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been so
+      minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would not.
+      Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been able
+      to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the house; I
+      sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca and the
+      clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as though I had
+      sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week, I cut myself
+      to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a sort of terrible
+      languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony, and yet tortured by
+      my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that no philosophy could
+      stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more than the strapping and
+      the labelling of my trunks that morning after I had slept, dreamfully, in
+      the bed that I should never use again&mdash;the bed that, indeed, was even
+      then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I wept at all, I should have
+      wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks: ‘Miss Peel, passenger to
+      Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,&rsquo; with two thick lines
+      drawn under the &lsquo;Euston.&rsquo; That writing of labels was the
+      climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and all
+      bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some day,
+      when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has been
+      fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved passionately
+      the disfigured hills and valleys of the Five Towns. And as I think of
+      Oldcastle Street, dropping away sleepily and respectably from the Town
+      Hall of Bursley, with the gold angel holding a gold crown on its spire, I
+      vibrate with an inexplicable emotion. What is there in Oldcastle Street to
+      disturb the dust of the soul?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must tell you here that Diaz had gone to South America on a triumphal
+      tour of concerts, lest I forget! I read it in the paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I arrived in London on a February day, about one o&rsquo;clock. And the
+      hall-porter at the Golden Cross Hotel, and the two pale girls in the
+      bureau of the hotel, were sympathetic and sweet to me, because I was young
+      and alone, and in mourning, and because I had great rings round my eyes.
+      It was a fine day, blue and mild. At half-past three I had nothing in the
+      world to do. I had come to London without a plan, without a purpose, with
+      scarcely an introduction; I wished simply to plunge myself into its
+      solitude, and to be alone with my secret fear. I walked out into the
+      street, slowly, like one whom ennui has taught to lose no chance of
+      dissipating time. I neither liked nor disliked London. I had no feelings
+      towards it save one of perplexity. I thought it noisy, dirty, and hurried.
+      Its great name roused no thrill in my bosom. On the morrow, I said, I
+      would seek a lodging, and perhaps write to Ethel Ryley. Meanwhile I
+      strolled up into Trafalgar Square, and so into Charing Cross Road. And in
+      Charing Cross Road&mdash;it was the curst accident of fate&mdash;I saw the
+      signboard of the celebrated old firm of publishers, Oakley and Dalbiac. It
+      is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in this
+      history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt&rsquo;s
+      death I had already written my first novel, <i>The Jest</i>, and sent it
+      to precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful
+      extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew
+      nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had
+      kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely
+      formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance of
+      success, and that they would be prepared to publish it on certain terms,
+      but that I must not expect, etc. By that time I had lost my original
+      sublime faith in the exceeding excellence of my story, and I replied that
+      I preferred to withdraw the book. To this letter I had received no answer.
+      When I saw the famous sign over a doorway the impulse seized me to enter
+      and get the manuscript, with the object of rewriting it. Soon, I
+      reflected, I might not be able to enter; the portals of mankind might be
+      barred to me for a space.... I saw in a flash of insight that my salvation
+      lay in work, and in nothing else. I entered, resolutely. A brougham was
+      waiting at the doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After passing along counters furnished with ledgers and clerks, through a
+      long, lofty room lined with great pigeon-holes containing thousands of
+      books each wrapped separately in white paper, I was shown into what the
+      clerk who acted as chamberlain called the office of the principal. This
+      room, too, was spacious, but so sombre that the electric light was already
+      burning. The first thing I noticed was that the window gave on a wall of
+      white tiles. In the middle of the somewhat dingy apartment was a vast,
+      square table, and at this table sat a pale, tall man, whose youth
+      astonished me&mdash;for the firm of Oakley and Dalbiac was historic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not look up exactly at the instant of my entering, but when he did
+      look up, when he saw me, he stared for an instant, and then sprang from
+      his chair as though magically startled into activity. His age was about
+      thirty, and he had large, dark eyes, and a slight, dark moustache, and his
+      face generally was interesting; he wore a dark gray suit. I was nervous,
+      but he was even more nervous; yet in the moment of looking up he had not
+      seemed nervous. He could not do enough, apparently, to make me feel at
+      ease, and to show his appreciation of me and my work. He spoke
+      enthusiastically of <i>The Jest</i>, begging me neither to suppress it nor
+      to alter it. And, without the least suggestion from me, he offered me a
+      considerable sum of money in advance of royalties. At that time I scarcely
+      knew what royalties were. But although my ignorance of business was
+      complete, I guessed that this man was behaving in a manner highly unusual
+      among publishers. He was also patently contradicting the tenor of his firm&rsquo;s
+      letter to me. I thanked him, and said I should like, at any rate, to
+      glance through the manuscript.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t alter it, Miss Peel, I beg,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;It is
+      &ldquo;young,&rdquo; I know; but it ought to be. I remember my wife said&mdash;my
+      wife reads many of our manuscripts&mdash;by the way&mdash;&rsquo; He went
+      to a door, opened it, and called out, &lsquo;Mary!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A tall and slim woman, extremely elegant, appeared in reply to this
+      appeal. Her hair was gray above the ears, and I judged that she was four
+      or five years older than the man. She had a kind, thin face, with shining
+      gray eyes, and she was wearing a hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary, this is Miss Peel, the author of <i>The Jest</i>&mdash;you
+      remember. Miss Peel, my wife.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman welcomed me with quick, sincere gestures. Her smile was very
+      pleasant, and yet a sad smile. The husband also had an air of quiet,
+      restrained, cheerful sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My wife is frequently here in the afternoon like this,&rsquo; said the
+      principal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; she laughed; &lsquo;it&rsquo;s quite a family affair, and I&rsquo;m
+      almost on the staff. I distinctly remember your manuscript, Miss Peel, and
+      how very clever and amusing it was.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her praise was spontaneous and cordial, but it was a different thing from
+      the praise of her husband. He obviously noticed the difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was just saying to Miss Peel&mdash;&rsquo; he began, with increased
+      nervousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pardon me,&rsquo; I interrupted. &lsquo;But am I speaking to Mr. Oakley
+      or Mr. Dalbiac?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To neither,&rsquo; said he. &lsquo;My name is Ispenlove, and I am the
+      nephew of the late Mr. Dalbiac. Mr. Oakley died thirty years ago. I have
+      no partner.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You expected to see a very old gentleman, no doubt,&rsquo; Mrs. Ispenlove
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘People often do. And Frank is so very young. You live in London?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I have just come up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To stay?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To stay.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Alone?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. My aunt died a few months ago. I am all that is left of my family.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Ispenlove&rsquo;s eyes filled with tears, and she fingered a gold
+      chain that hung from her neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But have you got rooms&mdash;a house?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am at a hotel for the moment.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you have friends?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head. Mr. Ispenlove was glancing rapidly from one to the other
+      of us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear young lady!&rsquo; exclaimed his wife. Then she hesitated, and
+      said: ‘Excuse my abruptness, but do let me beg you to come and have tea
+      with us this afternoon. We live quite near&mdash;in Bloomsbury Square. The
+      carriage is waiting. Frank, you can come?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can come for an hour,&rsquo; said Mr. Ispenlove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted very much to decline, but I could not. I could not disappoint
+      that honest and generous kindliness, with its touch of melancholy. I could
+      not refuse those shining gray eyes. I saw that my situation and my youth
+      had lacerated Mrs. Ispenlove&rsquo;s sensitive heart, and that she wished
+      to give it balm by being humane to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We seemed, so rapid was our passage, to be whisked on an Arabian carpet to
+      a spacious drawing-room, richly furnished, with thick rugs and ample
+      cushions and countless knicknacks and photographs and delicately-tinted
+      lampshades. There was a grand piano by Steinway, and on it Mendelssohn&rsquo;s
+      ‘Songs without Words.&rsquo; The fire slumbered in a curious grate that
+      projected several feet into the room&mdash;such a contrivance I had never
+      seen before. Near it sat Mrs. Ispenlove, entrenched behind a vast copper
+      disc on a low wicker stand, pouring out tea. Mr. Ispenlove hovered about.
+      He and his wife called each other &lsquo;dearest.&rsquo; &lsquo;Ring the
+      bell for me, dearest.&rsquo; &lsquo;Yes, dearest.&rsquo; I felt sure that
+      they had no children. They were very intimate, very kind, and always
+      gently sad. The atmosphere was charmingly domestic, even cosy, despite the
+      size of the room&mdash;a most pleasing contrast to the offices which we
+      had just left. Mrs. Ispenlove told her husband to look after me well, and
+      he devoted himself to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you know,&rsquo; said Mrs. Ispenlove, &lsquo;I am gradually recalling
+      the details of your book, and you are not at all the sort of person that I
+      should have expected to see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But that poor little book isn&rsquo;t <i>me</i>,&rsquo; I answered.
+      &lsquo;I shall never write another like it. I only&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shall you not?&rsquo; Mr. Ispenlove interjected. &lsquo;I hope you will,
+      though.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I only did it to see what I could do. I am going to begin something quite
+      different.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It appears to me,&rsquo; said Mrs. Ispenlove&mdash;&lsquo;and I must
+      again ask you to excuse my freedom, but I feel as if I had known you a
+      long time&mdash;it appears to me that what you want immediately is a
+      complete rest.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you say that?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not look well. You look exhausted and worn out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I blushed as she gazed at me. Could she&mdash;? No. Those simple gray eyes
+      could not imagine evil. Nevertheless, I saw too plainly how foolish I had
+      been. I, with my secret fear, that was becoming less a fear than a
+      dreadful certainty, to permit myself to venture into that house! I might
+      have to fly ignominiously before long, to practise elaborate falsehood, to
+      disappear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Perhaps you are right,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation grew fragmentary, and less and less formal. Mrs.
+      Ispenlove was the chief talker. I remember she said that she was always
+      being thrown among clever people, people who could do things, and that her
+      own inability to do anything at all was getting to be an obsession with
+      her; and that people like me could have no idea of the tortures of
+      self-depreciation which she suffered. Her voice was strangely wistful
+      during this confession. She also spoke&mdash;once only, and quite shortly,
+      but with what naïve enthusiasm!&mdash;of the high mission and influence of
+      the novelist who wrote purely and conscientiously. After this, though my
+      liking for her was undiminished, I had summed her up. Mr. Ispenlove
+      offered no commentary on his wife&rsquo;s sentiments. He struck me as
+      being a reserved man, whose inner life was intense and sufficient to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; I reflected, as Mrs. Ispenlove, with an almost motherly
+      accent, urged me to have another cup of tea, &lsquo;if you knew me, if you
+      knew me, what would you say to me? Would your charity be strong enough to
+      overcome your instincts?&rsquo; And as I had felt older than my aunt, so I
+      felt older than Mrs. Ispenlove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I left, but I had to promise to come again on the morrow, after I had seen
+      Mr. Ispenlove on business. The publisher took me down to my hotel in the
+      brougham (and I thought of the drive with Diaz, but the water was not
+      streaming down the windows), and then he returned to his office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without troubling to turn on the light in my bedroom, I sank sighing on to
+      the bed. The events of the afternoon had roused me from my terrible
+      lethargy, but now it overcame me again. I tried to think clearly about the
+      Ispenloves and what the new acquaintance meant for me; but I could not
+      think clearly. I had not been able to think clearly for two months. I
+      wished only to die. For a moment I meditated vaguely on suicide, but
+      suicide seemed to involve an amount of complicated enterprise far beyond
+      my capacity. It amazed me how I had managed to reach London. I must have
+      come mechanically, in a heavy dream; for I had no hope, no energy, no
+      vivacity, no interest. For many weeks my mind had revolved round an awful
+      possibility, as if hypnotized by it, and that monotonous revolution seemed
+      alone to constitute my real life. Moreover, I was subject to recurring
+      nausea, and to disconcerting bodily pains and another symptom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This must end!&rsquo; I said, struggling to my feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I summoned the courage of an absolute disgust. I felt that the power which
+      had triumphed over my dejection and my irresolution and brought me to
+      London might carry me a little further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving the hotel, I crossed the Strand. Innumerable omnibuses were
+      crawling past. I jumped into one at hazard, and the conductor put his arm
+      behind my back to support me. He was shouting, &lsquo;Putney, Putney,
+      Putney!&rsquo; in an absent-minded manner: he had assisted me to mount
+      without even looking at me. I climbed to the top of the omnibus and sat
+      down, and the omnibus moved off. I knew not where I was going; Putney was
+      nothing but a name to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where to, lady?&rsquo; snapped the conductor, coming upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Putney,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little bell rang and he gave me a ticket. The omnibus was soon full. A
+      woman with a young child shared my seat. But the population of the roof
+      was always changing. I alone remained&mdash;so it appeared to me. And we
+      moved interminably forward through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under
+      the mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an
+      arc-lamp, I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they
+      were nothing but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were
+      changed. A score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he
+      never looked at me again. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve done with you,&rsquo; his back
+      seemed to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly
+      succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark;
+      and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary
+      window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the tragic
+      romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to be
+      almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London.
+      Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction
+      with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations,
+      elbowing each other&mdash;No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I
+      felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth, my
+      inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the very
+      things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in that
+      despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of life,
+      the beauty of life&rsquo;s exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like a
+      red-hot iron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We crossed a great river by a great bridge&mdash;a mysterious and mighty
+      stream; and then the streets closed in on us again. And at last, after
+      hours and hours, the omnibus swerved into a dark road and stopped&mdash;stopped
+      finally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Putney!&rsquo; cried the conductor, like fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I descended. Far off, at the end of the vista of the dark road, I saw a
+      red lamp. I knew that in large cities a red lamp indicated a doctor: it
+      was the one useful thing that I did know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I approached the red lamp, cautiously, on the other side of the street.
+      Then some power forced me to cross the street and open a wicket. And in
+      the red glow of the lamp I saw an ivory button which I pushed. I could
+      plainly hear the result; it made me tremble. I had a narrow escape of
+      running away. The door was flung wide, and a middle-aged woman appeared in
+      the bright light of the interior of the house. She had a kind face. It is
+      astounding, the number of kind faces one meets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Is the doctor in?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would have given a year of my life to hear her say &lsquo;No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, miss,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Will you step in?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Events seemed to be moving all too rapidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I passed into a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the
+      surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano&mdash;scales,
+      played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters
+      of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano
+      ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall man
+      in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into the surgery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-evening, madam,&rsquo; he said gruffly. &lsquo;Won&rsquo;t you sit
+      down?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&mdash;I&mdash;I want to ask you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put a chair for me, and I dropped into it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; he said, after a moment. &lsquo;You felt as if you might
+      faint, didn&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. The tears came into my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I thought so,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll just give you a draught,
+      if you don&rsquo;t mind.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He busied himself behind me, and presently I was drinking something out of
+      a conical-shaped glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My heart beat furiously, but I felt strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to tell me, doctor,&rsquo; I spoke firmly, &lsquo;whether I am
+      about to become a mother.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah?&rsquo; he answered interrogatively, and then he hummed a fragment of
+      an air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have lost my husband,&rsquo; I was about to add; but suddenly I scorned
+      such a weakness and shut my lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Since when&mdash;&rsquo; the doctor began.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I heard him saying. &lsquo;You have been quite mistaken. But I
+      am not surprised. Such mistakes are frequently made&mdash;a kind of
+      auto-suggestion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mistaken!&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not prevent the room running round me as I reclined on the sofa;
+      and I fainted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the night, safely in my room again at the hotel, I wondered whether
+      that secret fear, now exorcised, had not also been a hope. I wondered....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART II &mdash; THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And now I was twenty-six.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the
+      lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of
+      avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary
+      narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as
+      for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire,
+      and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder
+      magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star; it
+      held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so that if
+      my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night in my
+      drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy world.
+      This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have loved I
+      have loved much....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama of
+      my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I had
+      achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had gradually
+      passed away, and a new creature had replaced her&mdash;a creature rapidly
+      developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of an
+      extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my face
+      had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given me
+      fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the
+      woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have
+      prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no
+      merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the
+      accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy,
+      and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage is
+      reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a
+      caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in
+      the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone
+      lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants
+      to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once
+      aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of
+      another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her
+      from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is a
+      form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which
+      will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule which I
+      made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I lost
+      much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And since
+      elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a
+      convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I surrounded
+      myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is the business
+      of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some persons after
+      knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others after reading
+      my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these persons lacked
+      perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself, I had naturally
+      sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest thinking, kindness of
+      heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search had not been
+      unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes
+      and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which Vicary,
+      the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were perhaps a
+      dozen guests assembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent
+      visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the
+      usual quaint Vicary details&mdash;such as the solemn warning whisper of an
+      equerry in Vicary&rsquo;s ear as he walked backwards, &lsquo;<i>Mind the
+      edge of the carpet&rsquo;;</i> and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a
+      little hysterically&mdash;all save Vicary, whose foible was never to
+      laugh. But immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those
+      disconcerting, involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a
+      chill hint of autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was
+      over in an instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended
+      that everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the
+      beginning of the downfall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be
+      interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from
+      a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality
+      in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since. I
+      joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and her
+      daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance. The
+      rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis Alcar,
+      who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano. Here was
+      another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what negligence had I
+      allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across to him, penitent,
+      and glad to leave the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are only two fundamental differences in the world&mdash;the
+      difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age.
+      Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before
+      mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of
+      my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy,
+      men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are
+      like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling
+      and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They
+      gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their
+      folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties enfeebled
+      but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of all luxuries&mdash;pretty
+      women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare man, quietly proud of
+      his age, his ability to go out in the evening unattended, his amorous
+      past, and his contributions to the history of English printing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows
+      on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me. And his
+      eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out. He
+      opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of
+      rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and
+      what they say becomes accordingly oracular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pallor suits you,&rsquo; he piped gallantly, and then added: &lsquo;But
+      do not carry it to extremes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Am I so pale, then?&rsquo; I faltered, trying to smile naturally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined
+      it like a connoisseur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said at length. &lsquo;What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naïve question with a
+      strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living
+      as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, &lsquo;Does she
+      really live without love? What does she conceal?&rsquo; I have read this
+      interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis,
+      would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so
+      mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that
+      he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted
+      to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor&rsquo;s freedom. Moreover,
+      we had an affectionate regard for each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Love is the matter!&rsquo; I might have passionately cried out to him,
+      had we been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I
+      thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile,
+      but thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was my sixth novel in five years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With you,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;work is simply a drug.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I expostulated, &lsquo;how do you know that?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,&rsquo;
+      he proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. &lsquo;Some women take to
+      morphia, others take to work.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘On the contrary,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;I have quite determined to do no
+      more work for twelve months.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Seriously?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Seriously.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then you mean to give yourself time to love?&rsquo; he murmured, as it
+      were with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow
+      features was intensified by an enigmatic smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo; I laughed encouragingly. &lsquo;Why not? What do you
+      advise?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I advise it,&rsquo; he said positively. &lsquo;I advise it. You have
+      already wasted the best years.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The best?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You have
+      nothing to learn about love!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated
+      their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the ordeal;
+      I tried to clutch my clothes about me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing
+      critically at his chandeliers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does love bring happiness?&rsquo; I asked Lord Francis, carefully
+      ignoring his remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For forty years,&rsquo; he quavered, &lsquo;I made love to every pretty
+      woman I met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent.
+      return on my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I
+      certainly did not get even that in happiness. I got it in&mdash;other
+      ways.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And if you had to begin afresh?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his
+      bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I would do the same again,&rsquo; he whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Would you?&rsquo; I said, looking up at him. &lsquo;Truly?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely
+      hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through
+      this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one
+      involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last
+      spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted
+      confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive
+      meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the
+      eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with
+      admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is the title of the new book?&rsquo; he demanded casually, sinking
+      into a chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Burning Sappho</i>,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;But the title is very
+      misleading.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Bright star!&rsquo; he exclaimed, taking my hand. &lsquo;With such a
+      title you will surely beat the record of the Good Dame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hsh!&rsquo; I enjoined him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal&mdash;or
+      to display&mdash;his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs.
+      Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that
+      impeccable <i>doyenne</i> of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had
+      captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound
+      problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of
+      them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her
+      dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen
+      thousand pounds a year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother&rsquo;s world, and she had
+      apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she
+      was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply
+      sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in
+      her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so
+      anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just
+      be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how
+      much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I remember,&rsquo; Lord Francis was saying. &lsquo;It was at St.
+      Malo. And what did you think of the Breton peasant?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh,&rsquo; said Jocelyn, &lsquo;mamma has not yet allowed us to study the
+      condition of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new
+      Settlement.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It must be very exhausting, my dear child,&rsquo; said Lord Francis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I came to ask you to play something,&rsquo; the child appealed to me.
+      &lsquo;I have never heard you play, and everyone says&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Jocelyn, my pet,&rsquo; the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis
+      floated across the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What, mamma?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal to
+      playing.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I
+      resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I
+      was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became violently
+      active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt murderous
+      towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I said, with
+      sugar in my voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the
+      mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening
+      phrase of Chopin&rsquo;s first Ballade, that composition so laden with
+      formidable memories&mdash;begun it without thinking and without
+      apprehension&mdash;showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the
+      silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands
+      filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I
+      saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one
+      of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind
+      and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed
+      unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and
+      vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess. And
+      then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in a
+      truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience, my
+      trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were
+      stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love, to
+      whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman expecting
+      her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous; a woman
+      with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who was at
+      once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I called my
+      dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and say that he,
+      too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the instrument of the god?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and
+      smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my
+      gaze suddenly to the keyboard. &lsquo;You too!&rsquo; I thought sadly,
+      &lsquo;You too!... One day! One day even you will know what life is, and
+      the look in those innocent eyes will never be innocent again!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of
+      the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and stopped.
+      It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my longing
+      for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My fingers
+      stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey me; my
+      pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting. And then I
+      became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed and anxious
+      faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my hands. It was
+      useless to fight further; the battle was lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will not play any more,&rsquo; I said quickly. &lsquo;I ought not to
+      have tried to play from memory. Excuse me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I
+      could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and
+      the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Poor thing!&rsquo; murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. &lsquo;Do sit
+      down, dear.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Won&rsquo;t you have something to drink?&rsquo; said Vicary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am perfectly all right,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m only sorry that
+      my memory is not what it used to be.&rsquo; And I persisted in standing
+      for a few moments by the mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of
+      a face as white as milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano,
+      frightened by she knew not what, like a young child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,&rsquo; said Lord Francis
+      shakily. He had followed me. &lsquo;She has wisely decided to take a long
+      holiday. Good-bye, my dear.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We
+      shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had
+      ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even
+      Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not come!
+      My secret was my own&mdash;and his. And no one should surprise it unless
+      we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as they
+      filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the right to
+      be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently woman of the
+      world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some
+      lustre ware in the further drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,&rsquo; I said,
+      approaching her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,&rsquo; replied Mrs. Sardis. &lsquo;The
+      carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk
+      with you. Do you permit?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be delighted,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are sure you are well enough?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There is nothing whatever the matter with me,&rsquo; I answered slowly
+      and distinctly. &lsquo;Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I
+      told Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared,
+      that she might retire to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis,
+      naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still
+      furtively wandered to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear co-worker,&rsquo; she began, and hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I encouraged her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her matron&rsquo;s lips together:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its
+      honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists
+      have in the work of regenerating the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing
+      to be said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I wonder,&rsquo; Mrs. Sardis continued, &lsquo;if you have ever realized
+      what a power <i>you</i> are in England and America to-day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Power!&rsquo; I echoed. &lsquo;I have done nothing but try to write as
+      honestly and as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,&rsquo; Mrs. Sardis said.
+      &lsquo;And I needn&rsquo;t tell you that I am a warm admirer of your
+      talent, and that I rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Surely,&rsquo; I interrupted her coldly, &lsquo;you are not taking the
+      trouble to tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous
+      Anglo-Saxon public!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,&rsquo; she protested.
+      &lsquo;I personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though
+      their originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but
+      there exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly
+      objects to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion,
+      ignorant opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to
+      employ the word &ldquo;immoral.&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What, then?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a
+      motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of
+      the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal
+      life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find in
+      it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mrs. Sardis!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;What do you mean?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this
+      incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth;
+      and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had
+      received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and
+      detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the
+      conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive
+      that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then, as
+      suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the painful
+      earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I&mdash;what were we but two
+      groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one mystery
+      into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our characters? Mrs.
+      Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a natural force, as I
+      was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat of the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What do you mean?&rsquo; I repeated quietly. &lsquo;Tell me exactly what
+      you mean.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the
+      freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles
+      were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours,
+      I should find myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To put it in as few words as possible,&rsquo; said she, &lsquo;I mean
+      your relations with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We
+      had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself
+      a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque of
+      existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a
+      moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked
+      steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t affect not to understand?&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I assented with a motion of the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Many persons say there is a&mdash;a liaison between you,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And do you think that?&rsquo; I asked quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,&rsquo;
+      she said solemnly. &lsquo;No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and
+      I brought Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only
+      heard the gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne
+      in upon me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not
+      everyone would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content
+      to talk among themselves.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About me? Oh!&rsquo; It was the expression of an almost physical pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What can you expect them to do?&rsquo; asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘True,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship
+      with her&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let me tell you&rsquo;&mdash;I stopped her&mdash;&lsquo;that not a single
+      word has ever passed between me and&mdash;and the man you mean, that
+      everybody might not hear. Not a single word!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dearest girl,&rsquo; she exclaimed; &lsquo;how glad I am! How glad I am!
+      Now I can take measures to&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo; I resumed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like
+      Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her own
+      code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply to every
+      conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast stolid
+      London that hemmed me in&mdash;of attempting to explain to such an
+      excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would not
+      answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a church
+      steeple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; I said, rising, &lsquo;except that I thank you. Be sure
+      that I am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very
+      unpleasant to you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, virtuously happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You made it easy,&rsquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I
+      hated kissing women!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No more need be said,&rsquo; she almost whispered, as I put my hand on
+      the knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair
+      fame of our calling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and
+      I opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove,
+      haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief
+      stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified silence
+      down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,&rsquo; I reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of
+      sensations caused by Ispenlove&rsquo;s presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Without a word, we passed together into the drawing-room, and I closed the
+      door. Ispenlove stood leaning against the piano, as though intensely
+      fatigued; he crushed his gibus with an almost savage movement, and then
+      bent his large, lustrous black eyes absently on the flat top of it. His
+      thin face was whiter even than usual, and his black hair, beard, and
+      moustache all dishevelled; the collar of his overcoat was twisted, and his
+      dinner-jacket rose an inch above it at the back of the neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to greet him, but I could not trust my lips. And I saw that he,
+      too, was trying in vain to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length I said, with that banality which too often surprises us in
+      supreme moments:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it? Do you know that your tie is under your ear?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as I uttered these words, my voice, breaking of itself and in defiance
+      of me, descended into a tone which sounded harsh and inimical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; he murmured, lifting his eyes to mine, &lsquo;if you turn
+      against me to-night, I shall&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Turn against you!&rsquo; I cried, shocked. &lsquo;Let me help you with
+      your overcoat!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went near him, meaning to take his overcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s finished between Mary and me,&rsquo; he said, holding me with
+      his gaze. ‘It&rsquo;s finished. I&rsquo;ve no one but you now; and I&rsquo;ve
+      come&mdash;I&rsquo;ve come&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped. We read one another&rsquo;s eyes at arm&rsquo;s length, and
+      all the sorrow and pity and love that were in each of us rose to our eyes
+      and shone there. I shivered with pleasure when I saw his arms move, and
+      then he clutched and dragged me to him, and I hid my glowing face on his
+      shoulder, in the dear folds of his overcoat, and I felt his lips on my
+      neck. And then, since neither of us was a coward, we lifted our heads, and
+      our mouths met honestly and fairly, and, so united, we shut our eyes for
+      an eternal moment, and the world was not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the avowal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave up my soul to him in that long kiss; all that was me, all that was
+      most secret and precious in me, ascended and poured itself out through my
+      tense lips, and was received by him. I kissed him with myself, with the
+      entire passionate energy of my being&mdash;not merely with my mouth. And
+      if I sighed, it was because I tried to give him more&mdash;more than I had&mdash;and
+      failed. Ah! The sensation of his nearness, the warmth of his face, the
+      titillation of his hair, the slow, luxurious intake of our breaths, the
+      sweet cruelty of his desperate clutch on my shoulders, the glimpses of his
+      skin through my eyelashes when I raised ever so little my eyelids! Pain
+      and joy of life, you were mingled then!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remembered that I was a woman, and disengaged myself and withdrew from
+      him. I hated to do it; but I did it. We became self-conscious. The
+      brilliant and empty drawing-room scanned us unfavourably with all its
+      globes and mirrors. How difficult it is to be natural in a great crisis!
+      Our spirits clamoured for expression, beating vainly against a thousand
+      barred doors of speech. There was so much to say, to explain, to define,
+      and everything was so confused and dizzily revolving, that we knew not
+      which door to open first. And then I think we both felt, but I more than
+      he, that explanations and statements were futile, that even if all the
+      doors were thrown open together, they would be inadequate. The
+      deliciousness of silence, of wonder, of timidity, of things guessed at and
+      hidden....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It makes me afraid,&rsquo; he murmured at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To be loved like that.... Your kiss ... you don&rsquo;t know.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled almost sadly. As if I did not know what my kiss had done! As if I
+      did not know that my kiss had created between us the happiness which
+      brings ruin!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You <i>do</i> love me?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Say it, say it!&rsquo; he pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘More than I can ever show you,&rsquo; I said proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Honestly,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t imagine what you have been
+      able to see in me. I&rsquo;m nothing&mdash;I&rsquo;m nobody&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Foolish boy!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;You are you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The profound significance of that age-worn phrase struck me for the first
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rushed to me at the word &lsquo;boy,&rsquo; and, standing over me, took
+      my hand in his hot hand. I let it lie, inert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you haven&rsquo;t always loved me. I have always loved <i>you</i>,
+      from the moment when I drove with you, that first day, from the office to
+      your hotel. But you haven&rsquo;t always loved me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then when did you&mdash;? Tell me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was dull at first&mdash;I could not see. But when you told me that the
+      end of <i>Fate and Friendship</i> was not as good as I could make it&mdash;do
+      you remember, that afternoon in the office?&mdash;and how reluctant you
+      were to tell me, how afraid you were to tell me?&mdash;your throat went
+      dry, and you stroked your forehead as you always do when you are nervous&mdash;There!
+      you are doing it now, foolish boy!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I seized his left arm, and gently pulled it down from his face. Oh,
+      exquisite moment!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was brave of you to tell me&mdash;very brave! I loved you for telling
+      me. You were quite wrong about the end of that book. You didn&rsquo;t see
+      the fine point of it, and you never would have seen it&mdash;and I liked
+      you, somehow, for not seeing it, because it was so feminine&mdash;but I
+      altered the book to please you, and when I had altered it, against my
+      conscience, I loved you more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s incredible! incredible!&rsquo; he muttered, half to himself.
+      &lsquo;I never hoped till lately that you would care for me. I never dared
+      to think of such a thing. I knew you oughtn&rsquo;t to! It passes
+      comprehension.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is just what love does,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no,&rsquo; he went on quickly; &lsquo;you don&rsquo;t understand; you
+      can&rsquo;t understand my feelings when I began to suspect, about two
+      months ago, that, after all, the incredible had happened. I&rsquo;m
+      nothing but your publisher. I can&rsquo;t talk. I can&rsquo;t write. I can&rsquo;t
+      play. I can&rsquo;t do anything. And look at the men you have here! I&rsquo;ve
+      sometimes wondered how often you&rsquo;ve been besieged&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘None of them was like you,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Perhaps that is why I
+      have always kept them off.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I raised my eyes and lips, and he stooped and kissed me. He wanted to take
+      me in his arms again, but I would not yield myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Be reasonable,&rsquo; I urged him. &lsquo;Ought we not to think of our
+      situation?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He loosed me, stammering apologies, abasing himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I ought to leave you, I ought never to see you again.&rsquo; He spoke
+      roughly. ‘What am I doing to you? You who are so innocent and pure!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I entreat you not to talk like that,&rsquo; I gasped, reddening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I must talk like that,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;I must talk like
+      that. You had everything that a woman can desire, and I come into your
+      life and offer you&mdash;what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I <i>have</i> everything a woman can desire,&rsquo; I corrected him
+      softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he breathed. &lsquo;If I bring you disaster, you will
+      forgive me, won&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My happiness will only cease with your love,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Happiness!&rsquo; he repeated. &lsquo;I have never been so happy as I am
+      now; but such happiness is terrible. It seems to me impossible that such
+      happiness can last.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Faint heart!&rsquo; I chided him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is for you I tremble,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;If&mdash;if&mdash;&rsquo;
+      He stopped. &lsquo;My darling, forgive me!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How I pitied him! How I enveloped him in an effluent sympathy that rushed
+      warm from my heart! He accused himself of having disturbed my existence.
+      Whereas, was it not I who had disturbed his? He had fought against me, I
+      knew well, but fate had ordained his defeat. He had been swept away; he
+      had been captured; he had been caught in a snare of the high gods. And he
+      was begging forgiveness, he who alone had made my life worth living! I
+      wanted to kneel before him, to worship him, to dry his tears with my hair.
+      I swear that my feelings were as much those of a mother as of a lover. He
+      was ten years older than me, and yet he seemed boyish, and I an aged woman
+      full of experience, as he sat there opposite to me with his wide,
+      melancholy eyes and restless mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wonderful, is it not,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that we should be talking
+      like this to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wonderful!&rsquo; I responded. &lsquo;But yesterday we talked with our
+      eyes, and our eyes did not say Mr. or Miss. Our eyes said&mdash;Ah, what
+      they said can never be translated into words!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable
+      curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun. Could it be true that
+      Heaven had made that fine creature&mdash;noble and modest, nervous and
+      full of courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things,
+      fine and delicate&mdash;could it be true that Heaven had made him and then
+      given him to me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves
+      constituted perfection? Oh, wonder, wonder! Oh, miraculous bounty which I
+      had not deserved! This thing had happened to me, of all women! How it
+      showed, by comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my
+      worldly splendour! I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled
+      interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had
+      almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water
+      and the palm. And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade.
+      Wonderful!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why were you so late to-night?&rsquo; I asked abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Late?&rsquo; he replied absently. &lsquo;Is it late?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both looked at the clock. It was yet half an hour from midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course it isn&rsquo;t&mdash;not <i>very</i>,&rsquo; I said. I was
+      forgetting that. Everybody left so early.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why was that?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by
+      reason of his failure to appear. He glanced at me with tender amaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I am fortunate to-day,&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;Was it not lucky
+      they left when they did? Suppose you had arrived, in that state, dearest
+      man, and burst into a room full of people? What would they have thought?
+      Where should I have looked?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m so sorry. I forgot it was your
+      evening. I must have forgotten. I forgot everything, except that I was
+      bound to see you at once, instantly, with all speed.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor boy! He was like a bird fluttering in my hand. Millions of women must
+      have so pictured to themselves the men who loved them, and whom they
+      loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But still, you <i>were</i> rather late, you know,&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not ask me why,&rsquo; he begged, with an expression of deep pain on
+      his face. &lsquo;I have had a scene with Mary. It would humiliate me to
+      tell you&mdash;to tell even you&mdash;what passed between us. But it is
+      over. Our relations in the future can never, in any case, be more than
+      formal.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A spasm of fierce jealousy shot through me&mdash;jealousy of Mary, my
+      friend Mary, who knew him with such profound intimacy that they could go
+      through a scene together which was &lsquo;humiliating.&rsquo; I saw that
+      my own intimacy with him was still crude with the crudity of newness, and
+      that only years could mellow it. Mary, the good, sentimental Mary, had
+      wasted the years of their marriage&mdash;had never understood the value of
+      the treasure in her keeping. Why had they always been sad in their house?
+      What was the origin of that resigned and even cheerful gloom which had
+      pervaded their domestic life, and which I had remarked on my first visit
+      to Bloomsbury Square? Were these, too, mysteries that I must not ask my
+      lover to reveal? Resentment filled me. I came near to hating Mary, not
+      because she had made him unhappy&mdash;oh no!&mdash;but because she had
+      had the priority in his regard, and because there was nothing about him,
+      however secret and recondite, that I could be absolutely sure of the sole
+      knowledge of. She had been in the depths with him. I desired fervently
+      that I also might descend with him, and even deeper. Oh, that I might have
+      the joy and privilege of humiliation with him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall ask you nothing, dearest,&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had risen from my seat and gone to him, and was lightly touching his
+      hair with my fingers. He did not move, but sat staring into the fire.
+      Somehow, I adored him because he made no response to the fondling of my
+      hand. His strange acceptance of the caress as a matter of course gave me
+      the illusion that I was his wife, and that the years had mellowed our
+      intimacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke my name slowly and distinctly, savouring it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I answered softly and obediently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta! Listen! Our two lives are in our hands at this moment&mdash;this
+      moment while we talk here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His rapt eyes had not stirred from the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I feel it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What are we to do? What shall we decide to do?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He slowly turned towards me. I lowered my glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, you do, Carlotta,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;You do know.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice trembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary and I are such good friends,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;That is what
+      makes it so&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no, no!&rsquo; he objected loudly. His nervousness had suddenly
+      increased. ‘Don&rsquo;t, for God&rsquo;s sake, begin to argue in that way!
+      You are above feminine logic. Mary is your friend. Good. You respect her;
+      she respects you. Good. Is that any reason why our lives should be ruined?
+      Will that benefit Mary? Do I not tell you that everything has ceased
+      between us?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The idea of being false to Mary&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There&rsquo;s no question of being false. And if there was, would you be
+      false to love rather than to friendship? Between you and me there is love;
+      between Mary and me there is not love. It isn&rsquo;t her fault, nor mine,
+      least of all yours. It is the fault of the secret essence of existence.
+      Have you not yourself written that the only sacred thing is instinct? Are
+      we, or are we not, to be true to ourselves?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You see,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;your wife is so sentimental. She would be
+      incapable of looking at the affair as&mdash;as we do; as I should in her
+      place.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that my protests were insincere, and that all my heart and brain
+      were with him, but I could not admit this frankly. Ah! And I knew also
+      that the sole avenue to peace and serenity, not to happiness, was the path
+      of renunciation and of obedience to the conventions of society, and that
+      this was precisely the path which we should never take. And on the horizon
+      of our joy I saw a dark cloud. It had always been there, but I had refused
+      to see it. I looked at it now steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; he groaned, &lsquo;if we are to be governed by Mary&rsquo;s
+      sentimentality&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear love,&rsquo; I whispered, &lsquo;what do you want me to do?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The only possible, honest, just thing. I want you to go away with me, so
+      that Mary can get a divorce.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke sternly, as it were relentlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does she guess&mdash;about me?&rsquo; I asked, biting my lip, and looking
+      away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not yet. Hasn&rsquo;t the slightest notion, I&rsquo;m sure. But I&rsquo;ll
+      tell her, straight and fair.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dearest friend,&rsquo; I said, after a silence. &lsquo;Perhaps I know
+      more of the world than you think. Perhaps I&rsquo;m a girl only in years
+      and situation. Forgive me if I speak plainly. Mary may prove
+      unfaithfulness, but she cannot get a decree unless she can prove other
+      things as well.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stroked his forehead. As for me, I shuddered with agitation. He walked
+      across the room and back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he said, putting his white face close to mine like an
+      actor. &lsquo;I will prove whether your love for me is great enough. I
+      have struck her. I struck her to-night in the presence of a servant. And I
+      did it purposely, in cold blood, so that she might be able to prove
+      cruelty. Ah! Have I not thought it all out? Have I not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sob, painfully escaping, shook my whole frame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And this was before you had&mdash;had spoken to me!&rsquo; I said
+      bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not myself, but some strange and frigid force within me uttered those
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is what love will do. That is the sort of thing love drives one to,&rsquo;
+      he cried despairingly. &lsquo;Oh! I was not sure of you&mdash;I was not
+      sure of you. I struck her, on the off chance.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sank on the sofa and wept passionately, unashamed, like a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not bear it. My heart would have broken if I had watched, without
+      assuaging, my boy&rsquo;s grief an instant longer than I did. I sprang to
+      him. I took him to my breast. I kissed his eyes until the tears ceased to
+      flow. Whatever it was or might be, I must share his dishonour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor girl!&rsquo; he said at length. &lsquo;If you had refused me, if
+      you had even judged me, I intended to warn you plainly that it meant my
+      death; and if that failed, I should have gone to the office and shot
+      myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not say such things,&rsquo; I entreated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is true. The revolver is in my pocket. Ah! I have made you cry!
+      You&rsquo;re frightened! But I&rsquo;m not a brute; I&rsquo;m only a
+      little beside myself. Pardon me, angel!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour. He did not understand
+      me. He did not suspect the risk he had run. If I had hesitated to
+      surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should
+      never have surrendered. I knew myself well enough to know that. I had a
+      conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have
+      parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man! But I forgave him.
+      Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;we shall leave everything. You grasp it?&mdash;everything.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I replied. &lsquo;Of all the things we have now, we shall
+      have nothing but ourselves.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see you
+      again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He meant
+      what he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is no sacrifice for me,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;The sacrifice would
+      be not to give up all in exchange for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We shall be exiles,&rsquo; he went on, &lsquo;until the divorce business
+      is over. And then perhaps we shall creep back&mdash;shall we?&mdash;and
+      try to find out how many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;We shall come back. They all do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What do you mean?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thousands have done what we are going to do,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And
+      all of them have thought that their own case was different from the other
+      cases.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And a few have been happy. A few have not regretted the price. A few have
+      retained the illusion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Illusion? Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see that my heart&rsquo;s treasure was ruffled. He clasped my hand
+      tenaciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen,&rsquo; I
+      answered quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous passion.
+      &lsquo;In me there are two beings&mdash;myself and the observer of myself.
+      It is the novelist&rsquo;s disease, this duplication of personality. When
+      I said illusion, I meant the supreme illusion of love. Is it not an
+      illusion? I have seen it in others, and in exactly the same way I see it
+      in myself and I see it in you. Will it last?&mdash;who knows? None can
+      tell.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he expostulated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No one can foresee the end of love,&rsquo; I said, with an exquisite
+      gentle sorrow. &lsquo;But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as
+      yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible
+      years of disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night
+      alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and his
+      disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely round my
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Call it illusion if you like,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Words are nothing. I
+      only know that for me it will be eternal. I only know that my one desire
+      is to be with you always, never to leave you, not to miss a moment of you;
+      to have you for mine, openly, securely. Carlotta, where shall we go?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We must travel, mustn&rsquo;t we?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Travel?&rsquo; he repeated, with an air of discontent. &lsquo;Yes. But
+      where to?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Travel,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;See things. See the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I had thought we might find some quiet little place,&rsquo; he said
+      wistfully, and as if apologetically, where we could be alone, undisturbed,
+      some spot where we could have ourselves wholly to ourselves, and go walks
+      into mountains and return for dinner; and then the long, calm evenings!
+      Dearest, our honeymoon!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our honeymoon! I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human
+      nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I not
+      talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and killed by
+      a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence! Inexperienced as I
+      was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the experience of my
+      impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very thought of
+      calculation would have been abhorrent. But I saw, I felt, I lived through
+      in a few seconds the interminable and monotonous length of those calm
+      days, and especially those calm evenings succeeding each other with a
+      formidable sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And I knew
+      that our love&mdash;miraculously sweet as it was&mdash;probably was not
+      greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive the
+      cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the
+      survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman
+      must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she
+      might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme,
+      devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely
+      and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion, for her, is a
+      campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart,
+      and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the
+      beautiful plant must not be exposed to hazard. Suppose it sickened, such a
+      love as ours&mdash;what then? The misery of hell, the torture of the
+      damned! Only its rich and ample continuance could justify us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear,&rsquo; I said submissively, &lsquo;I shall leave everything to
+      you. The idea of travelling occurred to me; that was all. I have never
+      travelled further than Cannes. Still, we have all our lives before us.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We will travel,&rsquo; he said unselfishly. &lsquo;We&rsquo;ll go round
+      the world&mdash;slowly. I&rsquo;ll get the tickets at Cook&rsquo;s
+      to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, dearest, if you would rather&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no! In any case we shall always have our evenings.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course we shall. Dearest, how good you are!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I wish I was,&rsquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was glad, then, that I had never allowed my portrait to appear in a
+      periodical. We could not prevent the appearance in American newspapers of
+      heralding paragraphs, but the likelihood of our being recognised was
+      sensibly lessened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you start soon?&rsquo; he asked. &lsquo;Can you be ready?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Any time. The sooner the better, now that it is decided.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not regret? We have decided so quickly. Ah! you are the merest
+      girl, and I have taken advantage&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put my hand over his mouth. He seized it, and kept it there and kissed
+      it, and his ardent breath ran through my fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What about your business?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall confide it to old Tate&mdash;tell him some story&mdash;he knows
+      quite as much about it as I do. To-morrow I will see to all that. The day
+      after, shall we start? No; to-morrow night. To-morrow night, eh? I&rsquo;ll
+      run in to-morrow and tell you what I&rsquo;ve arranged. I must see you
+      to-morrow, early.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Do not come before lunch.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not before lunch! Why?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was surprised. But I had been my own mistress for five years, with my
+      own habits, rules, privacies. I had never seen anyone before lunch. And
+      to-morrow, of all days, I should have so much to do and to arrange. Was
+      this man to come like an invader and disturb my morning? So felt the
+      celibate in me, instinctively, thoughtlessly. That deep-seated objection
+      to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common, I
+      think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a rich
+      dress, and donning the <i>peignoir</i> of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a
+      way which is an eternal enigma to men.... Then I saw, in a sudden flash,
+      that I had renounced my individual existence, that I had forfeited my
+      habits and rules, and privacies, that I was a man&rsquo;s woman. And the
+      passionate lover in me gloried in this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come as soon as you like, dearest friend,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nobody except Mary will know anything till we are actually gone,&rsquo;
+      he remarked. &lsquo;And I shall not tell her till the last thing.
+      Afterwards, won&rsquo;t they chatter! God! Let &rsquo;em.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘They are already chattering,&rsquo; I said. And I told him about Mrs.
+      Sardis. ‘When she met you on the landing,&rsquo; I added, &lsquo;she drew
+      her own conclusions, my poor, poor boy!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was furious. I could see he wanted to take me in his arms and protect
+      me masculinely from the rising storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All that is nothing,&rsquo; I soothed him. &lsquo;Nothing. Against it, we
+      have our self-respect. We can scorn all that.&rsquo; And I gave a short,
+      contemptuous laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Darling!&rsquo; he murmured. &lsquo;You are more than a woman.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I hope not.&rsquo; And I laughed again, but unnaturally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had risen; I leaned back in a large cushioned chair; we looked at each
+      other in silence&mdash;a silence that throbbed with the heavy pulse of an
+      unutterable and complex emotion&mdash;pleasure, pain, apprehension, even
+      terror. What had I done? Why had I, with a word&mdash;nay, without a word,
+      with merely a gesture and a glance&mdash;thrown my whole life into the
+      crucible of passion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act,
+      like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as an
+      infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may shatter?
+      Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when I gazed into those
+      eyes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose I must go,&rsquo; he said disconsolately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and the next instant the clock struck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he urged himself, &lsquo;I must go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent down, put his hands on the arms of the chair, and kissed me
+      violently, twice. The fire that consumes the world ran scorchingly through
+      me. Every muscle was suddenly strained into tension, and then fell slack.
+      My face flushed; I let my head slip sideways, so that my left cheek was
+      against the back of the chair. Through my drooping eyelashes I could see
+      the snake-like glitter of his eyes as he stood over me. I shuddered and
+      sighed. I was like someone fighting in vain against the sweet seduction of
+      an overwhelming and fatal drug. I wanted to entreat him to go away, to rid
+      me of the exquisite and sinister enchantment. But I could not speak. I
+      shut my eyes. This was love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment I heard the soft sound of his feet on the carpet. I opened
+      my eyes. He had stepped back. When our glances met he averted his face,
+      and went briskly for his overcoat, which lay on the floor by the piano. I
+      rose freed, re-established in my self-control. I arranged his collar,
+      straightened his necktie with a few touches, picked up his hat, pushed
+      back the crown, which flew up with a noise like a small explosion, and
+      gave it into his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;To-morrow morning, eh? I shall get to
+      know everything necessary before I come. And then we will fix things up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can let myself out,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made a vague gesture, intended to signify that I could not think of
+      permitting him to let himself out. We left the drawing-room, and passed,
+      with precautions of silence, to the front-door, which I gently opened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-night, then,&rsquo; he whispered formally, almost coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Too late for the lift,&rsquo; I murmured out there with him in the vast,
+      glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above
+      us and below us into the mysterious unseen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted steps,
+      firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the baluster.
+      When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below me, he
+      stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he resolutely
+      dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I had glimpses
+      of parts of his figure as he passed story after story. Then I heard his
+      tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the distant clatter of
+      double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was love, at last&mdash;the reality of love! He would have killed
+      himself had he failed to win me&mdash;killed himself! With the novelist&rsquo;s
+      habit, I ran off into a series of imagined scenes&mdash;the dead body,
+      with the hole in the temples and the awkward attitude of death; the
+      discovery, the rush for the police, the search for a motive, the inquest,
+      the rapid-speaking coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself,
+      cold and impassive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said....
+      But he lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his
+      spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was
+      inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my
+      mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous,
+      bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and
+      injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense
+      fact that he was mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How calm I am!&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized
+      the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give the
+      brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind
+      factitiously active. And I began at once to anticipate Frank&rsquo;s
+      coming, and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had
+      determined that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and
+      it occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which had,
+      in fact, wakened me. Save on special occasions, I was never wakened, and
+      Emmeline and my maid had injunctions not to come to me until I rang. My
+      thoughts ran instantly to Frank. He had arrived thus early, merely because
+      he could not keep away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How extremely indiscreet of him!&rsquo; I thought. &lsquo;What detestable
+      prevarications with Emmeline this will lead to! I cannot possibly be ready
+      in time if he is to be in and out all day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing him quickly, and the idea of his
+      splendid impatience, drenched me with joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; I called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emmeline entered in that terrible mauve dressing-gown which I had been
+      powerless to persuade her to discard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So sorry to disturb you,&rsquo; said Emmeline, feeling her loose golden
+      hair with one hand, &lsquo;but Mrs. Ispenlove has called, and wants to see
+      you at once. I&rsquo;m afraid something has happened.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Mrs</i>. Ispenlove?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My voice shook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Yvonne came to my room and told me that Mrs. Ispenlove was here, and
+      was either mad or very unwell, and would I go to her? So I got up at once.
+      What shall I do? Perhaps it&rsquo;s something very serious. Not half-past
+      eight, and calling like this!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let her come in here immediately,&rsquo; I said, turning my head on the
+      pillow, so that Emmeline should not see the blush which had spread over my
+      face and my neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was inevitable that a terrible and desolating scene must pass between
+      Mary Ispenlove and myself. I could not foresee how I should emerge from
+      it, but I desperately resolved that I would suffer the worst without a
+      moment&rsquo;s delay, and that no conceivable appeal should induce me to
+      abandon Frank. I was, as I waited for Mrs. Ispenlove to appear, nothing
+      but an embodied and fierce instinct to guard what I had won. No
+      consideration of mercy could have touched me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She entered with a strange, hysterical cry:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had asked her long ago to use my Christian name&mdash;long before I ever
+      imagined what would come to pass between her husband and me; but I always
+      called her Mrs. Ispenlove. The difference in our ages justified me. And
+      that morning the difference seemed to be increased. I realized, with a
+      cruel justice of perception quite new in my estimate of her, that she was
+      old&mdash;an old woman. She had never been beautiful, but she was tall and
+      graceful, and her face had been attractive by the sweetness of the mouth
+      and the gray beneficence of the eyes; and now that sweetness and that
+      beneficence appeared suddenly to have been swallowed up in the fatal
+      despair of a woman who discovers that she has lived too long. Gray hair,
+      wrinkles, crow&rsquo;s-feet, tired eyes, drawn mouth, and the terrible
+      tell-tale hollow under the chin&mdash;these were what I saw in Mary
+      Ispenlove. She had learnt that the only thing worth having in life is
+      youth. I possessed everything that she lacked. Surely the struggle was
+      unequal. Fate might have chosen a less piteous victim. I felt profoundly
+      sorry for Mary Ispenlove, and this sorrow was stronger in me even than the
+      uneasiness, the false shame (for it was not a real shame) which I
+      experienced in her presence. I put out my hands towards her, as it were,
+      involuntarily. She sprang to me, took them, and kissed me as I lay in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How beautiful you look&mdash;like that!&rsquo; she exclaimed wildly, and
+      with a hopeless and acute envy in her tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why&mdash;&rsquo; I began to protest, astounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will you think of me, disturbing you like this? What will you think?&rsquo;
+      she moaned. And then her voice rose: &lsquo;I could not help it; I couldn&rsquo;t,
+      really. Oh, Carlotta! you are my friend, aren&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing grew swiftly clear to me: that she was as yet perfectly unaware
+      of the relations between Frank and myself. My brain searched hurriedly for
+      an explanation of the visit. I was conscious of an extraordinary relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are my friend, aren&rsquo;t you?&rsquo; she repeated insistently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her
+      friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in
+      the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an
+      understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart
+      bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness
+      that I could not bring myself to reply directly, &lsquo;Yes, I am your
+      friend.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We have known each other a long time,&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There was no one else I could come to,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pass my
+      dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What are you going to do?&rsquo; she demanded fearfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and
+      then we will talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You&rsquo;ll be more
+      yourself after a cup of tea.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How young I was then! I remember my naïve satisfaction in this exhibition
+      of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be&mdash;hard in spite
+      of the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for
+      her. And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I
+      regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will
+      read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she
+      did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one
+      is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one,
+      defenceless as a rabbit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are very kind to me,&rsquo; she said, putting her cup on the
+      mantelpiece with a nervous rattle; &lsquo;and I need it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell me,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;Tell me&mdash;what I can do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace. A distance between us
+      seemed necessary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can&rsquo;t do anything, my dear,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Only I was
+      obliged to talk to someone, after all the night. It&rsquo;s about Frank.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mr. Ispenlove!&rsquo; I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not
+      very well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. He has left me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why? What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates
+      me. But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation. Still, could I
+      have behaved differently?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t understand unless I begin a long time ago,&rsquo; said
+      Mary Ispenlove. &lsquo;Carlotta, my married life has been awful&mdash;awful&mdash;a
+      tragedy. It has been a tragedy both for him and for me. But no one has
+      suspected it; we have hidden it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. I, however, had suspected it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just twenty years&mdash;yes, twenty&mdash;since I fell in
+      love,&rsquo; she proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With&mdash;Frank,&rsquo; I assumed. I lay back in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;With another man. That was in Brixton, when I
+      was a girl living with my father; my mother was dead. He was a barrister&mdash;I
+      mean the man I was in love with. He had only just been called to the Bar.
+      I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him. Certainly he
+      did; he could not help seeing it. I could not conceal it. Of course I can
+      understand now that it flattered him. Naturally it did. Any man is
+      flattered when a woman falls in love with him. And my father was rich, and
+      so on, and so on. We saw each other a lot. I hoped, and I kept on hoping.
+      Some people even said it was a match, and that I was throwing myself away.
+      Fancy&mdash;throwing myself away&mdash;me!&mdash;who have never been good
+      for anything! My father did not care much for the man; said he was selfish
+      and grasping. Possibly he was; but I was in love with him all the same.
+      Then I met Frank, and Frank fell in love with me. You know how obstinate
+      Frank is when he has once set his mind on a thing. Frank determined to
+      have me; and my father was on his side. I would not listen. I didn&rsquo;t
+      give him so much as a chance to propose to me. And this state of things
+      lasted for quite a long time. It wasn&rsquo;t my fault; it wasn&rsquo;t
+      anybody&rsquo;s fault.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just so,&rsquo; I agreed, raising my head on one elbow, and listening
+      intently. It was the first sincere word I had spoken, and I was glad to
+      utter it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The man I had fallen in love with came nearer. He was decidedly tempted.
+      I began to feel sure of him. All I wanted was to marry him, whether he
+      loved me a great deal or only a little tiny bit. I was in that state. Then
+      he drew away. He scarcely ever came to the house, and I seemed never to be
+      able to meet him. And then one day my father showed me something in the <i>Morning
+      Post</i>. It was a paragraph saying that the man I was in love with was
+      going to marry a woman of title, a widow and the daughter of a peer. I
+      soon found out she was nearly twice his age. He had done it to get on. He
+      was getting on very well by himself, but I suppose that wasn&rsquo;t fast
+      enough for him. Carlotta, it nearly killed me. And I felt so sorry for
+      him. You can&rsquo;t guess how sorry I felt for him. I felt that he didn&rsquo;t
+      know what he had missed. Oh, how happy I should have made him! I should
+      have lived for him. I should have done everything for him. I should have
+      ... You don&rsquo;t mind me telling you all this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made an imploring gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a shame!&rsquo; I burst out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, my dear!&rsquo; she said, &lsquo;he didn&rsquo;t love me. One can&rsquo;t
+      blame him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And then?&rsquo; I questioned, with an eagerness that I tried to
+      overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Frank was so persevering. And&mdash;and&mdash;I <i>did</i> admire his
+      character. A woman couldn&rsquo;t help admiring his character, could she?
+      And, besides, I honestly thought I had got over the other affair, and that
+      I was in love with him. I refused him once, and then I married him. He was
+      as mad for me as I had been for the other one. Yes, I married him, and we
+      both imagined we were going to be happy.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And why haven&rsquo;t you been?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This is my shame,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;I could not forget the other
+      one. We soon found that out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Did you <i>talk</i> about it, you&mdash;and Frank?&rsquo; I put in,
+      amazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh <i>no</i>!&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;It was never mentioned&mdash;never
+      once during fifteen years. But he knew; and I knew that he knew. The other
+      one was always between us&mdash;always, always, always! The other one was
+      always in my heart. We did our best, both of us; but it was useless. The
+      passion of my life was&mdash;it was invincible. I <i>tried</i> to love
+      Frank. I could only like him. Fancy his position! And we were helpless.
+      Because, you know, Frank and I are not the sort of people that go and make
+      a scandal&mdash;at least, that was what I thought,&rsquo; she sighed.
+      &lsquo;I know different now. Well, he died the day before yesterday.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Crettell. He had just been made a judge. He was the youngest judge on the
+      bench&mdash;only forty-six.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Was <i>that</i> the man?&rsquo; I exclaimed; for Crettell&rsquo;s
+      character was well known in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That was the man. Frank came in yesterday afternoon, and after he had
+      glanced at the paper, he said: &ldquo;By the way, Crettell&rsquo;s dead.&rdquo;
+      I did not grasp it at first. He repeated: &ldquo;Crettell&mdash;he&rsquo;s
+      dead.&rdquo; I burst into tears. I couldn&rsquo;t help it. And, besides, I
+      forgot. Frank asked me very roughly what I was crying for. You know, Frank
+      has much changed these last few months. He is not as nice as he used to
+      be. Excuse me talking like this, my dear. Something must be worrying him.
+      Well, I said as well as I could while I was crying that the news was a
+      shock to me. I tried to stop crying, but I couldn&rsquo;t. I sobbed. Frank
+      threw down the paper and stamped on it, and he swore. He said: &ldquo;I
+      know you&rsquo;ve always been in love with the brute, but you needn&rsquo;t
+      make such a damn fuss about it.&rdquo; Oh, my dear, how can I tell you
+      these things? That angered me. This was the first time in our married life
+      that Crettell had been even referred to, and it seemed to me that Frank
+      put all the hatred of fifteen years into that single sentence. Why was I
+      angry? I didn&rsquo;t know. We had a scene. Frank lost his temper, for the
+      first time that I remember, and then he recovered it. He said quietly he
+      couldn&rsquo;t stand living with me any more; and that he had long since
+      wanted to leave me. He said he would never see me again. And then one of
+      the servants came in, and&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing. I sent her out. And&mdash;and&mdash;Fran didn&rsquo;t come home
+      last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence. I could find nothing to say, and Mary had hidden her
+      face. I utterly forgot myself and my own state in this extraordinary
+      hazard of matrimony. I could only think of Mary&rsquo;s grief&mdash;a
+      grief which, nevertheless, I did not too well comprehend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then you love him now?&rsquo; I ventured at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You love him&mdash;is that so?&rsquo; I pursued. &lsquo;Tell me honestly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I spoke as gently as it was in me to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Honestly!&rsquo; she cried, looking up. &lsquo;Honestly! No! If I loved
+      him, could I have been so upset about Crettell? But we have been together
+      so long. We are husband and wife, Carlotta. We are so used to each other.
+      And generally he is so good. We&rsquo;ve got on very well, considering.
+      And now he&rsquo;s left me. Think of the scandal! It will be terrible!
+      terrible! A separation at my age! Carlotta, it&rsquo;s unthinkable! He&rsquo;s
+      mad&mdash;that&rsquo;s the only explanation. Haven&rsquo;t I tried to be a
+      good wife to him? He&rsquo;s never found fault with me&mdash;never! And I&rsquo;m
+      sure, as regards him, I&rsquo;ve had nothing to complain of.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He will come back,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;He&rsquo;ll think things over
+      and see reason.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was just as though I heard some other person saying these words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But he didn&rsquo;t come <i>home</i> last night,&rsquo; Mary insisted.
+      &lsquo;What the servants are thinking I shouldn&rsquo;t like to guess.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What does it matter what the servants think?&rsquo; I said brusquely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it <i>does</i> matter. He didn&rsquo;t come <i>home</i>. He must have
+      slept at a hotel. Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for
+      him! Oh, Carlotta, you&rsquo;re too young to understand what I feel! You&rsquo;re
+      very clever, and you&rsquo;re very sympathetic; but you can&rsquo;t see
+      things as I see them. Wait till you&rsquo;ve been married fifteen years.
+      The scandal! The shame! And me only too anxious to be a good wife, and to
+      keep our home as it should be, and to help him as much as I can with my
+      stupid brains in his business!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can understand perfectly,&rsquo; I asserted. &lsquo;I can understand
+      perfectly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I could. The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her
+      ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her,
+      was only too plainly apparent. She was&mdash;and naturally, sincerely,
+      instinctively&mdash;the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the
+      conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her
+      quiet resentment. But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief
+      and her resentment. Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her
+      resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified.
+      I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must
+      always be inferior to emotion. I am intensely proud of my ability to see,
+      then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary
+      Ispenlove&rsquo;s attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural,
+      exactly as free from artificiality, as my own. Can you go outside Nature?
+      Is not the polity of Londoners in London as much a part of Nature as the
+      polity of bees in a hive?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not a word for fifteen years, and then an explosion like that!&rsquo; she
+      murmured, incessantly recurring to the core of her grievance. &lsquo;I did
+      wrong to marry him, I know. But I <i>did</i> marry him&mdash;I <i>did</i>
+      marry him! We are husband and wife. And he goes off and sleeps at a hotel!
+      Carlotta, I wish I had never been born! What will people say? I shall
+      never be able to look anyone in the face again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He will come back,&rsquo; I said again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you think so?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time she caught at the straw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And you will settle down gradually; and
+      everything will be forgotten.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said that because it was the one thing I could say. I repeat that I had
+      ceased to think of myself. I had become a spectator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It can never be the same between us again,&rsquo; Mary breathed sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment Emmeline Palmer plunged, rather than came, into my bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Miss Peel&mdash;&rsquo; she began, and then stopped, seeing Mrs.
+      Ispenlove by the fireplace, though she knew that Mrs. Ispenlove was with
+      me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Anything wrong?&rsquo; I asked, affecting a complete calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that the good creature had lost her head, as she sometimes
+      did, when I gave her too much to copy, or when the unusual occurred in no
+      matter what form. The excellent Emmeline was one of my mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mr. Ispenlove is here,&rsquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None of us spoke for a few seconds. Mary Ispenlove stared at me, but
+      whether in terror or astonishment, I could not guess. This was one of the
+      most dramatic moments of my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell Mr. Ispenlove that I can see nobody,&rsquo; I said, glancing at the
+      wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And, Emmeline,&rsquo; I stopped her. &lsquo;Do not tell him anything
+      else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surely the fact that Frank had called to see me before nine o&rsquo;clock
+      in the morning, surely my uneasy demeanour, must at length arouse
+      suspicion even in the simple, trusting mind of his wife!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How does he know that I am here?&rsquo; Mary asked, lowering her voice,
+      when Emmeline had shut the door; &lsquo;I said nothing to the servants.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was saved. Her own swift explanation of his coming was, of course, the
+      most natural in the world. I seized on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Never mind how,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;Perhaps he was watching outside
+      your house, and followed you. The important thing is that he has come. It
+      proves,&rsquo; I went on, inventing rapidly, &lsquo;that he has changed
+      his mind and recognises his mistake. Had you not better go back home as
+      quickly as you can? It would have been rather awkward for you to see him
+      here, wouldn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, yes,&rsquo; she said, her eyes softening and gleaming with joy.
+      &lsquo;I will go. Oh, Carlotta! how can I thank you? You are my best
+      friend.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have done nothing,&rsquo; I protested. But I had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are a dear!&rsquo; she exclaimed, coming impulsively to the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat up. She kissed me fervently. I rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Has Mr. Ispenlove gone?&rsquo; I asked Emmeline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; said Emmeline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In another minute his wife, too, had departed, timorously optimistic,
+      already denying in her heart that it could never be the same between them
+      again. She assuredly would not find Frank at home. But that was nothing. I
+      had escaped! I had escaped!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Will you mind getting dressed at once?&rsquo; I said to Emmeline. &lsquo;I
+      should like you to go out with a letter and a manuscript as soon as
+      possible.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I got a notebook and began to write to Frank. I told him all that had
+      happened, in full detail, writing hurriedly, in gusts, and abandoning that
+      regard for literary form which the professional author is apt to preserve
+      even in his least formal correspondence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘After this,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;we must give up what we decided last
+      night. I have no good reason to offer you. The situation itself has not
+      been changed by what I have learnt from your wife. I have not even
+      discovered that she loves you, though in spite of what she says, which I
+      have faithfully told you, I fancy she does&mdash;at any rate, I think she
+      is beginning to. My ideas about the rights of love are not changed. My
+      feelings towards you are not changed. Nothing is changed. But she and I
+      have been through that interview, and so, after all, everything is
+      changed; we must give it all up. You will say I am illogical. I am&mdash;perhaps.
+      It was a mere chance that your wife came to me. I don&rsquo;t know why she
+      did. If she had not come, I should have given myself to you. Supposing she
+      had written&mdash;I should still have given myself to you. But I have been
+      in her presence. I have been with her. And then the thought that you
+      struck her, for my sake! She said nothing about that. That was the one
+      thing she concealed. I could have cried when she passed it over. After
+      all, I don&rsquo;t know whether it is sympathy for your wife that makes me
+      change, or my self-respect&mdash;say my self-pride; I&rsquo;m a proud
+      woman. I lied to her through all that interview.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, if I had only had the courage to begin by telling her outright and
+      bluntly that you and I had settled that I should take her place! That
+      would have stopped her. But I hadn&rsquo;t. And, besides, how could I
+      foresee what she would say to me and how she would affect me? No; I lied
+      to her at every point. My whole attitude was a lie. Supposing you and I
+      had gone off together before I had seen her, and then I had met her
+      afterwards, I could have looked her in the face&mdash;sorrowfully, with a
+      heart bleeding&mdash;but I could have looked her in the face. But after
+      this interview&mdash;no; it would be impossible for me to face her with
+      you at my side! Don&rsquo;t I put things crudely, horribly! I know
+      everything that you will say. You could not bring a single argument that I
+      have not thought of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘However, arguments are nothing. It is how I feel. Fate is against us.
+      Possibly I have ruined your life and mine without having done anything to
+      improve hers; and possibly I have saved us all three from terrible misery.
+      Possibly fate is with us. No one can say. I don&rsquo;t know what will
+      happen in the immediate future; I won&rsquo;t think about it. If you do as
+      I wish, if you have any desire to show me that I have any influence over
+      you, you will go back to live with your wife. Where did you sleep last
+      night? Or did you walk the streets? You must not answer this letter at
+      present. Write to me later. Do not try to see me. I won&rsquo;t see you.
+      We <i>mustn&rsquo;t</i> meet. I am going away at once. I don&rsquo;t think
+      I could stand another scene with your wife, and she would be sure to come
+      again to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Try to resume your old existence. You can do it if you try. Remember that
+      your wife is no more to blame than you are, or than I am. Remember that
+      you loved her once. And remember that I act as I am acting because there
+      is no other way for me. <i>C&rsquo;est plus fort que moi,</i> I am going
+      to Torquay. I let you know this&mdash;I hate concealment; and anyway you
+      would find out. But I shall trust you not to follow me. I shall trust you.
+      You are saying that this is a very different woman from last night. It is.
+      I haven&rsquo;t yet realized what my feelings are. I expect I shall
+      realize them in a few days. I send with this a manuscript. It is nothing.
+      I send it merely to put Emmeline off the scent, so that she shall think
+      that it is purely business. Now I shall <i>trust</i> you.&mdash;C. P.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I commenced the letter without even a &lsquo;Dear Frank,&rsquo; and I
+      ended it without an affectionate word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should like you to take these down to Mr. Ispenlove&rsquo;s office,&rsquo;
+      I said to Emmeline. &lsquo;Ask for him and give them to him yourself.
+      There&rsquo;s no answer. He&rsquo;s pretty sure to be in. But if he isn&rsquo;t,
+      bring them back. I&rsquo;m going to Torquay by that eleven-thirty express&mdash;isn&rsquo;t
+      it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Eleven-thirty-five,&rsquo; Emmeline corrected me coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she returned, she said she had seen Mr. Ispenlove and given him the
+      letter and the parcel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had acquaintances in Torquay, but I soon discovered that the place was
+      impossible for me. Torquay is the chosen home of the proprieties, the
+      respectabilities, and all the conventions. Nothing could dislodge them
+      from its beautiful hills; the very sea, as it beats primly, or with a
+      violence that never forgets to be discreet, on the indented shore,
+      acknowledges their sway. Aphrodite never visits there; the human race is
+      not continued there. People who have always lived within the conventions
+      go there to die within the conventions. The young do not flourish there;
+      they escape from the soft enervation. Since everybody is rich, there are
+      no poor. There are only the rich, and the servitors, who get rich. These
+      two classes never mix&mdash;even in the most modest villas they live on
+      opposite sides of the house. The life of the town is a vast conspiracy on
+      the part of the servitors to guard against any danger of the rich taking
+      all their riches to heaven. You can, if you are keen enough, detect
+      portions of this conspiracy in every shop. On the hills each abode stands
+      in its own undulating grounds, is approached by a winding drive of at
+      least ten yards, is wrapped about by the silence of elms, is flanked by
+      greenhouses, and exudes an immaculate propriety from all its windows. In
+      the morning the rich descend, the servitors ascend; the bosky and
+      perfectly-kept streets on the hills are trodden with apologetic celerity
+      by the emissaries of the servitors. The one interminable thoroughfare of
+      the town is graciously invaded by the rich, who, if they have not walked
+      down for the sake of exercise, step cautiously from their carriages,
+      enunciate a string of orders ending with the name of a house, and
+      cautiously regain their carriages. Each house has a name, and the pride of
+      the true servitor is his ability to deduce instantly from the name of the
+      house the name of its owner and the name of its street. In the afternoon a
+      vast and complicated game of visiting cards is played. One does not begin
+      to be serious till the evening; one eats then, solemnly and fully, to the
+      faint accompaniment of appropriate conversation. And there is no relief,
+      no surcease from utmost conventionality. It goes on night and day; it
+      hushes one to sleep, and wakes one up. On all but the strongest minds it
+      casts a narcotizing spell, so that thought is arrested, and originality,
+      vivacity, individuality become a crime&mdash;a shame that must be hidden.
+      Into this strange organism I took my wounded heart, imagining that an
+      atmosphere of coma might help to heal it. But no! Within a week my state
+      had become such that I could have cried out in mid Union Street at noon:
+      &lsquo;Look at me with your dead eyes, you dead who have omitted to get
+      buried, I am among you, and I am an adulteress in spirit! And my body has
+      sinned the sin! And I am alive as only grief can be alive. I suffer the
+      torture of vultures, but I would not exchange my lot with yours!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And one morning, after a fortnight, I thought of Monte Carlo. And the
+      vision of that place, which I had never seen, too voluptuously lovely to
+      be really beautiful, where there are no commandments, where
+      unconventionality and conventionality fight it out on even terms, where
+      the adulteress swarms, and the sin is for ever sinned, and wounded hearts
+      go about gaily, where it is impossible to distinguish between virtue and
+      vice, and where Toleration in fine clothes is the supreme social goddess&mdash;the
+      vision of Monte Carlo, as a place of refuge from the exacerbating and
+      moribund and yet eternal demureness of Torquay, appealed to me so
+      persuasively that I was on my way to the Riviera in two hours. In that
+      crisis of my life my moods were excessively capricious. Let me say that I
+      had not reached Exeter before I began to think kindly of Torquay. What was
+      Torquay but an almost sublime example of what the human soul can
+      accomplish in its unending quest of an ideal?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I left England on a calm, slate-coloured sea&mdash;sea that more than any
+      other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes wonderful
+      the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me the
+      mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters of
+      the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical
+      curiosity concerning each other, and then, mutually forgotten, took wing,
+      and spread out into the unknown. I think that as I stood near the hot
+      funnel, breasting the wind, and vacantly staring at the smooth expanse
+      that continually slipped from under us, I understood myself better than I
+      had done before. My soul was at peace&mdash;the peace of ruin after a
+      conflagration, but peace. Sometimes a little flame would dart out&mdash;flame
+      of regret, revolt, desire&mdash;and I would ruthlessly extinguish it. I
+      felt that I had nothing to live for, that no energy remained to me, no
+      interest, no hope. I saw the forty years of probable existence in front of
+      me flat and sterile as the sea itself. I was coldly glad that I had
+      finished my novel, well knowing that it would be my last. And the immense
+      disaster had been caused by a chance! Why had I been born with a vein of
+      overweening honesty in me? Why should I have sacrificed everything to the
+      pride of my conscience, seeing that consciences were the product of
+      education merely? Useless to try to answer the unanswerable! What is, is.
+      And circumstances are always at the mercy of character. I might have been
+      wrong, I might have been right; no ethical argument could have bent my
+      instinct. I did not sympathize with myself&mdash;I was too proud and stern&mdash;but
+      I sympathized with Frank. I wished ardently that he might be consoled&mdash;that
+      his agony might not be too terrible. I wondered where he was, what he was
+      doing. I had received no letter from him, but then I had instructed that
+      letters should not be forwarded to me. My compassion went out after him,
+      followed him into the dark, found him (as I hoped), and surrounded him
+      like an alleviating influence. I thought pityingly of the ravage that had
+      been occasioned by our love. His home was wrecked. Our lives were equally
+      wrecked. Our friends were grieved; they would think sadly of my closed
+      flat. Even the serio-comic figure of Emmeline touched me; I had paid her
+      three months&rsquo; wages and dismissed her. Where would she go with her
+      mauve <i>peignoir</i>? She was over thirty, and would not easily fall into
+      another such situation. Imagine Emmeline struck down by a splinter from
+      our passionate explosion! Only Yvonne was content at the prospect of
+      revisiting France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Ah! Qu&rsquo;on est bien ici, madame</i>!&rsquo; she said, when we had
+      fixed ourselves in the long and glittering <i>train de grand luxe</i> that
+      awaited us at Calais. Once I had enjoyed luxury, but now the futility of
+      all this luxurious cushioned arrogance, which at its best only
+      corresponded with a railway director&rsquo;s dreams of paradise, seemed to
+      me pathetic. Could it detain youth, which is for ever flying? Could it
+      keep out sorrow? Could it breed hope? As the passengers, so correct in
+      their travelling costumes, passed to and fro in the corridors with the
+      subdued murmurs always adopted by English people when they wish to prove
+      that they are not excited, I thought: &lsquo;Does it matter how you and I
+      go southwards? The pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs,
+      what can it help us that this should be sated? We cannot leave our souls
+      behind.&rsquo; The history of many of these men and women was written on
+      their faces. I wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the
+      mirrors which were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had
+      always seen. Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response.
+      Was I not part of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life
+      is good? On every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh
+      flowers that had been torn from the South, and would return there dead,
+      having ministered to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is
+      good. I hated that. I could almost have wished that I was travelling
+      southwards in a slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate
+      does not wear a mask. Great grief is democratic, levelling&mdash;not
+      downwards but upwards. It strips away the inessential, and makes brothers.
+      It is impatient with all the unavailing inventions which obscure the
+      brotherhood of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I descended from the train restlessly&mdash;there were ten minutes to
+      elapse before the departure&mdash;and walked along the platform, glimpsing
+      the faces in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and
+      napery in the two restaurant-cars: wistful all alike, I thought&mdash;flowers
+      and faces! How fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was! Opposite the door of
+      the first car stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery
+      of the International Sleeping Car Company. He wore white gloves, like all
+      the servants on the train: it was to foster the illusion; it was part of
+      what we paid for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘When is luncheon served?&rsquo; I asked him idly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs. He
+      contemplated me for an instant. He seemed to add me up, antipathetically,
+      as a product of Western civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Soon as the train starts, madam,&rsquo; he replied suavely, in good
+      American, and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the
+      platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you!&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the
+      African bush. I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression that
+      had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it was.
+      &lsquo;And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like
+      me,&rsquo; I mused. A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker
+      were busy with coal and grease. &lsquo;Five minutes hence, and our lives,
+      and our correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,&rsquo;
+      I said to myself. Strange world, the world of the <i>train de grand luxe</i>!
+      But a world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as
+      the inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and
+      varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all
+      that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself up
+      and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray
+      landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a
+      long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon;
+      and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway
+      director had received their most luscious expression&mdash;and had then
+      been modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern
+      flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes
+      as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was
+      finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car
+      towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How do you do, Miss Kate?&rsquo; I accosted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the younger of Vicary&rsquo;s two maiden sisters. I guessed that
+      the other could not be far away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had
+      done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?&rsquo; she said distantly, with a nervous
+      simper; and she passed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world of
+      my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from Miss
+      Kate&rsquo;s attitude that something must have occurred, or something must
+      have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a
+      time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly.
+      What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I
+      left without delay and went back to my coupé; it would have been a pity to
+      derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet it
+      might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for. I
+      read a little in the <i>Imitation of Christ</i> which Aunt Constance had
+      meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even
+      Christianity itself. &lsquo;Think not that thou hast made any progress,&rsquo;
+      I read, &lsquo;unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far
+      off thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be
+      angry or indignant, with any except one&rsquo;s self.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its
+      invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations,
+      dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through
+      placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save
+      their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In
+      traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs
+      of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair
+      dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in the abandoned attitudes
+      of fatigue&mdash;here and there a compartment with blinds discreetly
+      drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and here and there a
+      group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves nothing could
+      affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train and every
+      steamer a few such are to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we
+      thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their façades
+      occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under
+      streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to
+      see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to
+      a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared
+      haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to
+      carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial
+      quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations
+      we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we
+      trailed slowly our disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris would
+      fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony
+      magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we
+      were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the
+      splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by
+      the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a <i>train de grand luxe</i>,
+      while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms,
+      guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at
+      which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses
+      Vicary had brought several pairs of white gloves in order to have me
+      dismissed from the society of the train. A hand touched me. It was Yvonne&rsquo;s.
+      I awoke to a renewal of the maddening vibration. We had quitted Paris long
+      since. It was after seven o&rsquo;clock. &lsquo;<i>On dit que le diner est
+      servi, madame</i> said Yvonne. I told her to go, and I collected my wits
+      to follow her. As I was emerging into the corridor, Miss Kate went by. I
+      smiled faintly, perhaps timidly. She cut me completely. Then I went out
+      into the corridor. A man was standing at the other end twirling his
+      moustaches. He turned round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came towards me, uncertainly swaying with the movement of the swaying
+      train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good God!&rsquo; he muttered, and stopped within a yard of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I clung convulsively to the framework of the doorway. Our lives paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why have you followed me, Frank?&rsquo; I asked gloomily, in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had meant to be severe, offended. I had not meant to put his name at the
+      end of my question, much less to utter it tenderly, like an endearment.
+      But I had little control over myself. I was almost breathless with a fatal
+      surprise, shaken with terrible emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve not followed you,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I joined the train at
+      Paris. I&rsquo;d no idea you were on the train till I saw you in the
+      corner asleep, through the window of the compartment. I&rsquo;ve been
+      waiting here till you came out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you seen the Vicarys?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! You&rsquo;ve been away from London all this time?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I couldn&rsquo;t stay. I couldn&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;ve been in Belgium and
+      Holland. Then I went to Paris. And now&mdash;you see me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m going to Mentone,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I had thought of Monte
+      Carlo first, but I changed my mind. Where are you going to?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mentone,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked in hard, strained tones, avoiding each other&rsquo;s eyes. A
+      string of people passed along the car on their way to dinner. I withdrew
+      into my compartment, and Frank flattened himself against a window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come in here a minute,&rsquo; I said, when they were gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He entered the compartment and sat down opposite to me and lifted his
+      hand, perhaps unconsciously, to pull the door to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;don&rsquo;t shut it. Leave it like that.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was dressed in a gray tourist suit. Never before had I seen him in any
+      but the formal attire of London. I thought he looked singularly graceful
+      and distinguished, even romantic, in that loose, soft clothing. But no
+      matter what he wore, Frank satisfied the eye. We were both extremely
+      nervous and excited and timid, fearing speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta,&rsquo; he said at last&mdash;I had perceived that he was
+      struggling to a resolution&mdash;&lsquo;this is the best thing that could
+      have happened. Whatever we do, everybody will believe that we are running
+      off together.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think they have been believing that ever since we left London,&rsquo; I
+      said; and I told him about Miss Kate&rsquo;s treatment of me at lunch.
+      &lsquo;But how can that affect us?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary will believe it&mdash;does believe, I&rsquo;m sure. Long before
+      this, people will have enlightened her. And now the Vicarys have seen us,
+      it&rsquo;s all over. Our hand is forced, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Frank,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;didn&rsquo;t you think my letter was right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I obeyed it,&rsquo; he replied heavily. &lsquo;I haven&rsquo;t even
+      written to you. I meant to when I got to Mentone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But didn&rsquo;t you think I was right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know. Yes&mdash;I suppose it was.&rsquo; His lower lip
+      fell. &lsquo;Of course I don&rsquo;t want you to do anything that you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dinner, please,&rsquo; said my negro, putting his head between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both informed the man that we should not dine, and I asked him to tell
+      Yvonne not to wait for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There&rsquo;s your maid, too,&rsquo; said Frank. &lsquo;How are we going
+      to get out of it? The thing&rsquo;s settled for us.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear, dear boy!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;Are we to outrage our
+      consciences simply because people think we have outraged them?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It isn&rsquo;t my conscience&mdash;it&rsquo;s yours,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, then&mdash;mine.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I drew down my veil; I could scarcely keep dry eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why are you so hard, Carlotta?&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t
+      understand you. I never could. But you&rsquo;ll kill me&mdash;that&rsquo;s
+      what you&rsquo;ll do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Impulsively I leaned forward; and he seized my hand. Our antagonism melted
+      in tears. Oh the cruel joy of that moment! Who will dare to say that the
+      spirit cannot burn with pleasure while drowning in grief? Or that tragedy
+      may not be the highest bliss? That instant of renunciation was our true
+      marriage. I realize it now&mdash;a union that nothing can soil nor impair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I love you; you are fast and fast in my heart,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;But
+      you must go back to Mary. There is nothing else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I withdrew my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve no right, my dearest, to tell me to go back to Mary. I
+      cannot.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Forgive me,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I have only the right to ask you to
+      leave me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then there is no hope?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His lips trembled. Ah! those lips!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made a sign that there was no hope. And we sat in silence, overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A servant came to arrange the compartment for sleeping, and we were
+      obliged to assume nonchalance and go into the corridor. All the windows of
+      the corridor were covered with frost traceries. The train with its
+      enclosed heat and its gleaming lamps was plunging through an ice-gripped
+      night. I thought of the engine-driver, perched on his shaking, snorting,
+      monstrous machine, facing the weather, with our lives and our loves in his
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We&rsquo;ll leave each other now, Frank,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;before the
+      people begin to come back from dinner. Go and eat something.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be all right. Yvonne will get me some fruit. I shall stay in our
+      compartment till we arrive.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. And when we do arrive&mdash;what then? What are your wishes? You
+      see, I can&rsquo;t leave the train before we get to Mentone because of my
+      registered luggage.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke appealingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dear thing, with his transparent pretexts!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can ignore us at the station, and then leave Mentone again during the
+      day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you wish,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-night!&rsquo; I whispered. &lsquo;Good-bye!&rsquo; And I turned to
+      my compartment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo; he cried despairingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I shut the door and drew the blinds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yvonne was discretion itself when she returned. She had surely seen Frank.
+      No doubt she anticipated piquant developments at Mentone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All night I lay on my narrow bed, with Yvonne faintly snoring above me,
+      and the harsh, metallic rattle of the swinging train beneath. I could
+      catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow. The lamp burnt
+      delicately within its green shade. I lay almost moveless, almost dead,
+      shifting only at long intervals from side to side. Sometimes my brain
+      would arouse itself, and I would live again through each scene of my
+      relationship with Frank and Mary. I often thought of the engine-driver,
+      outside, watching over us and unflinchingly dragging us on. I hoped that
+      his existence had compensations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Early on the second morning after that interview in the train I sat on my
+      balcony in the Hôtel d'Écosse, full in the tremendous sun that had
+      ascended over the Mediterranean. The shore road wound along beneath me by
+      the blue water that never receded nor advanced, lopping always the same
+      stones. A vivid yellow electric tram, like a toy, crept forward on my left
+      from the direction of Vintimille and Italy, as it were swimming
+      noiselessly on the smooth surface of the road among the palms of an
+      intense green, against the bright blue background of the sea; and another
+      tram advanced, a spot of orange, to meet it out of the variegated tangle
+      of tinted houses composing the Old Town. High upon the summit of the Old
+      Town rose the slim, rose-coloured cupola of the church in a sapphire sky.
+      The regular smiting sound of a cracked bell, viciously rung, came from it.
+      The eastern prospect was shut in by the last olive-clad spurs of the Alps,
+      that tread violently and gigantically into the sea. The pathways of the
+      hotel garden were being gently swept by a child of the sun, who could not
+      have sacrificed his graceful dignity to haste; and many peaceful morning
+      activities proceeded on the road, on the shore, and on the jetty. A
+      procession of tawny fishing-boats passed from the harbour one after
+      another straight into the eye of the sun, and were lost there. Smoke
+      climbed up softly into the soft air from the houses and hotels on the
+      level of the road. The trams met and parted, silently widening the
+      distance between them which previously they had narrowed. And the sun rose
+      and rose, bathing the blue sea and the rich verdure and the glaring white
+      architecture in the very fluid of essential life. The whole azure coast
+      basked in it like an immense cat, commencing the day with a voluptuous
+      savouring of the fact that it was alive. The sun is the treacherous and
+      tyrannical god of the South, and when he withdraws himself, arbitrary and
+      cruel, the land and the people shiver and prepare to die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was such a morning as renders sharp and unmistakable the division
+      between body and soul&mdash;if the soul suffers. The body exults; the body
+      cries out that nothing on earth matters except climate. Nothing can damp
+      the glorious ecstasy of the body baptized in that air, caressed by that
+      incomparable sun. It laughs, and it laughs at the sorrow of the soul. It
+      imperiously bids the soul to choose the path of pleasure; it shouts aloud
+      that sacrifice is vain and honour an empty word, full of inconveniences,
+      and that to exist amply and vehemently, to listen to the blood as it beats
+      strongly through the veins, is the end of the eternal purpose. Ah! how
+      easy it is to martyrize one&rsquo;s self by some fatal decision made
+      grandly in the exultation of a supreme moment! And how difficult to endure
+      the martyrdom without regret! I regretted my renunciation. My body
+      rebelled against it, and even my soul rebelled. I scorned myself for a
+      fool, for a sentimental weakling&mdash;yes, and for a moral coward. Every
+      argument that presented itself damaged the justice of my decision. After
+      all, we loved, and in my secret dreams had I not always put love first, as
+      the most sacred? The reality was that I had been afraid of what Mary would
+      think. True, my attitude had lied to her, but I could not have avoided
+      that. Decency would have forbidden me to use any other attitude; and more
+      than decency&mdash;kindness. Ought the course of lives to be changed at
+      the bidding of mere hazard? It was a mere chance that Mary had called on
+      me. I bled for her grief, but nothing that I could do would assuage it. I
+      felt sure that, in the impossible case of me being able to state my
+      position to her and argue in its defence, I could force her to see that in
+      giving myself to Frank I was not being false to my own ideals. What else
+      could count? What other consideration should guide the soul on its
+      mysterious instinctive way? Frank and I had a right to possess each other.
+      We had a right to be happy if we could. And the one thing that had robbed
+      us of that right was my lack of courage, caused partly by my feminine
+      mentality (do we not realize sometimes how ignobly feminine we are?), and
+      partly by the painful spectacle of Mary&rsquo;s grief.... And her grief,
+      her most intimate grief, sprang not from thwarted love, but from a base
+      and narrow conventionality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus I declaimed to myself in my heart, under the influence of the
+      seductive temptations of that intoxicating atmosphere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; said a voice firmly and quietly underneath me in the
+      orange-trees of the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I started violently. It was Frank&rsquo;s voice. He was standing in the
+      garden, his legs apart, and a broad, flat straw hat, which I did not
+      admire, on his head. His pale face was puckered round about the eyes as he
+      looked up at me, like the face of a person trying to look directly at the
+      sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I exclaimed foolishly, glancing down over the edge of the
+      balcony, and shutting my white parasol with a nervous, hurried movement,
+      ‘have&mdash;have you come here?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had disobeyed my wish. He had not left Mentone at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; he repeated persuasively, and yet commandingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could feel my heart beating against the marble parapet of the balcony. I
+      seemed to be caught, to be trapped. I could not argue with him in that
+      position. I could not leave him shouting in the garden. So I nodded to
+      pacify him, and disappeared quickly from the balcony, almost scurrying
+      away. And in the comparative twilight of my room I stopped and gave a
+      glance in the mirror, and patted my hair, and fearfully examined the woman
+      that I saw in the glass, as if to discern what sort of woman she truly
+      was, and what was the root of her character. I hesitated and snatched up
+      my gloves. I wanted to collect my thoughts, and I could not. It was
+      impossible to think clearly. I moved in the room, dazed. I stood by the
+      tumbled bed, fingering the mosquito curtains. They might have been a veil
+      behind which was obscured the magic word of enlightenment I needed. I
+      opened the door, shut it suddenly, and held the knob tight, defying an
+      imagined enemy outside. &lsquo;Oh!&rsquo; I muttered at last, angry with
+      myself, &lsquo;what is the use of all this? You know you must go down to
+      him. He&rsquo;s waiting for you. Show a little common-sense and go without
+      so much fuss.&rsquo; And so I descended the stairs swiftly and guiltily,
+      relieved that no one happened to see me. In any case, I decided, nothing
+      could induce me to yield to him after my letter and after what had passed
+      in the train. The affair was beyond argument. I felt that I could not
+      yield, and that though it meant the ruin of happiness by obstinacy, I
+      could not yield. I shrank from yielding in that moment as men shrink from
+      public repentance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not moved from his post in the garden. We shook hands. A band of
+      Italian musicians wandered into the garden and began to sing Verdi to a
+      vigorous thrumming of guitars. They sang as only Italians can sing&mdash;as
+      naturally as they breathed, and with a rich and overflowing innocent joy
+      in the art which Nature had taught them. They sang loudly, swingingly,
+      glancing full of naive hope up at the windows of the vast, unresponsive
+      hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you are still in Mentone,&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Come for a walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come for a walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Very well,&rsquo; I consented. &lsquo;As I am?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you are. I saw you all in white on the balcony, and I was determined
+      to fetch you out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But could you see who it was from the road?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course I could. I knew in an instant.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We descended, he a couple of paces in front of me, the narrow zigzag path
+      leading down between two other hotels to the shore road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will happen now?&rsquo; I asked myself wildly. My head swam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that nothing would happen. We turned eastwards, walking slowly,
+      and I began to resume my self-control. Only the simple and the humble were
+      abroad at that early hour: purveyors of food, in cheerfully rattling
+      carts, or hauling barrows with the help of grave and formidable dogs;
+      washers and cleaners at the doors of highly-decorated villas, amiably
+      performing their tasks while the mighty slept; fishermen and fat
+      fisher-girls, industriously repairing endless brown nets on the other side
+      of the parapet of the road; a postman and a little policeman; a porcelain
+      mender, who practised his trade under the shadow of the wall; a few
+      loafers; some stable-boys exercising horses; and children with adorable
+      dirty faces, shouting in their high treble as they played at hopscotch. I
+      felt very closely akin to these meek ones as we walked along. They were so
+      human, so wistful. They had the wonderful simplicity of animals,
+      uncomplicated by the disease of self-consciousness; they were the vital
+      stuff without the embroidery. They preserved the customs of their
+      ancestors, rising with the sun, frankly and splendidly enjoying the sun,
+      looking up to it as the most important thing in the world. They never
+      attempted to understand what was beyond them; they troubled not with
+      progress, ideals, righteousness, the claims of society. They accepted
+      humbly and uninquiringly what they found. They lived the life of their
+      instincts, sometimes violent, often kindly, and always natural. Why should
+      I have felt so near to them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A calm and gentle pleasure filled me, far from intense, but yet
+      satisfying. I determined to enjoy the moment, or, perhaps, without
+      determination, I gave myself up, gradually, to the moment. I forgot care
+      and sorrow. I was well; I was with Frank; I was in the midst of enchanting
+      natural beauty; the day was fair and fresh and virgin. I knew not where I
+      was going. Shorewards a snowy mountain ridge rose above the long, wide
+      slopes of olives, dotted with white dwellings. A single sail stood up
+      seawards on the immense sheet of blue. The white sail appeared and
+      disappeared in the green palm-trees as we passed eastwards. Presently we
+      left the sea, and we lost the hills, and came into a street of poor little
+      shops for simple folk, that naïvely exposed their cheap and tawdry goods
+      to no matter what mightiness should saunter that way. And then we came to
+      the end of the tram-line, and it was like the end of the world. And we saw
+      in the distance abodes of famous persons, fabulously rich, defying the sea
+      and the hills, and condescending from afar off to the humble. We crossed
+      the railway, and a woman ran out from a cabin with a spoon in one hand and
+      a soiled flag in the other, and waved the flag at a towering black engine
+      that breathed stertorously in a cutting. Already we were climbing, and the
+      road grew steeper, and then we came to custom-houses&mdash;unsightly,
+      squalid, irregular, and mean&mdash;in front of which officials laughed and
+      lounged and smoked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked scarcely at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were up early this morning,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; I could not sleep.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was the same with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We recovered the sea; but now it was far below us, and the footprints of
+      the wind were marked on it, and it was not one blue, but a thousand blues,
+      and it faded imperceptibly into the sky. The sail, making Mentone, was
+      much nearer, and had developed into a two-masted ship. It seemed to be
+      pushed, rather than blown, along by the wind. It seemed to have rigidity
+      in all its parts, and to be sliding unwillingly over a vast slate. The
+      road lay through craggy rocks, shelving away unseen on one hand, and
+      rising steeply against the burning sky on the other. We mounted steadily
+      and slowly. I did not look much at Frank, but my eye was conscious of his
+      figure, striding leisurely along. Now and then, when I turned to glance
+      behind, I saw our shadows there diagonally on the road, and again I did
+      not care for his hat. I had not seen him in a straw hat till that morning.
+      We arrived at a second set of French custom-houses, deserted, and then we
+      saw that the gigantic side of the mountain was cleft by a fissure from
+      base to summit. And across the gorge had been thrown a tiny stone bridge
+      to carry the road. At this point, by the bridge, the face of the rock had
+      been carved smooth, and a great black triangle painted on it. And on the
+      road was a common milestone, with ‘France&rsquo; on one side and &lsquo;Italia&rsquo;
+      on the other. And a very old man was harmlessly spreading a stock of
+      picture postcards on the parapet of the bridge. My heart went out to that
+      poor old man, whose white curls glinted in the sunlight. It seemed to me
+      so pathetic that he should be just there, at that natural spot which the
+      passions and the blood of men long dead had made artificial, tediously
+      selling postcards in order to keep his worn and creaking body out of the
+      grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do give him something,&rsquo; I entreated Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while Frank went to him I leaned over the other parapet and listened
+      for the delicate murmur of the stream far below. The split flank of the
+      hill was covered with a large red blossom, and at the base, on the edge of
+      the sea, were dolls&rsquo; houses, each raising a slanted pencil of pale
+      smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then we were in Italy, and still climbing. We saw a row of narrow,
+      slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched
+      to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a
+      rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged about
+      four years and eight years, dirty, unkempt, delicious, shrill, their
+      movements full of the ravishing grace of infancy. They attacked the laced
+      soldier, chattering furiously, grumbling at him, intimidating him with the
+      charming gestures of spoilt and pouting children. And he bent down stiffly
+      in his superb uniform, and managed his long, heavy gun, and talked to them
+      in a deep, vibrating voice. He reasoned with them till we could hear him
+      no more. It was so touching, so exquisitely human!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reached the top of the hill, having passed the Italian customs, equally
+      vile with the French. The terraced grounds of an immense deserted castle
+      came down to the roadside; and over the wall, escaped from the garden,
+      there bloomed extravagantly a tangle of luscious yellow roses, just out of
+      our reach. The road was still and deserted. We could see nothing but the
+      road and the sea and the hills, all steeped, bewitched, and glorious under
+      the sun. The ship had nearly slid to Mentone. The curving coastline of
+      Italy wavered away into the shimmering horizon. And there were those huge
+      roses, insolently blooming in the middle of winter, the symbol of the
+      terrific forces of nature which slept quiescent under the universal calm.
+      Perched as it were in a niche of the hills, we were part of that
+      tremendous and ennobling scene. Long since the awkward self-consciousness
+      caused by our plight had left us. We did not use speech, but we knew that
+      we thought alike, and were suffering the same transcendent emotion. Was it
+      joy or sadness? Rather than either, it was an admixture of both,
+      originating in a poignant sense of the grandeur of life and of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Frank,&rsquo; I murmured, my spirit bursting, &lsquo;how beautiful it
+      is!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our eyes met. He took me and kissed me impetuously, as though my utterance
+      had broken a spell which enchained him. And as I kissed him I wept,
+      blissfully. Nature had triumphed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We departed from Mentone that same day after lunch. I could not remove to
+      his hotel; he could not remove to mine, for this was Mentone. We went to
+      Monte Carlo by road, our luggage following. We chose Monte Carlo partly
+      because it was the nearest place, and partly because it has some of the
+      qualities&mdash;incurious, tolerant, unprovincial&mdash;of a capital city.
+      If we encountered friends there, so much the better, in the end. The great
+      adventure, the solemn and perilous enterprise had begun. I sent Yvonne for
+      a holiday to her home in Laroche. Why? Ah, why? Perhaps for the simple
+      reason that I had not the full courage of my convictions. We seldom have&mdash;<i>nous
+      autres</i>. I felt that, if she had remained, Yvonne would have been too
+      near me in the enterprise. I could not at first have been my natural self
+      with her. I told the astonished and dissatisfied Yvonne that I would write
+      to her as soon as I wanted her. Yet in other ways I had courage, and I
+      found a delicious pleasure in my courage. When I was finally leaving the
+      hotel I had Frank by my side. I behaved to him as to a husband. I publicly
+      called him &lsquo;dear.&rsquo; I asked his advice in trifles. He paid my
+      bill. He even provided the money necessary for Yvonne. My joy in the
+      possession of this male creature, whose part it now was to do for me a
+      thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was
+      almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man&rsquo;s woman. I
+      had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of
+      that word&mdash;I had a protector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank was able to get three rooms at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. I
+      had only to approve them. We met in our sitting-room at half-past three,
+      ready to go out for a walk. It would be inexact to say that we were not
+      nervous. But we were happy. He had not abandoned his straw hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t wear that any more,&rsquo; I said to him, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why? It&rsquo;s quite new.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It doesn&rsquo;t suit you,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, that doesn&rsquo;t matter,&rsquo; he laughed, and he put it on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I don&rsquo;t like to see you in it,&rsquo; I persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, you&rsquo;ll stand it this afternoon, my angel, and I&rsquo;ll get
+      another to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Haven&rsquo;t you got another one here?&rsquo; I asked, with discontent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; and he laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, dear&mdash;&rsquo; I pouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed suddenly to realize that as a fact I did not like the hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come here,&rsquo; he said, charmingly grave; and he led me by the hand
+      into his bedroom, which was littered with clothes, small parcels, boots,
+      and brushes. One chair was overturned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Heavens!&rsquo; I muttered, pretending to be shocked at the disorder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew, me to a leather box of medium size.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can open it,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I opened it. The thing was rather a good contrivance, for a man. It held a
+      silk hat, an opera hat, a bowler hat, some caps, and a soft Panama straw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And you said you had no others!&rsquo; I grumbled at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, which is it to be?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This, of course,&rsquo; I said, taking the bowler. I reached up, removed
+      the straw hat from his head, and put the bowler in its place. &lsquo;There!&rsquo;
+      I exclaimed, satisfied, giving the bowler a pat&mdash;there!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed, immensely content, enraptured, foolishly blissful. We were
+      indeed happy. Before opening the door leading to the corridor we stopped
+      and kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the seaward terrace of the vast, pale, floriated Casino, so impressive
+      in its glittering vulgarity, like the bride-cake of a stockbroker&rsquo;s
+      wedding, we strolled about among a multifarious crowd, immersed in
+      ourselves. We shared a contempt for the architecture, the glaring
+      flower-beds, and the false distinction of the crowd, and an enthusiasm for
+      the sunshine and the hills and the sea, and whatever else had escaped the
+      hands of the Casino administration. We talked lightly and freely. Care
+      seemed to be leaving us; we had no preoccupations save those which were
+      connected with our passion. Then I saw, standing in an attitude of
+      attention, the famous body-servant of Lord Francis Alcar, and I knew that
+      Lord Francis could not be far away. We spoke to the valet; he pointed out
+      his master, seated at the front of the terrace, and told us, in a
+      discreet, pained, respectful voice, that our venerable friend had been
+      mysteriously unwell at Monte Carlo, and was now taking the air for the
+      first time in ten days. I determined that we should go boldly and speak to
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I said gently, after we had stood some seconds by
+      his chair, unremarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was staring fixedly at the distance of the sea. He looked amazingly
+      older than when I had last talked with him. His figure was shrunken, and
+      his face rose thin and white out of a heavy fur overcoat and a large blue
+      muffler. In his eyes there was such a sadness, such an infinite regret,
+      such a profound weariness as can only be seen in the eyes of the senile.
+      He was utterly changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I repeated, &lsquo;don&rsquo;t you know me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He started slightly and looked at me, and a faint gleam appeared in his
+      eyes. Then he nodded, and took a thin, fragile alabaster hand out of the
+      pocket of his overcoat. I shook it. It was like shaking hands with a dead,
+      starved child. He carefully moved the skin and bone back into his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you pretty well?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded. Then the faint gleam faded out of his eyes; his head fell a
+      little, and he resumed his tragic contemplation of the sea. The fact of my
+      presence had dropped like a pebble into the strange depths of that aged
+      mind, and the waters of the ferocious egotism of senility had closed over
+      it, and it was forgotten. His rapt and yet meaningless gaze frightened me.
+      It was as if there was more desolation and disillusion in that gaze than I
+      had previously imagined the whole earth to contain. Useless for Frank to
+      rouse him for the second time. Useless to explain ourselves. What was love
+      to him, or the trivial conventions of a world which he was already
+      quitting?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked away. From the edge of the terrace I could see a number of boats
+      pulling to and fro in the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s the pigeon-shooting,&rsquo; Frank explained. &lsquo;Come to
+      the railings and you&rsquo;ll be able to see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had already heard the sharp popping of rifles. I went to the railings,
+      and saw a number of boxes arranged in a semicircle on a green, which was,
+      as it were, suspended between the height of the terrace and the sea.
+      Suddenly one of the boxes collapsed with a rattle, and a bird flew out of
+      the ruin of it. There were two reports of a gun; the bird, its curving
+      flight cut short, fell fluttering to the grass; a dog trotted out from the
+      direction of the gun unseen beneath us, and disappeared again with the
+      mass of ruffled feathers in its mouth. Then two men showed themselves, ran
+      to the collapsed box, restored it, and put in it a fresh victim, and
+      disappeared after the dog. I was horrified, but I could not remove my eyes
+      from the green. Another box fell flat, and another bird flew out; a gun
+      sounded; the bird soared far away, wavered, and sank on to the surface of
+      the sea, and the boats converged towards it in furious haste. So the game
+      proceeded. I saw a dozen deaths on the green; a few birds fell into the
+      sea, and one escaped, settling ultimately on the roof of the Casino.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So that is pigeon-shooting,&rsquo; I said coldly, turning to Frank.
+      &lsquo;I suppose it goes on all day?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just as cruel as plenty of other sports, and no more,&rsquo;
+      he said, as if apologizing for the entire male sex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I presume so,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;But do you know, dear, if the
+      idea once gets into my head that that is going on all day, I shan&rsquo;t
+      be able to stop here. Let us have tea somewhere.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not until dinner did I recover from the obsession of that continual
+      slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the
+      Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the
+      mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot out
+      all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now do I
+      completely perceive how violent, how capricious and contradictory were my
+      emotions in those unique and unforgettable hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We dined late, because I had deprived myself of Yvonne. Already I was
+      almost in a mind to send for her. The restaurant of the hotel was full,
+      but we recognised no one as we walked through the room to our table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There is one advantage in travelling about with you,&rsquo; said Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No matter where one is, one can always be sure of being with the most
+      beautiful woman in the place.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was content. I repaid him by being more than ever a man&rsquo;s woman. I
+      knew that I was made for that. I understood why great sopranos have of
+      their own accord given up even the stage on marriage. The career of
+      literature seemed to me tedious and sordid in comparison with that of
+      being a man&rsquo;s woman. In my rich black dress and my rings and
+      bracelets I felt like an Eastern Empress; I felt that I could adequately
+      reward homage with smiles, and love with fervid love. And I felt like a
+      cat&mdash;idle, indolently graceful, voluptuously seeking warmth and
+      caresses. I enveloped Frank with soft glances, I dazed him with glances.
+      He ordered a wine which he said was fit for gods, and the waiter brought
+      it reverently and filled our glasses, with a ritual of precautions. Later
+      during the dinner Frank asked me if I would prefer champagne. I said,
+      &lsquo;No, of course not.&rsquo; But he said, &lsquo;I think you would,&rsquo;
+      and ordered some. &lsquo;Admit,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that you prefer
+      champagne.&rsquo; &lsquo;Well, of course,&rsquo; I replied. But I drank
+      very little champagne, lest I should be too happy. Frank&rsquo;s wonderful
+      face grew delicately flushed. The room resounded with discreet chatter,
+      and the tinkle of glass and silver and porcelain. The upper part of it
+      remained in shadow, but every table was a centre of rosy light,
+      illuminating faces and jewels and napery. And in my sweet illusion I
+      thought that every face had found the secret of joy, and that even the old
+      had preserved it. Pleasure reigned. Pleasure was the sole goddess. And how
+      satisfying then was the worship of her! Life had no inconveniences, no
+      dark spots, no pitfalls. The gratification of the senses, the appeasing of
+      appetites that instantly renewed themselves&mdash;this was the business of
+      the soul. And as the wine sank lower in the bottles, and we cooled our
+      tongues with ices, and the room began to empty, expectation gleamed and
+      glittered in our eyes. At last, except a group of men smoking and talking
+      in a corner, we were the only diners left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shall we go?&rsquo; Frank said, putting a veil of cigarette smoke between
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I trembled. I was once more the young and timid girl. I could not speak. I
+      nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the hall was Vicary, talking to the head-porter. He saw us and started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What! Vicary!&rsquo; I murmured, suddenly cooled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want to speak to you,&rsquo; said Vicary. &lsquo;Where can we go?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This way,&rsquo; Frank replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went to our sitting-room, silent and apprehensive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Sit down,&rsquo; said Vicary, shutting the door and standing against it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was wearing a tourist suit, with a gray overcoat, and his grizzled hair
+      was tumbling over his hard, white face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s the matter?&rsquo; Frank asked. &lsquo;Anything wrong?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Look here, you two,&rsquo; said Vicary, &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t want to
+      discuss your position, and I&rsquo;m the last person in this world to cast
+      the first stone; but it falls to me to do it. I was coming down to Nice to
+      stay with my sisters, and I&rsquo;ve come a little further. My sisters
+      wired me they had seen you. I&rsquo;ve been to Mentone, and driven here
+      from there. I hoped I should get here earlier than the newspapers, and I
+      have done, it seems.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Earlier than the newspapers?&rsquo; Frank repeated, standing up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Try to keep calm,&rsquo; Vicary continued. &lsquo;Your wife&rsquo;s body
+      was found in the Thames at seven o&rsquo;clock last night. The doctors say
+      it had been in the water for forty-eight hours. Your servants thought she
+      had gone to you. But doubtless some thoughtful person had told her that
+      you two were wandering about Europe together.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>My wife</i>&rsquo; cried Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the strange and terrible emphasis he put on the word &lsquo;wife&rsquo;
+      proved to me in the fraction of a second that in his heart I was not his
+      wife. A fearful tragedy had swept away the structure of argument in favour
+      of the rights of love which he had built over the original conventionality
+      of his mind. Poor fellow!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fell back into his chair and covered his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I thank God my mother didn&rsquo;t live to see this!&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he rushed to his bedroom and banged the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor girl!&rsquo; said Vicary, approaching me. &lsquo;What can I&mdash;I&rsquo;m
+      awfully&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I waved him away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s that?&rsquo; he exclaimed, in a different voice, listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran to the bedroom, and saw Frank lifting a revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve brought me to this, Carlotta!&rsquo; he shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang towards him, but it was too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART III &mdash; THE VICTORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I came out of the house, hurried and angrily flushing, I perceived
+      clearly that my reluctance to break a habit and my desire for physical
+      comfort, if not my attachment to the girl, had led me too far. I was
+      conscious of humiliation. I despised myself. The fact was that I had
+      quarrelled with Yvonne&mdash;Yvonne, who had been with me for eight years,
+      Yvonne who had remained sturdily faithful during my long exile. Now the
+      woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with
+      a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or
+      both. Possibly I was both. I had permitted Yvonne too much liberty. I had
+      spoilt her. She was fidelity itself, goodness itself; but her character
+      had not borne the strain of realizing that she had acquired power over me,
+      and that she had become necessary to me. So that morning we had differed
+      violently; we had quarrelled as equals. The worst side of her had appeared
+      suddenly, shockingly. And she had left me, demonstrating even as she
+      banged the door that she was at least my mistress in altercation. All day
+      I fought against the temptation to eat my pride, and ask her to return. It
+      was a horrible, a deplorable, temptation. And towards evening, after seven
+      hours of solitude in the hotel in the Avenue de Kleber, I yielded to it. I
+      knew the address to which she had gone, and I took a cab and drove there,
+      hating myself. I was received with excessive rudeness by a dirty and
+      hag-like concierge, who, after refusing all information for some minutes,
+      informed me at length that the young lady in question had quitted Paris in
+      company with a gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The insolence of the concierge, my weakness and my failure, the bitter
+      sense of lost dignity, the fact that Yvonne had not hesitated even a few
+      hours before finally abandoning me&mdash;all these things wounded me. But
+      the sharpest stab of all was that during our stay in Paris Yvonne must
+      have had secret relations with a man. I had hidden nothing from her; she,
+      however, had not reciprocated my candour. I had imagined that she lived
+      only for me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, the truth cannot be concealed that the years of wandering which had
+      succeeded the fatal night at Monte Carlo had done little to improve me.
+      What would you have? For months and months my ears rang with Frank&rsquo;s
+      despairing shout: &lsquo;<i>You&rsquo;ve</i> brought me to this, Carlotta!&rsquo;
+      And the profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of
+      my immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my
+      inmost soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem
+      inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what
+      it means to be broken&mdash;to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming
+      calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the
+      afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert
+      me; I deserted them. For the second time in my career I tore myself up by
+      the roots. I lived the nomad&rsquo;s life, in the usual European haunts of
+      the nomad. And in five years I did not make a single new friend, scarcely
+      an acquaintance. I lived in myself and on myself, nursing grief, nursing a
+      rancour against fate, nursing an involuntary shame.... You know, the
+      scandal of which I had been the centre was appalling; it touched the
+      extreme. It must have nearly killed the excellent Mrs. Sardis. I did not
+      dare to produce another novel. But after a year or so I turned to poetry,
+      and I must admit that my poetry was accepted. But it was not enough to
+      prevent me from withering&mdash;from shrivelling. I lost ground, and I was
+      still losing it. I was becoming sinister, warped, peculiar, capricious,
+      unaccountable. I guessed it then; I see it clearly now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house of the odious concierge was in a small, shabby street off the
+      Boulevard du Montparnasse. I looked in vain for a cab. Even on the wide,
+      straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had
+      been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great,
+      glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession,
+      but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither they
+      went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car. Without a cab I was as
+      helpless and as timid as a young girl, I who was thirty-one, and had
+      travelled and lived and suffered! Never had I been alone in the streets of
+      a large city at night. And the September night was sultry and forbidding.
+      I was afraid&mdash;I was afraid of the men who passed me, staring at me.
+      One man spoke to me, and I literally shook with fear as I hastened on.
+      What would I have given to have had the once faithful Yvonne by my side!
+      Presently I came to the crossing of the Boulevard Raspail, and this
+      boulevard, equally long, uncharitable, and mournful with the other,
+      endless, stretching to infinity, filled me with horror. Yes, with the
+      horror of solitude in a vast city. Oh, you solitary, you who have felt
+      that horror descending upon you, desolating, clutching, and chilling the
+      heart, you will comprehend me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the corner, of the two boulevards was a glowing cafe, the Café du Dome,
+      with a row of chairs and little tables in front of its windows. And at one
+      of these little tables sat a man, gazing absently at a green glass in a
+      white saucer. I had almost gone past him when some instinct prompted me to
+      the bravery of looking at him again. He was a stoutish man, apparently
+      aged about forty-five, very fair, with a puffed face and melancholy eyes.
+      And then it was as though someone had shot me in the breast. It was as if
+      I must fall down and die&mdash;as if the sensations which I experienced
+      were too acute&mdash;too elemental for me to support. I have never borne a
+      child, but I imagine that the woman who becomes a mother may feel as I
+      felt then, staggered at hitherto unsuspected possibilities of sensation. I
+      stopped. I clung to the nearest table. There was ice on my shuddering
+      spine, and a dew on my forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda!&rsquo; breathed the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had raised his eyes to mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Diaz, after ten years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first I had not recognised him. Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years
+      older. I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the returned
+      traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered landmarks.
+      Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him. The magic of
+      his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth reappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is I,&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, and in doing so shook the table, and his glass was overturned,
+      and scattered itself in fragments on the asphalte. At the noise a waiter
+      ran out of the cafe, and Diaz, blushing and obviously making a great
+      effort at self-control, gave him an order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should have known you anywhere,&rsquo; said Diaz to me, taking my hand,
+      as the waiter went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ineptitude of the speech was such that I felt keenly sorry for him. I
+      was not in the least hurt. My sympathy enveloped him. The position was so
+      difficult, and he had seemed so pathetic, sitting there alone on the
+      pavement of the vast nocturnal boulevard, so weighed down by sadness, that
+      I wanted to comfort him and soothe him, and to restore him to all the
+      brilliancy of his first period. It appeared to me unjust and cruel that
+      the wheels of life should have crushed him too. And so I said, smiling as
+      well as I could:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Won&rsquo;t you sit down here?&rsquo; he suggested, avoiding my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus I found myself seated outside a cafe, at night, conspicuous for
+      all Montparnasse to see. We never know what may lie in store for us at the
+      next turning of existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then I am not much changed, you think?&rsquo; he ventured, in an anxious
+      tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I lied. &lsquo;You are perhaps a little stouter. That&rsquo;s
+      all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How hard it was to talk! How lamentably self-conscious we were! How
+      unequal to the situation! We did not know what to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are far more beautiful than ever you were,&rsquo; he said, looking at
+      me for an instant. &lsquo;You are a woman; you were a girl&mdash;then.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The waiter brought another glass and saucer, and a second waiter followed
+      him with a bottle, from which he poured a greenish-yellow liquid into the
+      glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will you have?&rsquo; Diaz asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thank you,&rsquo; I said quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To sit outside the cafe was already much. It would have been impossible
+      for me to drink there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! as you please, as you please,&rsquo; Diaz snapped. &lsquo;I beg your
+      pardon.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Poor fellow!&rsquo; I reflected. &lsquo;He must be suffering from nervous
+      irritability.&rsquo; And aloud, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m not thirsty, thank you,&rsquo;
+      as nicely as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled beautifully; the irritability had passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s awfully kind of you to sit down here with me,&rsquo; he said,
+      in a lower voice. &lsquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ve heard about me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drank half the contents of the glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I read in the papers some years ago that you were suffering from
+      neurasthenia and nervous breakdown,&rsquo; I replied. &lsquo;I was very
+      sorry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;nervous breakdown&mdash;nervous breakdown.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You haven&rsquo;t been playing lately, have you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is more than two years since I played. And if you had heard me that
+      time! My God!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you have tried some cure?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Cure!&rsquo; he repeated after me. &lsquo;There&rsquo;s no cure. Here I
+      am! Me!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His glass was empty. He tapped on the window behind us, and the procession
+      of waiters occurred again, and Diaz received a third glass, which now
+      stood on three saucers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ll excuse me,&rsquo; he said, sipping slowly. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      not very well to-night. And you&rsquo;ve&mdash;Why did you run away from
+      me? I wanted to find you, but I couldn&rsquo;t.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Please do not let us talk about that,&rsquo; I stopped him. &lsquo;I&mdash;I
+      must go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, of course, if I&rsquo;ve offended you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m not at all offended. But I think&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, if you aren&rsquo;t offended, stop a little, and let me see you
+      home. You&rsquo;re sure you won&rsquo;t have anything?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head, wishing that he would not drink so much. I thought it
+      could not be good for his nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Been in Paris long?&rsquo; he asked me, with a slightly confused
+      utterance. ‘Staying in this quarter? Many English and Americans here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, in setting down the glass, he upset it, and it smashed on the
+      pavement like the first one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Damn!&rsquo; he exclaimed, staring forlornly at the broken glass, as if
+      in the presence of some irreparable misfortune. And before I could put in
+      a word, he turned to me with a silly smile, and approaching his face to
+      mine till his hat touched the brim of my hat, he said thickly: &lsquo;After
+      all, you know, I&rsquo;m the greatish pianist in the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth struck me like a blow. In my amazing ignorance of certain
+      aspects of life I had not suspected it. Diaz was drunk. The ignominy of
+      it! The tragedy of it! He was drunk. He had fallen to the beast. I drew
+      back from that hot, reeking face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t think I am?&rsquo; he muttered. &lsquo;You think young
+      What&rsquo;s-his-name can play Ch&mdash;Chopin better than me? Is that it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to run away, to cease to exist, to hide with my shame in some
+      deep abyss. And there I was on the boulevard, next to this animal, sharing
+      his table and the degradation! And I could not move. There are people so
+      gifted that in a dilemma they always know exactly the wisest course to
+      adopt. But I did not know. This part of my story gives me infinite pain to
+      write, and yet I must write it, though I cannot persuade myself to write
+      it in full; the details would be too repulsive. Nevertheless, forget not
+      that I lived it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his face to mine again, and began to stammer something, and I drew
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are ashamed of me, madam,&rsquo; he said sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you are not quite yourself&mdash;not quite well,&rsquo; I
+      replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I am drunk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I mean what I say. You are not quite well. Please do not twist my words.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I am drunk,&rsquo; he insisted, raising his voice. &lsquo;I am
+      not drunk; I have never been drunk. That I can swear with my hand on my
+      heart. But you are ashamed of being seen with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you ought to go home,&rsquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is only to get rid of me!&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no,&rsquo; I appealed to him persuasively. &lsquo;Do not wound me. I
+      will go with you as far as your house, if you like. You are too ill to be
+      alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment an empty open cab strolled by, and, without pausing for his
+      answer, I signalled the driver. My heart beat wildly. My spirit was in an
+      uproar. But I was determined not to desert him, not to abandon him to a
+      public disgrace. I rose from my seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re very good,&rsquo; he said, in a new voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cab had stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come!&rsquo; I entreated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rapped uncertainly on the window, and then, as the waiter did not
+      immediately appear, he threw some silver on the table, and aimed himself
+      in the direction of the cab. I got in. Diaz slipped on the step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve forgotten somethin&rsquo;,&rsquo; he complained. &lsquo;What
+      is it? My umbrella&mdash;yes, my umbrella&mdash;<i>pépin</i> as they say
+      here. &lsquo;Scuse me moment.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His umbrella was, in fact, lying under a chair. He stooped with difficulty
+      and regained it, and then the waiter, who had at length arrived, helped
+      him into the cab, and he sank like a mass of inert clay on my skirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell the driver the address,&rsquo; I whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver, with head turned and a grin on his face, was waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Rue de Douai,&rsquo; said Diaz sullenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What number?&rsquo; the driver asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does that regard you?&rsquo; Diaz retorted crossly in French. &lsquo;I
+      will tell you later.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell him now,&rsquo; I pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, to oblige you, I will. Twenty-seven. But what I can&rsquo;t stand
+      is the impudence of these fellows.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver winked at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just so,&rsquo; I soothed Diaz, and we drove off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have never been happier than in unhappiness. Happiness is not joy, and
+      it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more
+      disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realization of one&rsquo;s
+      secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence.
+      As I crossed Paris with the drunken Diaz leaning clumsily against my
+      shoulder, I was profoundly unhappy. I was desolated by the sight of this
+      ruin, and yet I was happier than I had been since Frank died. I had
+      glimpses and intimations of the baffling essence of our human lives here,
+      strange, fleeting comprehensions of the eternal wonder and the eternal
+      beauty.... In vain, professional writer as I am, do I try to express
+      myself. What I want to say cannot be said; but those who have truly lived
+      will understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed over the Seine, lighted and asleep in the exquisite Parisian
+      night, and the rattling of the cab on the cobble-stones roused Diaz from
+      his stupor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where are we?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just going through the Louvre,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know how I got to the other s-side of the river,&rsquo; he
+      said. ‘Don&rsquo;t remember. So you&rsquo;re coming home with me, eh? You
+      aren&rsquo;t ‘shamed of me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are hurting me,&rsquo; I said coldly, &lsquo;with your elbow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, a thousand pardons! a thous&rsquo; parnds, Magda! That isn&rsquo;t
+      your real name, is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat upright and turned his face to glance at mine with a fatuous smile;
+      but I would not look at him. I kept my eyes straight in front. Then a
+      swerve of the carriage swung his body away from me, and he subsided into
+      the corner. The intoxication was gaining on him every minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What shall I do with him?&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I blushed as we drove up the Avenue de l&rsquo;Opera and across the Grand
+      Boulevard, for it seemed to me that all the gay loungers must observe Diaz&rsquo;
+      condition. We followed darker thoroughfares, and at last the cab, after
+      climbing a hill, stopped before a house in a street that appeared rather
+      untidy and irregular. I got out first, and Diaz stumbled after me, while
+      two women on the opposite side of the road stayed curiously to watch us.
+      Hastily I opened my purse and gave the driver a five-franc-piece, and he
+      departed before Diaz could decide what to say. I had told him to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not wish to tell the driver to go. I told him in spite of myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz, grumbling inarticulately, pulled the bell of the great door of the
+      house. But he had to ring several times before finally the door opened;
+      and each second was a year for me, waiting there with him in the street.
+      And when the door opened he was leaning against it, and so pitched forward
+      into the gloom of the archway. A laugh&mdash;the loud, unrestrained laugh
+      of the courtesan&mdash;came from across the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The archway was as black as night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shut the door, will you?&rsquo; I heard Diaz&rsquo; voice. &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t
+      see it. Where are you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I was not going to shut the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you got a servant here?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘She comes in the mornings,&rsquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then there is no one in your flat?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not a shoul,&rsquo; said Diaz. &lsquo;Needn&rsquo;t be &lsquo;fraid.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I&rsquo;m not afraid,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;But I wanted to know. Which
+      floor is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Third. I&rsquo;ll light a match.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I pushed to the door, whose automatic latch clicked. We were fast in
+      the courtyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz dropped his matches in attempting to strike one. The metal box
+      bounced on the tiles. I bent down and groped with both hands till I found
+      it. And presently we began painfully to ascend the staircase, Diaz holding
+      his umbrella and the rail, and I striking matches from time to time. We
+      were on the second landing when I heard the bell ring again, and the
+      banging of the front-door, and then voices at the foot of the staircase. I
+      trembled lest we should be over-taken, and I would have hurried Diaz on,
+      but he would not be hurried. Happily, as we were halfway between the
+      second and third story, the man and the girl whose voices I heard stopped
+      at the second. I caught sight of them momentarily through the banisters.
+      The man was striking matches as I had been. &lsquo;<i>C&rsquo;est ici</i>,&rsquo;
+      the girl whispered. She was dressed in blue with a very large hat. She put
+      a key in the door when they had stopped, and then our matches went out
+      simultaneously. The door shut, and Diaz and I were alone on the staircase
+      again. I struck another match; we struggled on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I had taken his key from Diaz&rsquo; helpless hand, and opened his
+      door and guided him within, and closed the door definitely upon the outer
+      world, I breathed a great sigh. Every turn of the stair had been a station
+      of the cross for me. We were now in utter darkness. The classical
+      effluvium of inebriety mingled with the classical odour of the furnished
+      lodging. But I cared not. I had at last successfully hidden his shame. No
+      one could witness it now but me. So I was glad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither of us said anything as, still with the aid of matches, I
+      penetrated into the flat. Silently I peered about until I perceived a pair
+      of candles, which I lighted. Diaz, with his hat on his head and his
+      umbrella clasped tightly in his hand, fell into a chair. We glanced at
+      each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You had better go to bed,&rsquo; I suggested. &lsquo;Take your hat off.
+      You will feel better without it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not move, and I approached him and gently took his hat. I then
+      touched the umbrella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no, no!&rsquo; he cried suddenly; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m always losing this
+      umbrella, and I won&rsquo;t let it out of my sight.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you wish,&rsquo; I replied coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was standing by him when he got up with a surprising lurch and put a
+      hand on my shoulder. He evidently meant to kiss me. I kept him at arm&rsquo;s
+      length, feeling a sort of icy anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to bed,&rsquo; I repeated fiercely. &lsquo;It is the only place for
+      you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made inarticulate noises in his throat, and ultimately achieved the
+      remark:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re very hard, Magda.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he bent himself towards the next room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You will want a candle,&rsquo; I said, with bitterness. &lsquo;No; I will
+      carry it. Let me go first.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I preceded him through a tiny salon into the bedroom, and, leaving him
+      there with one candle, came back into the first room. The whole place was
+      deplorable, though not more deplorable than I had expected from the look
+      of the street and the house and the stairs and the girl with the large
+      hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless,
+      and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel&mdash;a
+      kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings
+      and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with enormous
+      red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once been a
+      carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with actually
+      a bed! It was the ready-made human kennel of commerce, which every large
+      city supplies wholesale in tens of thousands to its victims. In that
+      street there were hundreds such; in the house alone there were probably a
+      score at least. Their sole virtue was their privacy. Ah the blessedness of
+      the sacred outer door, which not even the tyrant concierge might violate!
+      I thought of all the other interiors of the house, floor above floor, and
+      serried one against another&mdash;vile, mean, squalid, cramped, unlovely,
+      frowsy, fetid; but each lighted and intensely alive with the interplay of
+      hearts; each cloistered, a secure ground where the instincts that move the
+      world might show themselves naturally and in secret. There was something
+      tragically beautiful in that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had heard uncomfortable sounds from the bedroom. Then Diaz called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s no use. Can&rsquo;t do it. Can&rsquo;t get into bed.&rsquo; I
+      went directly to him. He sat on the bed, still clasping the umbrella, one
+      arm out of his coat. His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man
+      who retires baffled from some tremendously complicated problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Put down your umbrella,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t be foolish.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m not foolish,&rsquo; he retorted irritably. &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t
+      want to loosh thish umbrella again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well then,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;hold it in the other hand, and I will
+      help you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that
+      revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He
+      was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty
+      centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should
+      exist&mdash;there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened,
+      shut in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted.
+      Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his mother.
+      I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed, clutching the
+      umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it from both
+      hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one
+      clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left
+      him to his inanimate companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was
+      prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs
+      alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to get
+      out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a cab
+      in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to walk
+      even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was, seated
+      in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself in the
+      vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful, passionate city
+      in the night&mdash;the night when the commonest noises seem to carry some
+      mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth walks abroad
+      naked and whispers her secrets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of
+      the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night,
+      the lamp was extinguished by a careful municipality, and I was left in
+      utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and
+      sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with
+      difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow&mdash;as if the city had not
+      been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was
+      about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up, and
+      I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound
+      disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz&rsquo; bedroom. As of
+      old, he slept with the tranquillity of a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished
+      floor under the table. The night had passed, and it appeared to be almost
+      a miracle that the night had passed, and that I had lived through it and
+      was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed
+      back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in
+      blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom. She
+      went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more sane,
+      more astringent. And yet only a few hours&mdash;and it had been night,
+      strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were
+      warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dreaming souls. But
+      that tall woman must go to bed in day, and rise to meet the first wind of
+      the morning, and perhaps never have known the sweet poison of the night. I
+      sank back into my chair....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sharp, decisive sound of a key in the lock of the
+      entrance-door. I jumped up, fully awake, with beating heart and blushing
+      face. Someone was invading the flat. Someone would catch me there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course it was his servant. I had entirely forgotten her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We met in the little passage. She was a stout creature and appeared to
+      fill the flat. She did not seem very surprised at the sight of me, and she
+      eyed me with the frigid disdain of one who conforms to a certain code for
+      one who does not conform to it. She sat in judgment on my well-hung skirt
+      and the rings on my fingers and the wickedness in my breast, and condemned
+      me to everlasting obloquy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Madame is going?&rsquo; she asked coldly, holding open the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, madame,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Are you the <i>femme de ménage</i> of
+      monsieur?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur is ill,&rsquo; I said, deciding swiftly what to do. &lsquo;He
+      does not wish to be disturbed. He would like you to return at two o&rsquo;clock.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before two I should have departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur knows well that I have another <i>ménage</i> from twelve to two,&rsquo;
+      protested the woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Three o&rsquo;clock, then,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Bien</i>, madame,&rsquo; said she, and, producing the contents of a
+      reticule: ‘Here are the bread, the butter, the milk, and the newspaper,
+      madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took the things, and she left, and I shut the door and bolted it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In anticipation, the circumstances of such an encounter would have caused
+      me infinite trouble of spirit. &lsquo;But after all it was not so very
+      dreadful,&rsquo; I thought, as I fastened the door. &lsquo;Do I care for
+      his <i>femme de ménage</i>?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great door of the house would be open now, and the stairs no longer
+      affrighting, and I might slip unobserved away. But I could not bring
+      myself to leave until I had spoken with Diaz, and I would not wake him. It
+      was nearly noon when he stirred. I heard his movements, and a slight
+      moaning sigh, and he called me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you there, Magda?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How feeble and appealing his voice!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer I stepped into his bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a quiver of
+      the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is is the ordered
+      and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be abhorrent, nothing
+      blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In the
+      presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we
+      maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin and of justice? We are, and that
+      is all we should dare to say. And yet, when I saw Diaz stretched on that
+      wretched bed my first movement was one of physical disgust. He had not
+      shaved for several days. His hair was like a doormat. His face was unclean
+      and puffed; his lips full and cracked; his eyes all discoloured. If aught
+      can be vile, he was vile. If aught can be obscene, he was obscene. His
+      limbs twitched; his features were full of woe and desolation and
+      abasement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at me heavily, mournfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz, Diaz!&rsquo; said my soul. &lsquo;Have you come to this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great and overmastering pity seized me, and I went to him, and laid my
+      hand gently on his. He was so nervous and tremulous that he drew away his
+      hand as if I had burnt it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Magda,&rsquo; he murmured, &lsquo;my head! There was a piece of hot
+      brick in my mouth, and I tried to take it out. But it was my tongue. Can I
+      have some tea? Will you give me some cold water first?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strange that the frank and simple way in which he accepted my presence
+      there, and assumed my willingness to serve him, filled me with a new joy!
+      He said nothing of the night. I think that Diaz was one of the few men who
+      are strong enough never to regret the past. If he was melancholy, it was
+      merely because he suffered bodily in the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave him water, and he thanked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now I will make some tea,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went into the tiny kitchen and looked around, lifting my skirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you find the things?&rsquo; he called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s all that splashing?&rsquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m washing a saucepan,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I never have my meals here,&rsquo; he called. &lsquo;Only tea. There are
+      two taps to the gas-stove&mdash;one a little way up the chimney.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, I was joyous, actively so. I brought the tea to the bedroom with a
+      glad smile. I had put two cups on the tray, which I placed on the
+      night-table; and there were some biscuits. I sat at the foot of the bed
+      while we drank. And the umbrella, unperceived by Diaz, lay with its handle
+      on a pillow, ludicrous and yet accusing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are an angel,&rsquo; said Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t call me that,&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because I wish it,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Angel&rsquo; was Ispenlove&rsquo;s
+      word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, what shall I call you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My name is Carlotta Peel,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Not Magdalen at all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was astounding, incredible, that he should be learning my name then for
+      the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall always call you Magda,&rsquo; he responded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And now I must go,&rsquo; I stated, when I had explained to him about the
+      servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you&rsquo;ll come back?&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No question of his coming to me! I must come to him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To a place like this?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unthinkingly I put into my voice some of the distaste I felt for his
+      deplorable apartments, and he was genuinely hurt. I believe that in all
+      honesty he deemed his apartments to be quite adequate and befitting. His
+      sensibilities had been so dulled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw up his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;if you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I stopped him quickly. &lsquo;I will come here. I was only
+      teasing you. Let me see. I&rsquo;ll come back at four, just to see how you
+      are. Won&rsquo;t you get up in the meantime?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, placated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I may do,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll try to. But in case I don&rsquo;t,
+      will you take my key? Where did you put it last night?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He summoned me to him just as I was opening the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are magnificent,&rsquo; he replied, with charming, impulsive
+      eagerness, his eyes resting upon me long. He was the old Diaz again.
+      &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t thank you. But when you come back I shall play to
+      you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Till four o&rsquo;clock,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he called again, just as I was leaving, &lsquo;bring one of
+      your books with you, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hesitated, with my hand on the door. When I gave him my name he had made
+      no sign that it conveyed to him anything out of the ordinary. That was
+      exactly like Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you read any of them?&rsquo; I asked loudly, without moving from the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he answered. &lsquo;But I have heard of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really!&rsquo; I said, keeping my tone free from irony. &lsquo;Well, I
+      will not bring you one of my books.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked hard at the door in front of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For you I will be nothing but a woman,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I fled down the stairs and past the concierge swiftly into the street,
+      as anxious as a thief to escape notice. I got a fiacre at once, and drove
+      away. I would not analyze my heart. I could not. I could but savour the
+      joy, sweet and fresh, that welled up in it as from some secret source. I
+      was so excited that I observed nothing outside myself, and when the cab
+      stopped in front of my hotel, it seemed to me that the journey had
+      occupied scarcely a few seconds. Do you imagine I was saddened by the
+      painful spectacle of Diaz&rsquo; collapse in life? No! I only knew that he
+      needed sympathy, and that I could give it to him with both hands. I could
+      give, give! And the last thing that the egotist in me told me before it
+      expired was that I was worthy to give. My longing to assuage the lot of
+      Diaz became almost an anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I returned at about half-past five, bright and eager, with vague
+      anticipations. I seemed to have become used to the house. It no longer
+      offended me, and I had no shame in entering it. I put the key into the
+      door of Diaz&rsquo; flat with a clear, high sense of pleasure. He had
+      entrusted me with his key; I could go in as I pleased; I need have no fear
+      of inconveniencing him, of coming at the wrong moment. It seemed
+      wonderful! And as I turned the key and pushed open the door my sole wish
+      was to be of service to him, to comfort him, to render his life less
+      forlorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Here I am!&rsquo; I cried, shutting the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the smaller of the two tiny sitting-rooms the piano, which had been
+      closed, was open, and I saw that it was a Pleyel. But both rooms were
+      empty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you still in bed, then?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went cautiously into the bedroom. It, too, was empty. The bed was made,
+      and the flat generally had a superficial air of tidiness. Evidently the
+      charwoman had been and departed; and doubtless Diaz had gone out, to
+      return immediately. I sat down in the chair in which I had spent most of
+      the night. I took off my hat and put it by the side of a tiny satchel
+      which I had brought, and began to wait for him. How delicious it would be
+      to open the door to him! He would notice that I had taken off my hat, and
+      he would be glad. What did the future, the immediate future, hold for me?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A long time I waited, and then I yawned heavily, and remembered that for
+      several days I had had scarcely any sleep. I shut my eyes to relieve the
+      tedium of waiting. When I reopened them, dazed, and startled into sudden
+      activity by mysterious angry noises, it was quite dark. I tried to recall
+      where I was, and to decide what the noises could be. I regained my
+      faculties with an effort. The noises were a beating on the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is Diaz,&rsquo; I said to myself; &lsquo;and he can&rsquo;t get in!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I felt very guilty because I had slept. I must have slept for hours.
+      Groping for a candle, I lighted it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Coming! coming!&rsquo; I called in a loud voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went into the passage with the candle and opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Diaz. The gas was lighted on the stairs. Between that and my candle
+      he stood conspicuous in all his details. Swaying somewhat, he supported
+      himself by the balustrade, and was thus distant about two feet from the
+      door. He was drunk&mdash;viciously drunk; and in an instant I knew the
+      cruel truth concerning him, and wondered that I had not perceived it
+      before. He was a drunkard&mdash;simply that. He had not taken to drinking
+      as a consequence of nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdown was a euphemism
+      for the result of alcoholic excess. I saw his slow descent as in a vision,
+      and everything was explained. My heart leapt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can save him,&rsquo; I said to myself. &lsquo;I can restore him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was aware of the extreme difficulty of curing a drunkard, of the immense
+      proportion of failures. But, I thought, if a woman such as I cannot by the
+      lavishing of her whole soul and body deliver from no matter what fiend a
+      man such as Diaz, then the world has changed, and the eternal Aphrodite is
+      dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can save him!&rsquo; I repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, heavenly moment!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Aren&rsquo;t you coming in?&rsquo; I addressed him quietly. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve
+      been waiting for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you?&rsquo; he angrily replied. &lsquo;I waited long enough for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;come in.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who is it?&rsquo; he demanded. &lsquo;I inzizt&mdash;who is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s I,&rsquo; I answered; &lsquo;Magda.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That&rsquo;s no&rsquo; wha&rsquo; I mean,&rsquo; he went on. &lsquo;And
+      wha&rsquo;s more&mdash;you know it. Who is it addrezzes you, madame?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I humoured him, &lsquo;it&rsquo;s you, of course&mdash;Diaz.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the sound of a door opening on one of the lower storeys, and I
+      hoped I had pacified him, and that he would enter; but I was mistaken. He
+      stamped his foot furiously on the landing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz!&rsquo; he protested, shouting. &lsquo;Who dares call me Diaz? Wha&rsquo;s
+      my full name?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Emilio Diaz,&rsquo; I murmured meekly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That&rsquo;s better,&rsquo; he grumbled. &lsquo;What am I?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wha&rsquo; am I?&rsquo; he roared; and his voice went up and down the
+      echoing staircase. &lsquo;I won&rsquo;t put foot ev&rsquo;n on doormat
+      till I&rsquo;m told wha&rsquo; I am here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are the&mdash;the master,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;But do come in.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The mas&rsquo;r! Mas&rsquo;r of wha&rsquo;?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Master of the pianoforte,&rsquo; I answered at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, suddenly appeased, and put his foot unsteadily on the doormat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good!&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;But, un&rsquo;stan&rsquo;, I wouldn&rsquo;t
+      ev&rsquo;n have pu&rsquo; foot on doormat&mdash;no, not ev&rsquo;n on
+      doormat&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came in, and I shut the door, and I was alone with my wild beast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Kiss me,&rsquo; he commanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I kissed him on the mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t put your arms roun&rsquo; me,&rsquo; he growled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I deposited the candle on the floor, and put my arms round his neck,
+      standing on tip-toe, and kissed him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went past me, staggering and growling, into the sitting-room at the end
+      of the passage, and furiously banged down the lid of the piano, so that
+      every cord in it jangled deafeningly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Light the lamp,&rsquo; he called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘In one second,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I locked the outer door on the inside, slipped the key into my pocket, and
+      picked up the candle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What were you doing out there?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I had to pick the candle up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized my hat from the table and threw it to the floor. Then he sat
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nex&rsquo; time,&rsquo; he remarked, &lsquo;you&rsquo;ll know better&rsquo;n
+      to keep me waiting.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I lighted a lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m very sorry,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Won&rsquo;t you go to bed?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall go to bed when I want,&rsquo; he answered. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      thirsty. In the cupboard you&rsquo;ll see a bottle. I&rsquo;ll trouble you
+      to give it me, with a glass and some water.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This cupboard?&rsquo; I said questioningly, opening a cupboard papered to
+      match the rest of the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you can&rsquo;t be thirsty, Diaz?&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Must I repea&rsquo; wha&rsquo; I said?&rsquo; he glared at me. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      thirsty. Give me the bottle.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took out the bottle nearest to hand. It was of a dark green colour, and
+      labelled &lsquo;Extrait d&rsquo;Absinthe. Pernod fils.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not this one, Diaz?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;Give it me. And get a glass and some
+      water.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wha&rsquo;? You won&rsquo;t give it me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He jumped up recklessly and faced me. His hat fell off the back of his
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me that bottle!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His breath poisoned the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I retreated in the direction of the window, and put my hand on the knob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang at me, but not before I had opened the window and thrown out the
+      bottle. I heard it fall in the roadway with a crash and scattering of
+      glass. Happily it had harmed no one. Diaz was momentarily checked. He
+      hesitated. I eyed him as steadily as I could, closing the while the window
+      behind me with my right hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He may try to kill me,&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My heart was thudding against my dress, not from fear, but from
+      excitement. My situation seemed impossible to me, utterly passing belief.
+      Yesterday I had been a staid spinster, attended by a maid, in a hotel of
+      impeccable propriety. Today I had locked myself up alone with a riotous
+      drunkard in a vile flat in a notorious Parisian street. Was I mad? What
+      force, secret and powerful, had urged me on?... And there was the foul
+      drunkard, with clenched hands and fiery eyes, undecided whether or not to
+      murder me. And I waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved away, inarticulately grumbling, and resumed with difficulty his
+      hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ver&rsquo; well,&rsquo; he hiccupped morosely, &lsquo;ver&rsquo; well; I&rsquo;m
+      going. Tha&rsquo;s all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lurched into the passage, and then I heard him fumbling a long time
+      with the outer door. He left the door and went into his bedroom, and
+      finally returned to me. He held one hand behind his back. I had sunk into
+      a chair by the small table on which the lamp stood, with my satchel beside
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now!&rsquo; he said, halting in front of me. &lsquo;You&rsquo;ve locked
+      tha&rsquo; door. I can&rsquo;t go out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me the key.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me the key,&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I mus&rsquo; have the key.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he showed his right hand, and it held a revolver. He bent slightly
+      over the table, staring down at me as I stared up at him. But as his chin
+      felt the heat rising from the chimney of the lamp, he shifted a little to
+      one side. I might have rushed for shelter into some other room; I might
+      have grappled with him; I might have attempted to soothe him. But I could
+      neither stir nor speak. Least of all, could I give him the key&mdash;for
+      him to go and publish his own disgrace in the thoroughfares. So I just
+      gazed at him, inactive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I s&rsquo;ll kill you!&rsquo; he muttered, and raised the revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My throat became suddenly dry. I tried to make the motion of swallowing,
+      and could not. And looking at the revolver, I perceived in a swift
+      revelation the vast folly of my inexperience. Since he was already drunk,
+      why had I not allowed him to drink more, to drink himself into a stupor?
+      Drunkards can only be cured when they are sober. To commence a course of
+      moral treatment at such a moment as I had chosen was indeed the act of a
+      woman. However, it was too late to reclaim the bottle from the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw that he meant to kill me. And I knew that previously, during our
+      encounter at the window, I had only pretended to myself that I thought
+      there was a risk of his killing me. I had pretended, in order to increase
+      the glory of my martyrdom in my own sight. Moreover, my brain, which was
+      working with singular clearness, told me that for his sake I ought to give
+      up the key. His exposure as a helpless drunkard would be infinitely
+      preferable to his exposure as a murderer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet I could not persuade myself to relinquish the key. If I did so, he
+      would imagine that he had frightened me. But I had no fear, and I could
+      not bear that he should think I had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My ears sang. The room was full of a new odour, and a cloud floated
+      reluctantly upwards from the mouth of the revolver. I sneezed, and then I
+      grew aware that, firing at a distant of two feet, he had missed me. What
+      had happened to the bullet I could not guess. He put the revolver down on
+      the table with a groan, and the handle rested on my satchel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My God, Magda!&rsquo; he sighed, pushing back his hair with his beautiful
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was somewhat sobered. I said nothing, but I observed that the lamp was
+      smoking, and I turned down the wick. I was so self-conscious, so
+      irresolute, so nonplussed, that in sheer awkwardness, like a girl at a
+      party who does not know what to do with her hands, I pushed the revolver
+      off the satchel, and idly unfastened the catch of the satchel. Within it,
+      among other things, was my sedative. I, too, had fallen the victim of a
+      habit. For five years a bad sleeper, I had latterly developed into a very
+      bad sleeper, and my sedative was accordingly strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A notion struck me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Drink a little of this, my poor Diaz!&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It will make you sleep,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a convulsive movement he clutched the bottle and uncorked it, and
+      before I could interfere he had drunk nearly the whole of its contents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Stop!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;You will kill yourself!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What matter!&rsquo; he exclaimed; and staggered off to the darkness of
+      the bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed him with the lamp, but he had already fallen on the bed, and
+      seemed to be heavily asleep. I shook him; he made no response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘At any cost he must he roused,&rsquo; I said aloud. &lsquo;He must be
+      forced to walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a knocking at the outer door, low, discreet, and continuous. It
+      sounded to me like a deliverance. Whoever might be there must aid me to
+      waken Diaz. I ran to the door, taking the key out of my pocket, and opened
+      it. A tall woman stood on the doormat. It was the girl that I had glimpsed
+      on the previous night in the large hat ascending the stairs with a man.
+      But now her bright golden head was uncovered, and she wore a blue <i>peignoir</i>,
+      such as is sold ready made, with its lace and its ribbons, at all the big
+      Paris shops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, pardon, madame,&rsquo; she said, in a thin, sweet voice in French.
+      &lsquo;I was at my door, and it seemed to me that I heard&mdash;a
+      revolver. Nothing serious has passed, then? Pardon, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thank you. You are very amiable, madame,&rsquo; I replied
+      stiffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All my excuses, madame,&rsquo; said she, turning away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;I am wrong. Do not go. Someone is ill&mdash;very
+      ill. If you would&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where? What is it?&rsquo; she inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He is in the bedroom&mdash;here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both spoke breathlessly, hurrying to the bedroom, after I had fetched
+      the lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wounded? He has done himself harm? Ah!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;not that.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I explained to her that Diaz had taken at least six doses of my strong
+      solution of trional.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I seized the lamp and held it aloft over the form of the sleeper, which
+      lay on its side cross-wise, the feet projecting a little over the edge of
+      the bed, the head bent forward and missing the pillow, the arms stretched
+      out in front&mdash;the very figure of abandoned and perfect
+      unconsciousness. And the girl and I stared at Diaz, our shoulders
+      touching, in the kennel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He must be made to walk about,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;You would be
+      extremely kind to help me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, madame,&rsquo; she replied. &lsquo;He will be very well like that.
+      When one is alcoholic, one cannot poison one&rsquo;s self; it is
+      impossible. All the doctors will tell you as much. Your friend will sleep
+      for twenty hours&mdash;twenty-four hours&mdash;and he will waken himself
+      quite re-established.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are sure? You know?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I know, madame. Be tranquil. Leave him. He could not have done better. It
+      is perfect.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Perhaps I should fetch a doctor?&rsquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is not worth the pain,&rsquo; she said, with conviction. &lsquo;You
+      would have vexations uselessly. Leave him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gazed at her, studying her, and I was satisfied. With her fluffly locks,
+      and her simple eyes, and her fragile face, and her long hands, she had,
+      nevertheless, the air of knowing profoundly her subject. She was a great
+      expert on males and all that appertained to them, especially their vices.
+      I was the callow amateur. I was compelled to listen with respect to this
+      professor in the professor&rsquo;s garb. I was impressed, in spite of
+      myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘One might arrange him more comfortably,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And we lifted the senseless victim, and put him on his back, and
+      straightened his limbs, as though he had been a corpse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How handsome he is!&rsquo; murmured my visitor, half closing her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You think so?&rsquo; I said politely, as if she had been praising one of
+      my private possessions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh yes. We are neighbours, madame. I have frequently remarked him, you
+      understand, on the stairs, in the street.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Has he been here long?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About a year, madame. You have, perhaps, not seen him since a long time.
+      An old friend?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is ten years ago,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! Ten years! In England, without doubt?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘In England, yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ten years!&rsquo; she repeated, musing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am certain she has a kind heart,&rsquo; I said to myself, and I decided
+      to question her: &lsquo;Will you not sit down, madame?&rsquo; I invited
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, madame! it is you who should sit down,&rsquo; she said quickly.
+      &lsquo;You must have suffered.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both sat down. There were only two chairs in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I would like to ask you,&rsquo; I said, leaning forward towards her,
+      &lsquo;have you ever seen him&mdash;drunk&mdash;before?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; she replied instantly; &lsquo;never before yesterday evening.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Be frank,&rsquo; I urged her, smiling sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why should I not be frank, madame?&rsquo; she said, with a grave, gentle
+      appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if she had said: &lsquo;We are talking woman to woman. I know
+      one of your secrets. You can guess mine. The male is present, but he is
+      deaf. What reason, therefore, for deceit?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am much obliged to you,&rsquo; I breathed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not at all,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Decidedly he is alcoholic&mdash;that
+      sees itself,&rsquo; she proceeded. &lsquo;But drunk&mdash;no!... He was
+      always alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Always alone?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Always.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes filled. I thought I had never seen a creature more gentle,
+      delicate, yielding, acquiescent, and fair. She was not beautiful, but she
+      had grace and distinction of movement. She was a Parisienne. She had won
+      my sympathy. We met in a moment when my heart needed the companionship of
+      a woman&rsquo;s heart, and I was drawn to her by one of those sudden
+      impulses that sometimes draw women to each other. I cared not what she
+      was. Moreover, she had excited my curiosity. She was a novelty in my life.
+      She was something that I had heard of, and seen&mdash;yes, and perhaps
+      envied in secret, but never spoken with. And she shattered all my
+      preconceptions about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are an old tenant of this house?&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; she said; &lsquo;it suits me. But the great heats are
+      terrible here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not leave Paris, then?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Never. Except to see my little boy.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I started, envious of her, and also surprised. It seemed strange that this
+      ribboned and elegant and plastic creature, whose long, thin arms were used
+      only to dalliance, should be a mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you have a little boy?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; he lives with my parents at Meudon. He is four years old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Excuse me,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Be frank with me once again. Do you love
+      your child, honestly? So many women don&rsquo;t, it appears.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I love him?&rsquo; she cried, and her face glowed with her love.
+      &lsquo;I adore him!&rsquo; Her sincerity was touching and overwhelming.
+      &lsquo;And he loves me, too. If he is naughty, one has only to tell him
+      that he will make his <i>petite mère</i> ill, and he will be good at once.
+      When he is told to obey his grandfather, because his grandfather provides
+      his food, he says bravely: &ldquo;No, not grandpapa; it is <i>petite mère</i>!&rdquo;
+      Is it not strange he should know that I pay for him? He has a little
+      engraving of the Queen of Italy, and he says it is his <i>petite mère</i>.
+      Among the scores of pictures he has he keeps only that one. He takes it to
+      bed with him. It is impossible to deprive him of it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled divinely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How beautiful!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And you go to see him often?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As often as I have time. I take him out for walks. I run with him till we
+      reach the woods, where I can have him to myself alone. I never stop; I
+      avoid people. No one except my parents knows that he is my child. One
+      supposes he is a nurse-child, received by my parents. But all the world
+      will know now,&rsquo; she added, after a pause. &lsquo;Last Monday I went
+      to Meudon with my friend Alice, and Alice wanted to buy him some sweets at
+      the grocer&rsquo;s. In the shop I asked him if he would like <i>dragées</i>,
+      and he said &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; The grocer said to him, &ldquo;Yes who,
+      young man?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes, <i>petite mère</i>,&rdquo; he said, very
+      loudly and bravely. The grocer understood. We all lowered our heads.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something so affecting in the way she half whispered the last
+      phrase, that I could have wept; and yet it was comical, too, and she
+      appreciated that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have no child, madame?&rsquo; she asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;How I envy you!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You need not,&rsquo; she observed, with a touch of hardness. &lsquo;I
+      have been so unhappy, that I can never be as unhappy again. Nothing
+      matters now. All I wish is to save enough money to be able to live quietly
+      in a little cottage in the country.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With your child,&rsquo; I put in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My child will grow up and leave me. He will become a man, and he will
+      forget his <i>petite mère.&lsquo;</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not talk like that,&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced at me almost savagely. I was astonished at the sudden change
+      in her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo; she inquired coldly. &lsquo;Is it not true, then? Do you
+      still believe that there is any difference between one man and another?
+      They are all alike&mdash;all, all, all! I know. And it is we who suffer,
+      we others.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you have some tender souvenir of your child&rsquo;s father?&rsquo;
+      I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I know who my child&rsquo;s father is?&rsquo; she demanded. &lsquo;My
+      child has thirty-six fathers!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You seem very bitter,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;for your age. You are much
+      younger than I am.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled and shook her honey-coloured hair, and toyed with the ribbons
+      of her <i>peignoir</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What I say is true,&rsquo; she said gently. &lsquo;But, there, what would
+      you have? We hate them, but we love them. They are beasts! beasts! but we
+      cannot do without them!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes rested on Diaz for a moment. He slept without the least sound,
+      the stricken and futile witness of our confidences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You will take him away from Paris soon, perhaps?&rsquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I can,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sound of light footsteps on the stair. They stopped at the
+      door, which I remembered we had not shut. I jumped up and went into the
+      passage. Another girl stood in the doorway, in a <i>peignoir</i> the exact
+      counterpart of my first visitor&rsquo;s, but rose-coloured. And this one,
+      too, was languorous and had honey-coloured locks. It was as though the
+      mysterious house was full of such creatures, each with her secret lair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pardon, madame,&rsquo; said my visitor, following and passing me; and
+      then to the newcomer: &lsquo;What is it, Alice?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is Monsieur Duchatel who is arrived.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; with a disdainful gesture. &lsquo;<i>Je m&rsquo;en fiche.</i>
+      Let him go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is the nephew, my dear; not the uncle.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, the nephew! I come. <i>Bon soir, madams, et bonne nuit</i>.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two <i>peignoirs</i> fluttered down the stairs together. I returned to
+      my Diaz, and seeing his dressing-gown behind the door of the bedroom, I
+      took it and covered him with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      His first words were:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda, you look like a ghost. Have you been sitting there like that all
+      the time?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I lay down.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘By your side.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tea-time. The water is boiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Was I dreadful last night?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dreadful? How?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have a sort of recollection of getting angry and stamping about. I didn&rsquo;t
+      do anything foolish?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You took a great deal too much of my sedative,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I feel quite well,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;but I didn&rsquo;t know I had
+      taken any sedative at all. I&rsquo;m glad I didn&rsquo;t do anything silly
+      last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran away to prepare the tea. The situation was too much for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor Diaz!&rsquo; I said, when we had begun to drink the tea, and he
+      was sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes full of sleep, his chin
+      rough, and his hair magnificently disarranged, &lsquo;you did one thing
+      that was silly last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t tell me I struck you?&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh no!&rsquo; and I laughed. &lsquo;Can&rsquo;t you guess what I mean?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I got vilely drunk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he burst out passionately, seeming at this point fully to
+      arouse himself, to resume acutely his consciousness, &lsquo;why were you
+      late? You said four o&rsquo;clock. I thought you had deceived me. I
+      thought I had disgusted you, and that you didn&rsquo;t mean to return. I
+      waited more than an hour and a quarter, and then I went out in despair.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I came just afterwards,&rsquo; I protested. &lsquo;You had only to
+      wait a few more minutes. Surely you could have waited a few more minutes?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You said four o&rsquo;clock,&rsquo; he repeated obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was barely half-past five when I came,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I had meant never to drink again,&rsquo; he went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were so kind to me. But then, when you didn&rsquo;t come&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You doubted me, Diaz. You ought to have been sure of me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was wrong.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;It was I who was wrong. But I never thought
+      that an hour and a half would make any difference.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, Magda, Magda!&rsquo;&mdash;he suddenly began to weep; it was
+      astounding&mdash;&lsquo;remember that you had deserted me once before.
+      Remember that. If you had not done that, my life might have been
+      different. It <i>would</i> have been different.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t say so,&rsquo; I pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I must say so. You cannot imagine how solitary my life has been.
+      Magda, I loved you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I too wept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His accent was sincerity itself. I saw the young girl hurrying secretly
+      out of the Five Towns Hotel. Could it be true that she had carried away
+      with her, unknowing, the heart of Diaz? Could it be true that her panic
+      flight had ruined a career? The faint possibility that it was true made me
+      sick with vain grief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And now I am old and forgotten and disgraced,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How old are you, Diaz?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thirty-six,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;you have thirty years to live.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; and what years?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Famous years. Brilliant years.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am done for&mdash;&rsquo; he murmured, and his head sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you so weak, then?&rsquo; I took his hand. &lsquo;Are you so weak?
+      Look at me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He obeyed, and his wet eyes met mine. In that precious moment I lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You could not have looked at me if you had not been strong, very strong,&rsquo;
+      I said firmly. &lsquo;You told me once that you had a house near
+      Fontainebleau. Have you still got it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose so.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let us go there, and&mdash;and&mdash;see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should like to go,&rsquo; I insisted, with a break in my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My God!&rsquo; he exclaimed in a whisper, &lsquo;my God!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was sobbing violently, and my forehead was against the rough stuff of
+      his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And one morning, long afterwards, I awoke very early, and the murmuring of
+      the leaves of the forest came through the open window. I had known that I
+      should wake very early, in joyous anticipation of that day. And as I lay
+      he lay beside me, lost in the dreamless, boyish, natural sleep that he
+      never sought in vain. He lay, as always, slightly on his right side, with
+      his face a little towards me&mdash;his face that was young again, and from
+      which the bane had passed. It was one of the handsomest, fairest faces in
+      the world, one of the most innocent, and one of the strongest; the face of
+      a man who follows his instincts with the direct simplicity of a savage or
+      a child, and whose instincts are sane and powerful. Seen close, perfectly
+      at rest, as I saw it morning after morning, it was full of a special and
+      mysterious attraction. The fine curves of the nostrils and of the lobe of
+      the ear, the masterful lines of the mouth, the contours of the cheek and
+      chin and temples, the tints of the flesh subtly varying from rose to
+      ivory, the golden crown of hair, the soft moustache. I had learned every
+      detail by heart; my eyes had dwelt on them till they had become my soul&rsquo;s
+      inheritance, till they were mystically mine, drawing me ever towards them,
+      as a treasure draws. Gently moving, I would put my ear close, close, and
+      listen to the breath of life as it entered regularly, almost
+      imperceptibly, vivifying that organism in repose. There is something
+      terrible in the still beauty of sleep. It is as though the spiritual
+      fabric hangs inexplicably over the precipice of death. It seems
+      impossible, or at least miraculous, that the intake and the expulsion upon
+      which existence depends should continue thus, minute by minute, hour by
+      hour. It is as though one stood on the very confines of life, and could
+      one trace but one step more, one single step, one would unveil the eternal
+      secret. I would not listen long; the torture was too sweet, too exquisite,
+      and I would gently slide back to my place.... His hand was on the
+      counterpane, near to my breast&mdash;the broad hand of the pianist, with a
+      wrist of incredible force, and the fingers tapering suddenly at the end to
+      a point. I let my own descend on it as softly as snow. Ah, ravishing
+      contact! He did not move. And while my small hand touched his I gazed into
+      the spaces of the bedroom, with its walls of faded blue tapestry and its
+      white curtains, and its marble and rosewood, and they seemed to hold
+      peace, as the hollows of a field hold dew; they seemed to hold happiness
+      as a great tree holds sunlight in its branches; and outside was the
+      murmuring of the leaves of the forest and the virginal freshness of the
+      morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surely he must wake earlier that day! I pursed my lips and blew tenderly,
+      mischievously, on his cheek, lying with my cheek full on the pillow, so
+      that I could watch him. The muscles of his mouth twitched, his inner being
+      appeared to protest. And then began the first instinctive blind movement
+      of the day with him. His arms came forward and found my neck, and drew me
+      forcibly to him, and then, just before our lips touched, he opened his
+      eyes and shut them again. So it occurred every morning. Ere even his brain
+      had resumed activity his heart had felt its need of me. This it was that
+      was so wonderful, so overpowering! And the kiss, languid and yet warm,
+      heavy with a human scent, with the scent of the night, honest, sensuous,
+      and long&mdash;long! As I lay thus, clasped in his arms, I half closed my
+      eyes, and looked into his eyes through my lashes, smiling, and all was a
+      delicious blur....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the summit of bliss! No! I have never mounted higher! I asked
+      myself, astounded, what I had done that I should receive such happiness,
+      what I had done that existence should have no flaw for me. And what <i>had</i>
+      I done? I know not, I know not. It passes me. I am lost in my joy. For I
+      had not even cured him. I had anticipated painful scenes, interminable
+      struggles, perhaps a relapse. But nothing of the kind. He had simply
+      ceased at once the habit&mdash;that was all. We never left each other. And
+      his magnificent constitution had perfectly recovered itself in a few
+      months. I had done nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he murmured indistinctly, drawing his mouth an inch away
+      from mine, &lsquo;why can&rsquo;t your dark hair always be loose over your
+      shoulders like that? It is glorious!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What ideas you have!&rsquo; I murmured, more softly than he. &lsquo;And
+      do you know what it is to-day?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve forgotten?&rsquo; I pouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Guess.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No; you must tell me. Not your birthday? Not mine?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just a year since I met you,&rsquo; I whispered timidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our mouths met again, and, so enlocked, we rested, savouring the true
+      savour of life. And presently my hand stole up to his head and stroked his
+      curls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every morning he began to practise at eight o&rsquo;clock, and continued
+      till eleven. The piano, a Steinway in a hundred Steinways, was in the
+      further of the two drawing-rooms. He would go into the room smoking a
+      cigarette, and when he had thrown away the cigarette I would leave him.
+      And as soon as I had closed the door the first notes would resound, slow
+      and solemn, of the five-finger exercises with which he invariably
+      commenced his studies. That morning, as often, I sat writing in the
+      enclosed garden. I always wrote in pencil on my knee. The windows of the
+      drawing-room were wide open, and Diaz&rsquo; music filled the garden. The
+      sheer beauty of his tone was such that to hear him strike even an isolated
+      note gave pleasure. He created beauty all the time. His five-finger
+      exercises were lovely patterns of sound woven with exact and awful
+      deliberation. It seemed impossible that these should be the same bald and
+      meaningless inventions which I had been wont to repeat. They were
+      transformed. They were music. The material in which he built them was
+      music itself, enchanting the ear as much by the quality of the tone as by
+      the impeccable elegance of the form. To hear Diaz play a scale, to catch
+      that measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of
+      equal splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born&mdash;this
+      was to perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the
+      divine magic that is the soul of the divinest art. I used to believe that
+      nothing could surpass the beauty of a scale, until Diaz, after writing
+      formal patterns in the still air innumerably, and hypnotizing me with that
+      sorcery, would pass suddenly to the repetition of fragments of Bach. And
+      then I knew that hitherto he had only been trying to be more purely and
+      severely mechanical than a machine, and that now the interpreter was at
+      work. I have heard him repeat a passage fifty times&mdash;and so slowly!&mdash;and
+      each rendering seemed more beautiful than the last; and it was more
+      beautiful than the last. He would extract the final drop of beauty from
+      the most beautiful things in the world. Washed, drenched in this
+      circumambient ether of beauty, I wrote my verse. Perhaps it may appear
+      almost a sacrilege that I should have used the practising of a Diaz as a
+      background for my own creative activity. I often thought so. But when one
+      has but gold, one must put it to lowly use. So I wrote, and he passed from
+      Bach to Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Usually he would come out into the garden for five minutes at half-past
+      nine to smoke a cigarette, but that morning it had struck ten before the
+      music ceased. I saw him. He walked absent-minded along the terrace in the
+      strange silence that had succeeded. He was wearing his riding-breeches,
+      for we habitually rode at eleven. And that morning I did not hide my work
+      when he came. It was, in fact, finished; the time had arrived to disclose
+      it. He stopped in front of me in the sunlight, utterly preoccupied with
+      himself and his labours. He had the rapt look on his face which results
+      from the terrible mental and spiritual strain of practising as he
+      practised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Satisfied?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He frowned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There are times when one gets rather inspired,&rsquo; he said, looking at
+      me, as it were, without seeing me. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s as if the whole soul
+      gets into one&rsquo;s hands. That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s wanted.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You had it this morning?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘A bit.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled with candid joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘While I was listening&mdash;&rsquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; he broke in impulsively, violently, &lsquo;it isn&rsquo;t you
+      that have to listen. It&rsquo;s I that have to listen. It&rsquo;s the
+      player that has to listen. He&rsquo;s got to do more than listen. He&rsquo;s
+      got to be <i>in</i> the piano with his inmost heart. If he isn&rsquo;t on
+      the full stretch of analysis the whole blessed time, he might just as well
+      be turning the handle of a barrel-organ.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He always talked about his work during the little &lsquo;recess&rsquo;
+      which he took in the middle of the morning. He pretended to be talking to
+      me, but it was to himself that he talked. He was impatient if I spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be greater than ever,&rsquo; he proceeded, after a moment. And
+      his attitude towards himself was so disengaged, so apart and aloof, so
+      critically appreciative, that it was impossible to accuse him of egoism.
+      He was, perhaps, as amazed at his own transcendent gift as any other
+      person could be, and he was incapable of hiding his sensations. &lsquo;Yes,&rsquo;
+      he repeated; &lsquo;I think I shall be greater than ever. You see, a
+      Chopin player is born; you can&rsquo;t make him. With Chopin it&rsquo;s
+      not a question of intellect. It&rsquo;s all tone with Chopin&mdash;<i>tone</i>,
+      my child, even in the most bravura passages. You&rsquo;ve got to get it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed over the tree-tops into the blue sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I may be ready in six months,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you will,&rsquo; I concurred, with a judicial air. But I honestly
+      deemed him to be more than ready then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twelve months previously he had said: &lsquo;With six hours&rsquo;
+      practice a day for two years I shall recover what I have lost.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had succeeded beyond his hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you writing in that book?&rsquo; he inquired carelessly as he threw
+      down the cigarette and turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have just finished something,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m glad you aren&rsquo;t idle. It&rsquo;s
+      so boring.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He returned to the piano, perfectly incurious about what I did,
+      self-absorbed as a god. And I was alone in the garden, with the semicircle
+      of trees behind me, and the façade of the old house and its terrace in
+      front. And lying on the lawn, just under the terrace, was the white end of
+      the cigarette which he had abandoned; it breathed upwards a thin spiral of
+      blue smoke through the morning sunshine, and then it ceased to breathe.
+      And the music recommenced, on a different plane, more brilliantly than
+      before. It was as though, till then, he had been laboriously building the
+      bases of a tremendous triumphal arch, and that now the two wings met,
+      dazzlingly, soaringly, in highest heaven, and the completed arch became a
+      rainbow glittering in the face of the infinite. He played two of his great
+      concert pieces, and their intricate melodies&mdash;brocaded, embroidered,
+      festooned&mdash;poured themselves through the windows into the garden in a
+      procession majestic and impassioned, perturbing the intent soul of the
+      solitary listener, swathing her in intoxicating sound. It was the unique
+      virtuoso born again, proudly displaying the ultimate sublime end of all
+      those slow-moving exercises to which he had subdued his fingers. Not for
+      ten years had I heard him play so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we first came into the house I had said bravely to myself: &lsquo;His
+      presence shall not deter me from practising as I have always done.&rsquo;
+      And one afternoon I had sat down to the piano full of determination to
+      practise without fear of him, without self-consciousness. But before my
+      hands had touched the keys shame took me, unreasoning, terror-struck
+      shame, and I knew in an instant that while he lived I should never more
+      play the piano. He laughed lightly when I told him, and I called myself
+      silly. Yet now, as I sat in the garden, I saw how right I had been. And I
+      wondered that I should ever have had the audacity even to dream of playing
+      in his house; the idea was grotesque. And he did not ask me to play, save
+      when there arrived new orchestral music arranged for four hands. Then I
+      steeled myself to the ordeal of playing with him, because he wished to try
+      over the music. And he would thank me, and say that pianoforte duets were
+      always very enjoyable. But he did not pretend that I was not an amateur,
+      and he never&mdash;thank God!&mdash;suggested that we should attempt <i>Tristan</i>
+      again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he finished. And I heard distantly the bell which he had rung for
+      his glass of milk. And, remembering that I was not ready for the ride, I
+      ran with guilty haste into the house and upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two bay horses were waiting, our English groom at their heads, when I
+      came out to the porch. Diaz was impatiently tapping his boot with his
+      whip. He was not in the least a sporting man, but he loved the sensation
+      of riding, and the groom would admit that he rode passably; but he loved
+      more to strut in breeches, and to imitate in little ways the sporting man.
+      I had learnt to ride in order to please him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come along,&rsquo; he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes said: &lsquo;You are always late.&rsquo; And I was. Some people
+      always know exactly what point they have reached in the maze and jungle of
+      the day, just as mariners are always aware, at the back of their minds, of
+      the state of the tide. But I was not born so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz helped me to mount, and we departed, jingling through the gate and
+      across the road into a glade of the forest, one of those long sandy
+      defiles, banked on either side, and over-shadowed with tall oaks, which
+      pierce the immense forest like rapiers. The sunshine slanted through the
+      crimsoning leafwork and made irregular golden patches on the dark sand to
+      the furthest limit of the perspective. And though we could not feel the
+      autumn wind, we could hear it in the tree-tops, and it had the sound of
+      the sea. The sense of well-being and of joy was exquisite. The beauty of
+      horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and irrational as young
+      girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange is that their vast strength
+      does not seem incongruous with it. To be above that proud and lovely
+      organism, listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nervous far beyond the
+      human, to feel one&rsquo;s self almost part of it by intimate contact, to
+      yield to it, and make it yield, to draw from it into one&rsquo;s self some
+      of its exultant vitality&mdash;in a word, to ride&mdash;yes, I could
+      comprehend Diaz&rsquo; fine enthusiasm for that! I could share it when he
+      was content to let the horses amble with noiseless hoofs over the soft
+      ways. But when he would gallop, and a strong wind sprang up to meet our
+      faces, and the earth shook and thundered, and the trunks of the trees
+      raced past us, then I was afraid. My fancy always saw him senseless at the
+      foot of a tree while his horse calmly cropped the short grass at the sides
+      of the path, or with his precious hand twisted and maimed! And I was in
+      agony till he reined in. I never dared to speak to him of this fear, nor
+      even hint to him that the joy was worth less than the peril. He would have
+      been angry in his heart, and something in him stronger than himself would
+      have forced him to increase the risks. I knew him! ... Ah! but when we
+      went gently, life seemed to be ideal for me, impossibly perfect! It seemed
+      to contain all that I could ever have demanded of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at him sideways, so noble and sane and self-controlled. And the
+      days in Paris had receded, far and dim and phantom-like. Was it
+      conceivable that they had once been real, and that we had lived through
+      them? And was this Diaz, the world-renowned darling of capitals, riding by
+      me, a woman whom he had met by fantastic chance? Had he really hidden
+      himself in my arms from the cruel stare of the world and the insufferable
+      curiosity of admirers who, instead of admiring, had begun to pity? Had I
+      in truth saved him? Was it I who would restore him to his glory? Oh, the
+      astounding romance that my life had been! And he was with me! He shared my
+      life, and I his! I wondered what would happen when he returned to his
+      bright kingdom. I was selfish enough to wish that he might never return to
+      his kingdom, and that we might ride and ride for ever in the forest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then we came to a circular clearing, with an iron cross in the middle,
+      where roads met, a place such as occurs magically in some ballade of
+      Chopin&rsquo;s. And here we drew rein on the leaf-strewn grass, breathing
+      quickly, with reddened cheeks, and the horses nosed each other, with long
+      stretchings of the neck and rattling of bits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you&rsquo;ve been writing again?&rsquo; said Diaz, smiling
+      quizzically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve been writing a long time, but I
+      haven&rsquo;t let <i>you</i> know anything about it; and just to-day I&rsquo;ve
+      finished it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it&mdash;another novel?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No; a little drama in verse.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Going to publish it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why, naturally.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was aware that I enjoyed fame in England and America. He was probably
+      aware that my books had brought me a considerable amount of money. He had
+      read some of my works, and found them excellent&mdash;indeed, he was quite
+      proud of my talent. But he did not, he could not, take altogether
+      seriously either my talent or my fame. I knew that he always regarded me
+      as a child gracefully playing at a career. For him there was only one sort
+      of fame; all the other sorts were shadows. A supreme violinist might,
+      perhaps, approach the real thing, in his generous mind; but he was
+      incapable of honestly believing that any fame compared with that of a
+      pianist. The other fames were very well, but they were paste to the
+      precious stone, gewgaws to amuse simple persons. The sums paid to sopranos
+      struck him as merely ridiculous in their enormity. He could not be called
+      conceited; nevertheless, he was magnificently sure that he had been, and
+      still was, the most celebrated person in the civilized world. Certainly he
+      had no superiors in fame, but he would not admit the possibility of
+      equals. Of course, he never argued such a point; it was a tacit
+      assumption, secure from argument. And with that he profoundly reverenced
+      the great composers. The death of Brahms affected him for years. He
+      regarded it as an occasion for universal sorrow. Had Brahms condescended
+      to play the piano, Diaz would have turned the pages for him, and deemed
+      himself honoured&mdash;him whom queens had flattered!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Did you imagine,&rsquo; I began to tease him, after a pause, &lsquo;that
+      while you are working I spend my time in merely existing?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You exist&mdash;that is enough, my darling,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Strange
+      that a beautiful woman can&rsquo;t understand that in existing she is
+      doing her life&rsquo;s work!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he leaned over and touched my right wrist below the glove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You dear thing!&rsquo; I murmured, smiling. &lsquo;How foolish you can
+      be!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s the drama about?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About La Vallière,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘La Vallière! But that&rsquo;s the kind of subject I want for my opera!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I have thought so.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Could you turn it into a libretto, my child?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, dearest.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because it already is a libretto. I have written it as such.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For whom else?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I looked at him fondly, and I think tears came to my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are a genius, Magda!&rsquo; he exclaimed. &lsquo;You leave nothing
+      undone for me. The subject is the very thing to suit Villedo.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who is Villedo?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My jewel, you don&rsquo;t know who Villedo is! Villedo is the director of
+      the Opéra Comique in Paris, the most artistic opera-house in Europe. He
+      used to beg me every time we met to write him an opera.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And why didn&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because I had neither the subject nor the time. One doesn&rsquo;t write
+      operas after lunch in hotel parlours; and as for a good libretto&mdash;well,
+      outside Wagner, there&rsquo;s only one opera in the world with a good
+      libretto, and that&rsquo;s <i>Carmen</i>.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz, who had had a youthful operatic work performed at the Royal School
+      of Music in London, and whose numerous light compositions for the
+      pianoforte had, of course, enjoyed a tremendous vogue, was much more
+      serious about his projected opera than I had imagined. He had frequently
+      mentioned it to me, but I had not thought the idea was so close to his
+      heart as I now perceived it to be. I had written the libretto to amuse
+      myself, and perhaps him, and lo! he was going to excite himself; I well
+      knew the symptoms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You wrote it in that little book,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You haven&rsquo;t
+      got it in your pocket?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;I haven&rsquo;t even a pocket.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would not laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come,&rsquo; he said&mdash;&lsquo;come, let&rsquo;s see it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gathered up his loose rein and galloped off. He could not wait an
+      instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come along!&rsquo; he cried imperiously, turning his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am coming,&rsquo; I replied; &lsquo;but wait for me. Don&rsquo;t leave
+      me like that, Diaz.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old fear seized me, but nothing could stop him, and I followed as fast
+      as I dared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where is it?&rsquo; he asked, when we reached home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Upstairs,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came upstairs behind me, pulling my habit playfully, in an effort
+      to persuade us both that his impatience was a simulated one. I had to find
+      my keys and unlock a drawer. I took the small, silk-bound volume from the
+      back part of the drawer and gave it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;But remember lunch is ready.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He regarded the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a pretty binding!&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Who worked it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I did.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And, of course, your handwriting is so pretty, too!&rsquo; he added,
+      glancing at the leaves. &lsquo;&ldquo;La Vallière, an opera in three acts.&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We exchanged a look, each of us deliciously perturbed, and then he ran off
+      with the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had to be called three times from the garden to lunch, and he brought
+      the book with him, and read it in snatches during the meal, and while
+      sipping his coffee. I watched him furtively as he turned over the pages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, you&rsquo;ve done it!&rsquo; he said at length&mdash;&lsquo;you&rsquo;ve
+      done it! You evidently have a gift for libretto. It is neither more nor
+      less than perfect! And the subject is wonderful!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose, walked round the table, and, taking my head between his hands,
+      kissed me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;you&rsquo;re the cleverest girl that was
+      ever born.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, do you think you will compose it?&rsquo; I asked, joyous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I think I will compose it! Why, what do you imagine? I&rsquo;ve
+      already begun. It composes itself. I&rsquo;m now going to read it all
+      again in the garden. Just see that I&rsquo;m not worried, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean you don&rsquo;t want me there. You don&rsquo;t care for me any
+      more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It amused me to pretend to pout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he laughed; &lsquo;that&rsquo;s it. I don&rsquo;t care for
+      you any more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have no fear!&rsquo; I cried after him. &lsquo;I shan&rsquo;t come into
+      your horrid garden!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His habit was to resume his practice at three o&rsquo;clock. The hour was
+      then half-past one. I wondered whether he would allow himself to be
+      seduced from the piano that afternoon by the desire to compose. I hoped
+      not, for there could be no question as to the relative importance to him
+      of the two activities. To my surprise, I heard the piano at two o&rsquo;clock,
+      instead of at three, and it continued without intermission till five. Then
+      he came, like a sudden wind, on to the terrace where I was having tea.
+      Diaz would never take afternoon tea. He seized my hand impulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; he said&mdash;&lsquo;down under the trees there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What for?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, Diaz, let me put my cup down. I shall spill the tea on my dress.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll take your cup.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I haven&rsquo;t nearly finished my tea, either. And you&rsquo;re
+      hurting me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll bring you a fresh cup,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Come, come!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he dragged me off, laughing, to the lower part of the garden, where
+      were two chairs in the shade. And I allowed myself to be dragged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There! Sit down. Don&rsquo;t move. I&rsquo;ll fetch your tea.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently he returned with the cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now that you&rsquo;ve nearly killed me,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;and spoilt
+      my dress, perhaps you&rsquo;ll explain.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He produced the silk-bound book of manuscript from his pocket and put it
+      in my unoccupied hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to read it to me aloud, all of it,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a strange boy you are!&rsquo; I chided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I drank the tea, straightened my features into seriousness, and began
+      to read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reading occupied less than an hour. He made no remark when it was
+      done, but held out his hand for the book, and went out for a walk. At
+      dinner he was silent till the servants had gone. Then he said musingly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That scene in the cloisters between Louise and De Montespan is a great
+      idea. It will be magnificent; it will be the finest thing in the opera.
+      What a subject you have found! what a subject!&rsquo; His tone altered.
+      &lsquo;Magda, will you do something to oblige me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If it isn&rsquo;t foolish.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to go to bed.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Out of the way?&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to bed and to sleep,&rsquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want to walk about this floor. I must be alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;just to prove how humble and obedient I am, I
+      will go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I held up my mouth to be kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wondrous, the joy I found in playing the decorative, acquiescent,
+      self-effacing woman to him, the pretty, pouting plaything! I liked him to
+      dismiss me, as the soldier dismisses his charmer at the sound of the
+      bugle. I liked to think upon his obvious conviction that the libretto was
+      less than nothing compared to the music. I liked him to regard the whole
+      artistic productivity of my life as the engaging foible of a pretty woman.
+      I liked him to forget that I had brought him alive out of Paris. I liked
+      him to forget to mention marriage to me. In a word, he was Diaz, and I was
+      his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as I lay in bed I even tried to go to sleep, in my obedience, because
+      I knew he would wish it. But I could not easily sleep for anticipating his
+      triumph of the early future. His habits of composition were extremely
+      rapid. It might well occur that he would write the entire opera in a few
+      months, without at all sacrificing the piano. And naturally any operatic
+      manager would be loath to refuse an opera signed by Diaz. Villedo,
+      apparently so famous, would be sure to accept it, and probably would
+      produce it at once. And Diaz would have a double triumph, a dazzling and
+      gorgeous re-entry into the world. He might give his first recital in the
+      same week as the <i>première</i> of the opera. And thus his shame would
+      never be really known to the artistic multitude. The legend of a nervous
+      collapse could be insisted on, and the opera itself would form a
+      sufficient excuse for his retirement.... And I should be the secret cause
+      of all this glory&mdash;I alone! And no one would ever guess what Diaz
+      owed to me. Diaz himself would never appreciate it. I alone, withdrawn
+      from the common gaze, like a woman of the East, Diaz&rsquo; secret
+      fountain of strength and balm&mdash;I alone should be aware of what I had
+      done. And my knowledge would be enough for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I imagine I must have been dreaming when I felt a hand on my cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda, you aren&rsquo;t asleep, are you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was standing over me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I answered, in a voice made feeble by sleep. And I looked
+      up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Put something on and come downstairs, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, I don&rsquo;t know. One o&rsquo;clock.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve been working for over three hours, then!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said proudly. &lsquo;Come along. I want to play you my
+      notion of the overture. It&rsquo;s only in the rough, but it&rsquo;s
+      there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve begun with the overture?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not, my child? Here&rsquo;s your dressing-gown. Which is the top end
+      of it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed him downstairs, and sat close by him at the piano, with one
+      limp hand on his shoulder. There was no light in the drawing-rooms, save
+      one candle on the piano. My slipper escaped off my bare foot. As Diaz
+      played he looked at me constantly, demanding my approval, my enthusiasm,
+      which I gave him from a full heart. I thought the music charming, and, of
+      course, as he played it...!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall only have three motives,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;That&rsquo;s the
+      La Vallière motive. Do you see the idea?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean she limps?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Precisely. Isn&rsquo;t it delightful?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘She won&rsquo;t have to limp much, you know. She didn&rsquo;t.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just the faintest suggestion. It will be delicious. I can see Morenita in
+      the part. Well, what do you think of it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not speak. His appeal, suddenly wistful, moved me so. I leaned
+      forward and kissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear girl!&rsquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he blew out the candle. He was beside himself with excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz,&rsquo; I cried, &lsquo;what&rsquo;s the matter with you? Do have a
+      little sense. And you&rsquo;ve made me lose my slipper.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll carry you upstairs,&rsquo; he replied gaily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint illumination came from the hall, so that we could just see each
+      other. He lifted me off the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No!&rsquo; I protested, laughing. &lsquo;And my slipper.... The servants!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Stuff!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a trifle in those arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The triumphal re-entry into the world has just begun, and exactly as Diaz
+      foretold. And the life of the forest is over. We have come to Paris, and
+      he has taken Paris, and already he is leaving it for other shores, and I
+      am to follow. At this moment, while I write because I have not slept and
+      cannot sleep, his train rolls out of St. Lazare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last night! How glorious! But he is no longer wholly mine. The world has
+      turned his face a little from my face....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if I had never before realized the dazzling significance of the
+      fame of Diaz. I had only once seen him in public. And though he conquered
+      in the Jubilee Hall of the Five Towns, his victory, personal and artistic,
+      at the Opera Comique, before an audience as exacting, haughty, and
+      experienced as any in Europe, was, of course, infinitely more striking&mdash;a
+      victory worthy of a Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat alone and hidden at the back of a <i>baignoire</i> in the
+      auditorium. I had drawn up the golden grille, by which the occupants of a
+      <i>baignoire</i> may screen themselves from the curiosity of the <i>parterre</i>.
+      I felt like some caged Eastern odalisque, and I liked so to feel. I liked
+      to exist solely for him, to be mysterious, and to baffle the general gaze
+      in order to be more precious to him. Ah, how I had changed! How he had
+      changed me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Thursday, a subscription night, and, in addition, all Paris was in
+      the theatre, a crowded company of celebrities, of experts, and of
+      perfectly-dressed women. And no one knew who I was, nor why I was there.
+      The vogue of a musician may be universal, but the vogue of an English
+      writer is nothing beyond England and America. I had not been to a
+      rehearsal. I had not met Villedo, nor even the translator of my verse. I
+      had wished to remain in the background, and Diaz had not crossed me. Thus
+      I gazed through the bars of my little cell across the rows of bald heads,
+      and wonderful coiffures, and the waving arms of the conductor, and the
+      restless, gliding bows of the violinists, and saw a scene which was
+      absolutely strange and new to me. And it seemed amazing that these figures
+      which I saw moving and chanting with such grace in a palace garden,
+      authentic to the last detail of historical accuracy, were my La Vallière
+      and my Louis, and that this rich and coloured music which I heard was the
+      same that Diaz had sketched for me on the piano, from illegible scraps of
+      ruled paper, on the edge of the forest. The full miracle of operatic art
+      was revealed to me for the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when the curtain fell on the opening act, the intoxicating human
+      quality of an operatic success was equally revealed to me for the first
+      time. How cold and distant the success of a novelist compared to this! The
+      auditorium was suddenly bathed in bright light, and every listening face
+      awoke to life as from an enchantment, and flushed and smiled, and the
+      delicatest hands in France clapped to swell the mighty uproar that filled
+      the theatre with praise. Paris, upstanding on its feet, and leaning over
+      balconies and cheering, was charmed and delighted by the fable and the
+      music, in which it found nothing but the sober and pretty elegance that it
+      loves. And Paris applauded feverishly, and yet with a full sense of the
+      value of its applause&mdash;given there in the only French theatre where
+      the claque has been suppressed. And then the curtain rose, and La Vallière
+      and Louis tripped mincingly forward to prove that after all they were
+      Morenita and Montfériot, the darlings of their dear Paris, and utterly
+      content with their exclusively Parisian reputation. Three times they came
+      forward. And then the applause ceased, for Paris is not Naples, and it is
+      not Madrid, and the red curtain definitely hid the stage, and the theatre
+      hummed with animated chatter as elegant as Diaz&rsquo; music, and my ear,
+      that loves the chaste vivacity of the French tongue, was caressed on every
+      side by its cadences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This is the very heart of civilization,&rsquo; I said to myself. &lsquo;And
+      even in the forest I could not breathe more freely.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stared up absently at Benjamin Constant&rsquo;s blue ceiling,
+      meretricious and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of
+      Paris, and my eyes moistened because the world is so beautiful in such
+      various ways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the door of the <i>baignoire</i> opened. It was Diaz himself who
+      appeared. He had not forgotten me in the excitements of the stage and the
+      dressing-rooms. He put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and I glanced at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well?&rsquo; he murmured, and gave me a box of bonbons elaborately tied
+      with rich ribbons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I murmured, &lsquo;Well?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glory of his triumph was upon him. But he understood why my eyes were
+      wet, and his fingers moved soothingly on my shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t come round?&rsquo; he asked. &lsquo;Both Villedo and
+      Morenita are dying to meet you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re satisfied?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘More than satisfied,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;The thing is wonderful.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think it&rsquo;s rather charming,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;By the way, I&rsquo;ve
+      just had an offer from New York for it, and another from Rome.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded my appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t want anything?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thanks,&rsquo; I said, opening the box of bonbons, &lsquo;except
+      these. Thanks so much for thinking of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he left me again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the second act the legend&mdash;has not the tale of La Vallière
+      acquired almost the quality of a legend?&mdash;grew in persuasiveness and
+      in magnificence. It was the hour of La Vallière&rsquo;s unwilling
+      ascendancy, and it foreboded also her fall. The situations seemed to me to
+      be poignantly beautiful, especially that in which La Vallière and
+      Montespan and the Queen found themselves together. And Morenita had
+      perceived my meaning with such a sure intuition. I might say that she
+      showed me what I had meant. Diaz, too, had given to my verse a voice than
+      which it appeared impossible that anything could be more appropriate. The
+      whole effect was astonishing, ravishing. And within me&mdash;far, far
+      within the recesses of my glowing heart&mdash;a thin, clear whisper spoke
+      and said that I, and I alone, was the cause of that beauty of sight and
+      sound. Not Morenita, and not Montfériot, not Diaz himself, but Magda, the
+      self-constituted odalisque, was its author. I had thought of it; I had
+      schemed it; I had fashioned it; I had evoked the emotion in it. The others
+      had but exquisitely embroidered my theme. Without me they must have been
+      dumb and futile. On my shoulders lay the burden and the glory. And though
+      I was amazed, perhaps naively, to see what I had done, nevertheless I had
+      done it&mdash;I! The entire opera-house, that complicated and various
+      machine, was simply a means to express me. And it was to my touch on their
+      heartstrings that the audience vibrated. With all my humility, how proud I
+      was&mdash;coldly and arrogantly proud, as only the artist can be! I wore
+      my humility as I wore my black gown. Even Diaz could not penetrate to the
+      inviolable place in my heart, where the indestructible egoism defied the
+      efforts of love to silence it. And yet people say there is nothing
+      stronger than love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the close of the act, while the ringing applause, much more
+      enthusiastic than before, gave certainty of a genuine and extraordinary
+      success, I could not help blushing. It was as if I was in danger of being
+      discovered as the primal author of all that fleeting loveliness, as if my
+      secret was bound to get about, and I to be forced from my seclusion in
+      order to receive the acclamations of Paris. I played nervously and
+      self-consciously with my fan, and I wrapped my humility closer round me,
+      until at length the tumult died away, and the hum of charming, eager
+      chatter reassured my ears again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz did not come. The entr&rsquo;acte stretched out long, and the chatter
+      lost some of its eagerness, and he did not come. Perhaps he could not
+      come. Perhaps he was too much engaged, too much preoccupied, to think of
+      the gallantry which he owed to his mistress. A man cannot always be
+      dreaming of his mistress. A mistress must be reconciled to occasional
+      neglect; she must console herself with chocolates. And they were
+      chocolates from Marquis&rsquo;s, in the Passage des Panoramas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he came, accompanied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A whirl of high-seasoned, laughing personalities invaded my privacy. Diaz,
+      smiling humorously, was followed by a man and a cloaked woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear lady,&rsquo; he said, with an intimate formality, &lsquo;I present
+      Mademoiselle Morenita and Monsieur Villedo. They insisted on seeing you.
+      Mademoiselle, Monsieur&mdash;Mademoiselle Peel.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stood up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All our excuses,&rsquo; said Villedo, in a low, discreet voice, as he
+      carefully shut the door. &lsquo;All our excuses, madame. But it was
+      necessary that I should pay my respects&mdash;it was stronger than I.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came forward, took my hand, and raised it to his lips. He is a
+      little finicking man, with a little gray beard, and the red rosette in his
+      button-hole, and a most consummate ease of manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur,&rsquo; I replied, &lsquo;you are too amiable. And you, madame.
+      I cannot sufficiently thank you both.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morenita rushed at me with a swift, surprising movement, her cloak
+      dropping from her shoulders, and taking both my hands, she kissed me
+      impulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have genius,&rsquo; she said; &lsquo;and I am proud. I am ashamed
+      that I cannot read English; but I have the intention to learn in order to
+      read your books. Our Diaz says wonderful things of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She is a tall, splendidly-made, opulent creature, of my own age, born for
+      the footlights, with an extremely sweet and thrilling voice, and that
+      slight coarseness or exaggeration of gesture and beauty which is the
+      penalty of the stage. She did not in the least resemble a La Vallière as
+      she stood there gazing at me, with her gleaming, pencilled eyes and heavy,
+      scarlet lips. It seemed impossible that she could refine herself to a La
+      Vallière. But that woman is the drama itself. She would act no matter
+      what. She has always the qualities necessary to a rôle. And the gods have
+      given her green eyes, so that she may be La Vallière to the very life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I began to thank her for her superb performance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is I who should thank you,&rsquo; she answered. &lsquo;It will be my
+      greatest part. Never have I had so many glorious situations in a part. Do
+      you like my limp?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, her head on one side. Success glittered in those orbs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You limp adorably,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is my profession to make compliments,&rsquo; Villedo broke in; and
+      then, turning to Morenita, &lsquo;<i>N&rsquo;est-ce pas, ma belle créature</i>?
+      But really&rsquo;&mdash;he turned to me again&mdash;&lsquo;but very
+      sincerely, all that there is of most sincerely, dear madame, your libretto
+      is made with a virtuosity astonishing. It is <i>du théâtre</i>. And with
+      that a charm, an emotion...! One would say&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it continued, the flattering stream, while Diaz listened, touched,
+      and full of pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;It is not I who deserve praise.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An electric bell trembled in the theatre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morenita picked up her cloak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Mon ami</i>,&rsquo; she warned Villedo. &lsquo;I must go. Diaz, <i>mon
+      petit</i>! you will persuade Mademoiselle Peel to come to the room of the
+      Directeur later. Madame, a few of us will meet there&mdash;is it not so,
+      Villedo? We shall count on you, madame. You have hidden yourself too long.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I glanced at Diaz, and he nodded. As a fact, I wished to refuse; but I
+      could not withstand the seduction of Morenita. She had a physical
+      influence which was unique in my experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I accept,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>A tout à l&rsquo;heure</i>, then,&rsquo; she twittered gaily; and they
+      left as they had come, Villedo affectionately toying with Morenita&rsquo;s
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz remained behind a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am so glad you didn&rsquo;t decline,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You see,
+      here in this theatre Morenita is a queen. I wager she has never before in
+      all her life put herself out of the way as she has done for you to-night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really!&rsquo; I faltered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, indeed, as I pondered over it, the politeness of these people
+      appeared to be marvellous, and so perfectly accomplished. Villedo, who has
+      made a European reputation and rejuvenated his theatre in a dozen years,
+      is doubtless, as he said, a professional maker of compliments. In his
+      position a man must be. But, nevertheless, last night&rsquo;s triumph is
+      officially and very genuinely Villedo&rsquo;s. While as for Morenita and
+      Diaz, the mere idea of these golden stars waiting on me, the librettist,
+      effacing themselves, rendering themselves subordinate at such a moment,
+      was fantastic. It passed the credible.... A Diaz standing silent and
+      deferential, while an idolized prima donna stepped down from her throne to
+      flatter me in her own temple! All that I had previously achieved of renown
+      seemed provincial, insular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Diaz took his own right place in the spacious salon of Villedo
+      afterwards, after all the applause had ceased, and the success had been
+      consecrated, and the enraptured audience had gone, and the lights were
+      extinguished in the silent auditorium. It is a room that seems to be
+      furnished with nothing but a grand piano and a large, flat writing-table
+      and a few chairs. On the walls are numberless signed portraits of singers
+      and composers, and antique playbills of the Opéra Comique, together with
+      strange sinister souvenirs of the great fires which have destroyed the
+      house and its patrons in the past. When Diaz led me in, only Villedo and
+      the principal artists and Pouvillon, the conductor, were present.
+      Pouvillon, astonishingly fat, was sitting on the table, idly swinging the
+      electric pendant over his head; while Morenita occupied Villedo&rsquo;s
+      armchair, and Villedo talked to Montfériot and another man in a corner.
+      But a crowd of officials of the theatre ventured on Diaz&rsquo; heels. And
+      then came Monticelli, the <i>première danseuse</i>, in a coat and skirt,
+      and then some of her rivals. And as the terrible Director did not protest,
+      the room continued to fill until it was full to the doors, where stood a
+      semicircle of soiled, ragged scene-shifters and a few fat old women, who
+      were probably dressers. Who could protest on such a night? The democracy
+      of a concerted triumph reigned. Everybody was joyous, madly happy.
+      Everybody had done something; everybody shared the prestige, and the rank
+      and file might safely take generals by the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was then the centre of attraction. It was recognised that he had
+      entered that sphere from a wider one, bringing with him a radiance
+      brighter than he found there. He was divine last night. All felt that he
+      was divine. He spoke to everyone with an admirable modesty, gaily, his
+      eyes laughing. Several women kissed him, including Morenita. Not that I
+      minded. In the theatre the code is different, coarser, more banal. He
+      alone raised this crowd above its usual level and gave it distinction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Someone suggested that, as the piano was there, he should play, and the
+      demand ran from mouth to mouth. Villedo, appreciating its audacity, made a
+      gesture to indicate that such a thing could not be asked. But Diaz
+      instantly said that, if it would give pleasure, he would play with
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sat down to the piano, and looked round, smiling, and the room was
+      hushed in a moment, and each face was turned towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo; he ejaculated. And then, as no definite recommendation was
+      offered, he said: &lsquo;Do you wish that I improvise?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea was accepted with passionate, noisy enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cold perspiration broke out over my whole body. I must have turned very
+      pale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are not ill, madame?&rsquo; asked that ridiculous fop, Montfèriot,
+      who had been presented to me, and was whispering the most fatuous
+      compliments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, I thank you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact was that Diaz, since his retirement, had not yet played to anyone
+      except myself. This was his first appearance. I was afraid for him. I
+      trembled for him. I need not have done. He was absolutely master of his
+      powers. His fingers announced, quite simply, one of the most successful
+      airs from <i>La Vallière</i>, and then he began to decorate it with an
+      amazing lacework of variations, and finished with a bravura display such
+      as no pianist could have surpassed. The performance, marvellous in itself,
+      was precisely suited to that audience, and it electrified the audience; it
+      electrified even me. Diaz fought his way through kisses and embraces to
+      Villedo, who stood on his toes and wept and put his arms round Diaz&rsquo;
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Cher maître</i>,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;you overwhelm us!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are too kind, all of you,&rsquo; said Diaz. &lsquo;I must ask
+      permission to retire. I have to conduct Mademoiselle Peel to her hotel,
+      and there is much for me to do during the night. You know I start very
+      early to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Hélas!</i> Morenita sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had blushed. Decidedly I behaved like a girl last night. But, indeed,
+      the new, swift realization, as Diaz singled me out of that multitude, that
+      after all he utterly belonged to me, that he was mine alone, was more than
+      I could bear with equanimity. I was the proudest woman in the universe. I
+      scorned the lot of all other women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The adieux were exchanged, and there were more kisses. &lsquo;<i>Au
+      revoir! Bon voyage</i>! Much success over there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The majority of these good, generous souls were in tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Villedo opened a side-door, and we escaped into a corridor, only Morenita
+      and one or two others accompanying us to the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And on the pavement a carpet had been laid. The electric brougham was
+      waiting. I gathered up my skirt and sprang in. Diaz followed, smiling at
+      me. He put his head out of the window and said a few words. Morenita blew
+      a kiss. Villedo bowed profoundly. The carriage moved in the direction of
+      the boulevard.... I had carried him off. Oh, the exquisite dark intimacy
+      of the interior of that smooth-rolling brougham! When, after the theatre,
+      a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory in
+      the fact that she is his? Is it not the most delicious of avowals? There
+      is something in the enforced bend of one&rsquo;s head as one steps in. And
+      when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wondered idly what Morenita and Villedo thought of our relations. They
+      must surely guess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went down the boulevard and by the Rue Royale into the Place de la
+      Concorde, where vehicles flitted mysteriously in a maze of lights under
+      the vast dome of mysterious blue. And Paris, in her incomparable toilette
+      of a June night, seemed more than ever the passionate city of love that
+      she is, recognising candidly, with the fearless intellectuality of the
+      Latin temperament, that one thing only makes life worth living. How soft
+      was the air! How languorous the pose of the dim figures that passed us
+      half hidden in other carriages! And in my heart was the lofty joy of work
+      done, definitely accomplished, and a vista of years of future pleasure. My
+      happiness was ardent and yet calm&mdash;a happiness beyond my hopes,
+      beyond what a mortal has the right to dream of. Nothing could impair it,
+      not even Diaz&rsquo; continued silence as to a marriage between us, not
+      even the imminent brief separation that I was to endure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My child,&rsquo; said Diaz suddenly, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m very hungry. I&rsquo;ve
+      never been so hungry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You surely didn&rsquo;t forget to have your dinner?&rsquo; I exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I did,&rsquo; he admitted like a child; &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve just
+      remembered.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz!&rsquo; I pouted, and for some strange reason my bliss was
+      intensified, ‘you are really terrible! What can I do with you? You will
+      eat before you leave me. I must see to that. We can get something for you
+      at the hotel, perhaps.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Suppose we go to a supper restaurant?&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without waiting for my reply, he seized the dangling end of the
+      speaking-tube and spoke to the driver, and we swerved round and regained
+      the boulevard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the private room of a great, glittering restaurant, one of a long
+      row of private rooms off a corridor, I ate strawberries and cream and
+      sipped champagne while Diaz went through the entire menu of a supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Your eyes look sad,&rsquo; he murmured, with a cigar between his teeth.
+      &lsquo;What is it? We shall see each other again in a fortnight.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was to resume his career by a series of concerts in the United States.
+      A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents,
+      had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and
+      fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played
+      at no concert before he played in New York. And in order to reach New York
+      in time for the first concert, it was imperative that he should catch the
+      <i>Touraine</i> at Havre. I was to follow in a few days by a
+      Hamburg-American liner. Diaz had judged it more politic that we should not
+      travel together. In this he was undoubtedly right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am both sad and happy,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved his chair until it touched mine, and put his arm round my neck,
+      and brought my face close to his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Look at me,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I looked into his large, splendid eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mustn&rsquo;t think,&rsquo; he whispered, &lsquo;that, because I don&rsquo;t
+      talk about it, I don&rsquo;t feel that I owe everything to you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I let my face fall on his breast. I knew I had flushed to the ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor boy,&rsquo; I sobbed, &lsquo;if you talk about that I shall never
+      forgive you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was heaven itself. No woman has ever been more ecstatically happy than
+      I was then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rang for the bill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We parted at the door of my hotel. In the carriage we had exchanged one
+      long, long kiss. At the last moment I wanted to alter the programme, go
+      with him to his hotel to assist in his final arrangements, and then see
+      him off at early morning at the station. But he refused. He said he could
+      not bear to part from me in public. Perhaps it was best so. Just as I
+      turned away he put a packet into my hand. It contained seven banknotes for
+      ten thousand francs each, money that it had been my delight to lend him
+      from time to time. Foolish, vain, scrupulous boy! I knew not where he had
+      obtained&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      It is now evening. Diaz is on the sea. While writing those last lines I
+      was attacked by fearful pains in the right side, and cramp, so that I
+      could not finish. I can scarcely write now. I have just seen the old
+      English doctor. He says I have appendicitis, perhaps caused by pips of
+      strawberries. And that unless I am operated on at once&mdash;And that even
+      if&mdash;He is telephoning to the hospital. Diaz! No; I shall come safely
+      through the affair. Without me Diaz would fall again. I see that now. And
+      I have had no child. I must have a child. Even that girl in the blue <i>peignoir</i>
+      had a&mdash;Chance is a strange&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Extract translated from &lsquo;Le Temps,&rsquo; the Paris Evening Paper</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OBSEQUIES OF MISS PELL (<i>sic</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obsequies of Mademoiselle Pell, the celebrated English poetess, and
+      author of the libretto of <i>La Vallière</i>, were celebrated this morning
+      at eleven o&rsquo;clock in the Church of St. Honoré d&rsquo;Eylau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief mourners were the doctor who assisted at the last moments of
+      Mademoiselle Pell, and M. Villedo, director of the Opéra-Comique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the wreaths we may cite those of the Association of Dramatic
+      Artists, of Madame Morenita, of the management of the Opéra-Comique, and
+      of the artists of the Opéra-Comique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mass was said by a vicar of the parish, and general absolution given by M.
+      le Curé Marbeau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the service there was given, under the direction of M. Lêtang,
+      chapel-master, the <i>Funeral March</i> of Beethoven, the <i>Kyrie</i> of
+      Neidermeyer, the <i>Pie Jesu</i> of Stradella, the <i>Ego Sum</i> of
+      Gounod, the <i>Libera Me</i> of S. Rousseau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      M. Deep officiated at the organ.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the ceremony the remains were transported to the cemetery of
+      Père-Lachaise and cremated.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11360 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #11360 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11360)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sacred And Profane Love , by E. Arnold Bennett
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Sacred And Profane Love 
+
+Author: E. Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: February 28, 2004  [eBook #11360]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE ***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+
+A NOVEL IN THREE EPISODES
+
+BY ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+1905
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO MY FRIEND EDEN PHILLPOTTS
+
+THE NOVELIST FOR WHOM MAN AND NATURE ARE INSEPARABLE WITH PROFOUND
+RESPECT FOR THE CLASSICAL DIGNITY OF HIS AIM AND EQUAL ADMIRATION
+FOR THE AUSTERE SPLENDOUR OF HIS PERFORMANCE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+PART II
+
+THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+
+_'How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women of the
+past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have opened for the
+kiss, and who are dead! The kiss--it is immortal! It passes from lip to
+lip, from century to century, from age to age. Men gather it, give it
+back, and die.'_--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+
+
+
+
+SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+
+
+PART I
+
+IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love--and by love I
+mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the
+soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to
+the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of
+my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in
+amorous dreams.
+
+I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the
+piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to
+conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me:
+warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round
+on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and
+I asked myself: 'Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?' For
+even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and
+the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at
+the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of
+those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort
+of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian
+room, large and stately and symmetrical, full--but not too full--of
+twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes,
+gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and
+here and there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, recalled the Empire
+period and the deserted Napoleonic palaces of France. The expanse of
+yellow and green carpet had been married to the floor by two generations
+of decorous feet, and the meaning of its tints was long since explained
+away. Never have I seen a carpet with less individuality of its own than
+that carpet; it was so sweetly faded, amiable, and flat, that its sole
+mission in the world seemed to be to make things smooth for the chairs.
+The wall-paper looked like pale green silk, and the candles were
+reflected in it as they were reflected in the crystals of the chandelier.
+The grand piano, a Collard and Collard, made a vast mass of walnut in the
+chamber, incongruous, perhaps, but still there was something in its mild
+and indecisive tone that responded to the furniture. It, too, spoke of
+Evangelicalism, the Christian Year, and a dignified reserved confidence
+in Christ's blood. It, too, defied the assault of time and the invasion
+of ideas. It, too, protested against Chopin and romance, and demanded
+Thalberg's variations on 'Home, Sweet Home.'
+
+My great-grandfather, the famous potter--second in renown only to
+Wedgwood--had built that Georgian house, and my grandfather had furnished
+it; and my parents, long since dead, had placidly accepted it and the
+ideal that it stood for; and it had devolved upon my Aunt Constance, and
+ultimately it would devolve on me, the scarlet woman in a dress of
+virginal white, the inexplicable offspring of two changeless and
+blameless families, the secret revolutionary, the living lie! How had I
+come there?
+
+I went to the window, and, pulling the curtain aside, looked vaguely out
+into the damp, black garden, from which the last light was fading. The
+red, rectangular house stood in the midst of the garden, and the garden
+was surrounded by four brick walls, which preserved it from four streets
+where dwelt artisans of the upper class. The occasional rattling of a
+cart was all we caught of the peaceable rumour of the town; but on clear
+nights the furnaces of Cauldon Bar Ironworks lit the valley for us, and
+we were reminded that our refined and inviolate calm was hemmed in by
+rude activities. On the east border of the garden was a row of poplars,
+and from the window I could see the naked branches of the endmost. A
+gas-lamp suddenly blazed behind it in Acre Lane, and I descried a bird in
+the tree. And as the tree waved its plume in the night-wind, and the bird
+swayed on the moving twig, and the gas-lamp burned meekly and patiently
+beyond, I seemed to catch in these simple things a glimpse of the secret
+meaning of human existence, such as one gets sometimes, startlingly, in a
+mood of idle receptiveness. And it was so sad and so beautiful, so full
+of an ecstatic melancholy, that I dropped the curtain. And my thought
+ranged lovingly over our household--prim, regular, and perfect: my old
+aunt embroidering in the breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in
+the impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion
+that Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in
+fancy all over the house--the attics, my aunt's bedroom so miraculously
+neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the corridors where
+clocks ticked.
+
+I had the sense of the curious compact organism of which my aunt was the
+head, and into which my soul had strayed by some caprice of fate. What I
+felt was that the organism was suspended in a sort of enchantment,
+lifelessly alive, unconsciously expectant of the magic touch which would
+break the spell, and I wondered how long I must wait before I began to
+live. I know now that I was happy in those serene preliminary years, but
+nevertheless I had the illusion of spiritual woe. I sighed grievously as
+I went back to the piano, and opened the volume of Mikuli's Chopin.
+
+Just as I was beginning to play, Rebecca came into the room. She was a
+maid of forty years, and stout; absolutely certain of a few things, and
+quite satisfied in her ignorance of all else; an important person in our
+house, and therefore an important person in the created universe, of
+which our house was for her the centre. She wore the white cap with
+distinction, and when an apron was suspended round her immense waist it
+ceased to be an apron, and became a symbol, like the apron of a
+Freemason.
+
+'Well, Rebecca?' I said, without turning my head.
+
+I guessed urgency, otherwise Rebecca would have delegated Lucy.
+
+'If you please, Miss Carlotta, your aunt is not feeling well, and she
+will not be able to go to the concert to-night.'
+
+'Not be able to go to the concert!' I repeated mechanically.
+
+'No, miss.'
+
+'I will come downstairs.'
+
+'If I were you, I shouldn't, miss. She's dozing a bit just now.'
+
+'Very well.'
+
+I went on playing. But Chopin, who was the chief factor in my emotional
+life; who had taught me nearly all I knew of grace, wit, and tenderness;
+who had discovered for me the beauty that lay in everything, in sensuous
+exaltation as well as in asceticism, in grief as well as in joy; who had
+shown me that each moment of life, no matter what its import, should be
+lived intensely and fully; who had carried me with him to the dizziest
+heights of which passion is capable; whose music I spiritually
+comprehended to a degree which I felt to be extraordinary--Chopin had
+almost no significance for me as I played then the most glorious of his
+compositions. His message was only a blurred sound in my ears. And
+gradually I perceived, as the soldier gradually perceives who has been
+hit by a bullet, that I was wounded.
+
+The shock was of such severity that at first I had scarcely noticed it.
+What? My aunt not going to the concert? That meant that I could not go.
+But it was impossible that I should not go. I could not conceive my
+absence from the concert--the concert which I had been anticipating and
+preparing for during many weeks. We went out but little, Aunt Constance
+and I. An oratorio, an amateur operatic performance, a ballad concert in
+the Bursley Town Hall--no more than that; never the Hanbridge Theatre.
+And now Diaz was coming down to give a pianoforte recital in the Jubilee
+Hall at Hanbridge; Diaz, the darling of European capitals; Diaz, whose
+name in seven years had grown legendary; Diaz, the Liszt and the
+Rubenstein of my generation, and the greatest interpreter of Chopin since
+Chopin died--Diaz! Diaz! No such concert had ever been announced in the
+Five Towns, and I was to miss it! Our tickets had been taken, and they
+were not to be used! Unthinkable! A photograph of Diaz stood in a silver
+frame on the piano; I gazed at it fervently. I said: 'I will hear you
+play the Fantasia this night, if I am cut in pieces for it to-morrow!'
+Diaz represented for me, then, all that I desired of men. All my dreams
+of love and freedom crystallized suddenly into Diaz.
+
+I ran downstairs to the breakfast-room.
+
+'You aren't going to the concert, auntie?' I almost sobbed.
+
+She sat in her rocking-chair, and the gray woollen shawl thrown round her
+shoulders mingled with her gray hair. Her long, handsome face was a
+little pale, and her dark eyes darker than usual.
+
+'I don't feel well enough,' she replied calmly.
+
+She had not observed the tremor in my voice.
+
+'But what's the matter?' I insisted.
+
+'Nothing in particular, my dear. I do not feel equal to the exertion.'
+
+'But, auntie--then I can't go, either.'
+
+'I'm very sorry, dear,' she said. 'We will go to the next concert.'
+
+'Diaz will never come again!' I exclaimed passionately. 'And the tickets
+will be wasted.'
+
+'My dear,' my Aunt Constance repeated, 'I am not equal to it. And you
+cannot go alone.'
+
+I was utterly selfish in that moment. I cared nothing whatever for my
+aunt's indisposition. Indeed, I secretly accused her of maliciously
+choosing that night of all nights for her mysterious fatigue.
+
+'But, auntie,' I said, controlling myself, 'I must go, really. I shall
+send Lucy over with a note to Ethel Ryley to ask her to go with me.'
+
+'Do,' said my aunt, after a considerable pause, 'if you are bent
+on going.'
+
+I have often thought since that during that pause, while we faced each
+other, my aunt had for the first time fully realized how little she knew
+of me; she must surely have detected in my glance a strangeness, a
+contemptuous indifference, an implacable obstinacy, which she had never
+seen in it before. And, indeed, these things were in my glance. Yet I
+loved my aunt with a deep affection. I had only one grievance against
+her. Although excessively proud, she would always, in conversation with
+men, admit her mental and imaginative inferiority, and that of her sex.
+She would admit, without being asked, that being a woman she could not
+see far, that her feminine brain could not carry an argument to the end,
+and that her feminine purpose was too infirm for any great enterprise.
+She seemed to find a morbid pleasure in such confessions. As regards
+herself, they were accurate enough; the dear creature was a singularly
+good judge of her own character. What I objected to was her assumption,
+so calm and gratuitous, that her individuality, with all its confessed
+limitations, was, of course, superior--stronger, wiser, subtler than
+mine. She never allowed me to argue with her; or if she did, she treated
+my remarks with a high, amused tolerance. 'Wait till you grow older,' she
+would observe, magnificently ignorant of the fact that my soul was
+already far older than hers. This attitude naturally made me secretive in
+all affairs of the mind, and most affairs of the heart.
+
+We took in the county paper, the _Staffordshire Recorder,_ and the _Rock_
+and the _Quiver_. With the help of these organs of thought, which I
+detested and despised, I was supposed to be able to keep discreetly and
+sufficiently abreast of the times. But I had other aids. I went to the
+Girls' High School at Oldcastle till I was nearly eighteen. One of the
+mistresses there used to read continually a red book covered with brown
+paper. I knew it to be a red book because the paper was gone at the
+corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in
+the book--she would pick it up at every spare moment--excited in me an
+ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on the
+title-page, _Introduction to the Study of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer.
+Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that astonished
+and charmed me. I said: 'Why are not our school histories like this?' The
+owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it to me, but she would
+not, nor would she give me any reason for declining. Soon afterwards I
+left school. I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free Library at the
+Wedgwood Institution. But the book was not in the catalogue. (How often,
+in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the reading-room, where men
+read the daily papers and the magazines, without daring to enter!) At
+length I audaciously decided to buy the book. I ordered it, not at our
+regular stationer's in Oldcastle Street, but at a little shop of the
+same kind in Trafalgar Road. In three days it arrived. I called for it,
+and took it home secretly in a cardboard envelope-box. I went to bed
+early, and I began to read. I read all night, thirteen hours. O book with
+the misleading title--for you have nothing to do with sociology, and you
+ought to have been called _How to Think Honestly_--my face flushed again
+and again as I perused your ugly yellowish pages! Again and again I
+exclaimed: 'But this is marvellous!' I had not guessed that anything so
+honest, and so courageous, and so simple, and so convincing had ever been
+written. I am capable now of suspecting that Spencer was not a supreme
+genius; but he taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing
+is sacred that will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory. The next
+morning after breakfast I fell asleep in a chair. 'My dear!' protested
+Aunt Constance. 'Ah,' I thought, 'if you knew, Aunt Constance, if you had
+the least suspicion, of the ideas that are surging and shining in my
+head, you would go mad--go simply mad!' I did not care much for
+deception, but I positively hated clumsy concealment, and the red book
+was in the house; at any moment it might be seized. On a shelf of books
+in my bedroom was a novel called _The Old Helmet_, probably the silliest
+novel in the world. I tore the pages from the binding and burnt them; I
+tore the binding from Spencer and burnt it; and I put my treasure in the
+covers of _The Old Helmet_. Once Rebecca, a person privileged, took the
+thing away to read; but she soon brought it back. She told me she had
+always understood that _The Old Helmet_ was more, interesting than that.
+
+Later, I discovered _The Origin of Species_ in the Free Library. It
+finished the work of corruption. Spencer had shown me how to think;
+Darwin told me what to think. The whole of my upbringing went for naught
+thenceforward. I lived a double life. I said nothing to my aunt of the
+miracle wrought within me, and she suspected nothing. Strange and
+uncanny, is it not, that such miracles can escape the observation of a
+loving heart? I loved her as much as ever, perhaps more than ever. Thank
+Heaven that love can laugh at reason!
+
+So much for my intellectual inner life. My emotional inner life is less
+easy to indicate. I became a woman at fifteen--years, interminable years,
+before I left school. I guessed even then, vaguely, that my nature was
+extremely emotional and passionate. And I had nothing literary on which
+to feed my dreams, save a few novels which I despised, and the Bible and
+the plays and poems of Shakespeare. It is wonderful, though, what good I
+managed to find in those two use-worn volumes. I knew most of the Song of
+Solomon by heart, and many of the sonnets; and I will not mince the fact
+that my favourite play was _Measure for Measure_. I was an innocent
+virgin, in the restricted sense in which most girls of my class and age
+are innocent, but I obtained from these works many a lofty pang of
+thrilling pleasure. They illustrated Chopin for me, giving precision and
+particularity to his messages. And I was ashamed of myself. Yes; at the
+bottom of my heart I was ashamed of myself because my sensuous being
+responded to the call of these masterpieces. In my ignorance I thought I
+was lapsing from a sane and proper ideal. And then--the second miracle in
+my career, which has been full of miracles--I came across a casual
+reference, in the _Staffordshire Recorder_, of all places, to the
+_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ of Théophile Gautier. Something in the
+reference, I no longer remember what, caused me to guess that the book
+was a revelation of matters hidden from me. I bought it. With the
+assistance of a dictionary, I read it, nightly, in about a week. Except
+_Picciola_, it was the first French novel I had ever read. It held me
+throughout; it revealed something on nearly every page. But the climax
+dazzled and blinded me. It was exquisite, so high and pure, so
+startling, so bold, that it made me ill. When I recovered I had fast in
+my heart's keeping the new truth that in the body, and the instincts of
+the body, there should be no shame, but rather a frank, joyous pride.
+From that moment I ceased to be ashamed of anything that I honestly
+liked. But I dared not keep the book. The knowledge of its contents would
+have killed my aunt. I read it again; I read the last pages several
+times, and then I burnt it and breathed freely.
+
+Such was I, as I forced my will on my aunt in the affair of the concert.
+And I say that she who had never suspected the existence of the real me,
+suspected it then, when we glanced at each other across the
+breakfast-room. Upon these apparent trifles life swings, as upon a pivot,
+into new directions.
+
+I sat with my aunt while Lucy went with the note. She returned soon with
+the reply, and the reply was:
+
+'So sorry I can't accept your kind invitation. I should have liked to go
+awfully. But Fred has got the toothache, and I must not leave him.'
+
+The toothache! And my very life, so it seemed to me, hung in the balance.
+
+I did not hesitate one second.
+
+'Hurrah!' I cried. 'She can go. I am to call for her in the cab.'
+
+And I crushed the note cruelly, and threw it in the fire.
+
+'Tell him to call at Ryleys',' I said to Rebecca as she was putting me
+and my dress into the cab.
+
+And she told the cabman with that sharp voice of hers, always arrogant
+towards inferiors, to call at Ryleys.'
+
+I put my head out of the cab window as soon as we were in
+Oldcastle Street.
+
+'Drive straight to Hanbridge,' I ordered.
+
+The thing was done.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He was like his photograph, but the photograph had given me only the most
+inadequate idea of him. The photograph could not render his extraordinary
+fairness, nor the rich gold of his hair, nor the blue of his dazzling
+eyes. The first impression was that he was too beautiful for a man, that
+he had a woman's beauty, that he had the waxen beauty of a doll; but the
+firm, decisive lines of the mouth and chin, the overhanging brows, and
+the luxuriance of his amber moustache, spoke more sternly. Gradually one
+perceived that beneath the girlish mask, beneath the contours and the
+complexion incomparably delicate, there was an individuality intensely
+and provocatively male. His body was rather less than tall, and it was
+muscular and springy. He walked on to the platform as an unspoilt man
+should walk, and he bowed to the applause as if bowing chivalrously to a
+woman whom he respected but did not love. Diaz was twenty-six that year;
+he had recently returned from a tour round the world; he was filled full
+of triumph, renown, and adoration. As I have said, he was already
+legendary. He had become so great and so marvellous that those who had
+never seen him were in danger of forgetting that he was a living human
+being, obliged to eat and drink, and practise scales, and visit his
+tailor's. Thus it had happened to me. During the first moments I found
+myself thinking, 'This cannot be Diaz. It is not true that at last I see
+him. There must be some mistake.' Then he sat down leisurely to the
+piano; his gaze ranged across the hall, and I fancied that, for a second,
+it met mine. My two seats were in the first row of the stalls, and I
+could see every slightest change of his face. So that at length I felt
+that Diaz was real, and that he was really there close in front of me, a
+seraph and yet very human. He was all alone on the great platform, and
+the ebonized piano seemed enormous and formidable before him. And all
+around was the careless public--ignorant, unsympathetic, exigent,
+impatient, even inimical--two thousand persons who would get value for
+their money or know the reason why. The electric light and the inclement
+gaze of society rained down cruelly upon that defenceless head. I wanted
+to protect it. The tears rose to my eyes, and I stretched out towards
+Diaz the hands of my soul. My passionate sympathy must have reached him
+like a beneficent influence, of which, despite the perfect
+self-possession and self-confidence of his demeanour, it seemed to me
+that he had need.
+
+I had risked much that night. I had committed an enormity. No one but a
+grown woman who still vividly remembers her girlhood can appreciate my
+feelings as I drove from Bursley to Hanbridge in the cab, and as I got
+out of the cab in the crowd, and gave up my ticket, and entered the
+glittering auditorium of the Jubilee Hall. I was alone, at night, in the
+public places, under the eye of the world. And I was guiltily alone.
+Every fibre of my body throbbed with the daring and the danger and the
+romance of the adventure. The horror of revealing the truth to Aunt
+Constance, as I was bound to do--of telling her that I had lied, and that
+I had left my maiden's modesty behind in my bedroom, gripped me at
+intervals like some appalling and exquisite instrument of torture. And
+yet, ere Diaz had touched the piano with his broad white hand, I was
+content, I was rewarded, and I was justified.
+
+The programme began with Chopin's first Ballade.
+
+There was an imperative summons, briefly sustained, which developed into
+an appeal and an invocation, ascending, falling, and still higher
+ascending, till it faded and expired, and then, after a little pause, was
+revived; then silence, and two chords, defining and clarifying the
+vagueness of the appeal and the invocation. And then, almost before I was
+aware of it, there stole forth from under the fingers of Diaz the song of
+the soul of man, timid, questioning, plaintive, neither sad nor joyous,
+but simply human, seeking what it might find on earth. The song changed
+subtly from mood to mood, expressing that which nothing but itself could
+express; and presently there was a low and gentle menace, thrice repeated
+under the melody of the song, and the reply of the song was a proud cry,
+a haughty contempt of these furtive warnings, and a sudden winged leap
+into the empyrean towards the Eternal Spirit. And then the melody was
+lost in a depth, and the song became turgid and wild and wilder,
+hysteric, irresolute, frantically groping, until at last it found its
+peace and its salvation. And the treasure was veiled in a mist of
+arpeggios, but one by one these were torn away, and there was a hush, a
+pause, and a preparation; and the soul of man broke into a new song of
+what it had found on earth--the magic of the tenderness of love--an air
+so caressing and so sweet, so calmly happy and so mournfully sane, so
+bereft of illusions and so naïve, that it seemed to reveal in a few
+miraculous phrases the secret intentions of God. It was too beautiful; it
+told me too much about myself; it vibrated my nerves to such an
+unbearable spasm of pleasure that I might have died had I not willed to
+live.... It gave place momentarily to the song of the question and the
+search, but only to return, and to return again, with a more thrilling
+and glorious assurance. It was drowned in doubt, but it emerged
+triumphantly, covered with noble and delicious ornaments, and swimming
+strongly on mysterious waves. And finally, with speed and with fire, it
+was transformed and caught up into the last ecstasy, the ultimate
+passion. The soul swept madly between earth and heaven, fell, rose; and
+there was a dreadful halt. Then a loud blast, a distortion of the magic,
+an upward rush, another and a louder blast, and a thunderous fall,
+followed by two massive and terrifying chords....
+
+Diaz was standing up and bowing to his public. What did they understand?
+Did they understand anything? I cannot tell. But I know that they felt.
+A shudder of feeling had gone through the hall. It was in vain that
+people tried to emancipate themselves from the spell by the violence of
+their applause. They could not. We were all together under the
+enchantment. Some may have seen clearly, some darkly, but we were equal
+before the throne of that mighty enchanter. And the enchanter bowed and
+bowed with a grave, sympathetic smile, and then disappeared. I had not
+clapped my hands; I had not moved. Only my full eyes had followed him as
+he left the platform; and when he returned--because the applause would
+not cease--my eyes watched over him as he came back to the centre of the
+platform. He stood directly in front of me, smiling more gaily now. And
+suddenly our glances met! Yes; I could not be mistaken. They met, and
+mine held his for several seconds.... Diaz had looked at me. Diaz had
+singled me out from the crowd. I blushed hotly, and I was conscious of a
+surpassing joy. My spirit was transfigured. I knew that such a man was
+above kings. I knew that the world and everything of loveliness that it
+contained was his. I knew that he moved like a beautiful god through the
+groves of delight, and that what he did was right, and whom he beckoned
+came, and whom he touched was blessed. And my eyes had held his eyes for
+a little space.
+
+The enchantment deepened. I had read that the secret of playing Chopin
+had died with Chopin; but I felt sure that evening, as I have felt sure
+since, that Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have
+received Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a
+superior. For Diaz had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of
+the keyboard that Chopin could not have possessed. Diaz had come to the
+front in a generation of pianists who had lifted technique to a plane of
+which neither Liszt nor Rubinstein dreamed. He had succeeded primarily by
+his gigantic and incredible technique. And then, when his technique had
+astounded the world, he had invited the world to forget it, as the glass
+is forgotten through which is seen beauty. And Diaz's gift was now such
+that there appeared to intervene nothing between his conception of the
+music and the strings of the piano, so perfected was the mechanism.
+Difficulties had ceased to exist.
+
+The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if
+they were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they
+should fall off. It was not so with Diaz. When Diaz played you
+experienced the pure emotions caused by the unblurred contemplation of
+that beauty which the great masters had created, and which Diaz had
+tinted with the rare dyes of his personality. You forgot all but beauty.
+The piano was not a piano; it was an Arabian magic beyond physical laws,
+and it, too, had a soul.
+
+So Diaz laid upon us the enchantment of Chopin and of himself. Mazurkas,
+nocturnes, waltzes, scherzos, polonaises, preludes, he exhibited to us in
+groups those manifestations of that supreme spirit--that spirit at once
+stern and tender, not more sad than joyous, and always sane, always
+perfectly balanced, always preoccupied with beauty. The singular myth of
+a Chopin decadent, weary, erratic, mournful, hysterical, at odds with
+fate, was completely dissipated; and we perceived instead the grave
+artist nourished on Bach and studious in form, and the strong soul that
+had dared to look on life as it is, and had found beauty everywhere. Ah!
+how the air trembled and glittered with visions! How melody and harmony
+filled every corner of the hall with the silver and gold of sound! How
+the world was changed out of recognition! How that which had seemed
+unreal became real, and that which had seemed real receded to a horizon
+remote and fantastic!...
+
+He was playing the fifteenth Prelude in D flat now, and the water was
+dropping, dropping ceaselessly on the dead body, and the beautiful calm
+song rose serenely in the dream, and then lost itself amid the presaging
+chords of some sinister fate, and came again, exquisite and fresh as
+ever, and then was interrupted by a high note like a clarion; and while
+Diaz held that imperious, compelling note, he turned his face slightly
+from the piano and gazed at me. Several times since the first time our
+eyes had met, by accident as I thought. But this was a deliberate seeking
+on his part. Again I flushed hotly. Again I had the terrible shudder of
+joy. I feared for a moment lest all the Five Towns was staring at me,
+thus singled out by Diaz; but it was not so: I had the wit to perceive
+that no one could remark me as the recipient of that hurried and burning
+glance. He had half a dozen bars to play, yet his eyes did not leave
+mine, and I would not let mine leave his. He remained moveless while the
+last chord expired, and then it seemed to me that his gaze had gone
+further, had passed through me into some unknown. The applause startled
+him to his feet.
+
+My thought was: 'What can he be thinking of me?... But hundreds of women
+must have loved him!'
+
+In the interval an attendant came on to the platform and altered the
+position of the piano. Everybody asked: 'What's that for?' For the new
+position was quite an unusual one; it brought the tail of the piano
+nearer to the audience, and gave a better view of the keyboard to the
+occupants of the seats in the orchestra behind the platform. 'It's a
+question of the acoustics, that's what it is,' observed a man near me,
+and a woman replied: 'Oh, I see!'
+
+When Diaz returned and seated himself to play the Berceuse, I saw that he
+could look at me without turning his head. And now, instead of flushing,
+I went cold. My spine gave way suddenly. I began to be afraid; but of
+what I was afraid I had not the least idea. I fixed my eyes on my
+programme as he launched into the Berceuse. Twice I glanced up, without,
+however, moving my head, and each time his burning blue eyes met mine.
+(But why did I choose moments when the playing of the piece demanded less
+than all his attention?) The Berceuse was a favourite. In sentiment it
+was simpler than the great pieces that had preceded it. Its excessive
+delicacy attracted; the finesse of its embroidery swayed and enraptured
+the audience; and the applause at the close was mad, deafening, and
+peremptory. But Diaz was notorious as a refuser of encores. It had been
+said that he would see a hall wrecked by an angry mob before he would
+enlarge his programme. Four times he came forward and acknowledged the
+tribute, and four times he went back. At the fifth response he halted
+directly in front of me, and in his bold, grave eyes I saw a question. I
+saw it, and I would not answer. If he had spoken aloud to me I could not
+have more clearly understood. But I would not answer. And then some power
+within myself, hitherto unsuspected by me, some natural force, took
+possession of me, and I nodded my head.... Diaz went to the piano.
+
+He hesitated, brushing lightly the keys.
+
+'The Prelude in F sharp,' my thought ran. 'If he would play that!'
+
+And instantly he broke into that sweet air, with its fateful hushed
+accompaniment--the trifle which Chopin threw off in a moment of his
+highest inspiration.
+
+'It is the thirteenth Prelude,' I reflected. I was disturbed,
+profoundly troubled.
+
+The next piece was the last, and it was the Fantasia, the masterpiece
+of Chopin.
+
+In the Fantasia there speaks the voice of a spirit which has attained all
+that humanity may attain: of wisdom, of power, of pride and glory. And
+now it is like the roll of an army marching slowly through terrific
+defiles; and now it is like the quiet song of royal wanderers meditating
+in vast garden landscapes, with mossy masonry and long pools and
+cypresses, and a sapphire star shining in the purple sky on the shoulder
+of a cypress; and now it is like the cry of a lost traveller, who,
+plunging heavily through a virgin forest, comes suddenly upon a green
+circular sward, smooth as a carpet, with an antique statue of a beautiful
+nude girl in the midst; and now it is like the oratory of richly-gowned
+philosophers awaiting death in gorgeous and gloomy palaces; and now it is
+like the upward rush of winged things that are determined to achieve,
+knowing well the while that the ecstasy of longing is better than the
+assuaging of desire. And though the voice of this spirit speaking in the
+music disguises itself so variously, it is always the same. For it
+cannot, and it would not, hide the strange and rare timbre which
+distinguishes it from all others--that quality which springs from a pure
+and calm vision, of life. The voice of this spirit says that it has lost
+every illusion about life, and that life seems only the more beautiful.
+It says that activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but
+another form of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but
+another form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. It
+says there is no end, only a means; and that the highest joy is to
+suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will but live, it
+cries, that grave but yet passionate voice--if you will but live! Were
+there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more than live. The
+true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and lose, and weep
+and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to live, and blind
+your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of existence....
+
+No, no; I cannot--I cannot describe further the experiences of my soul
+while Diaz played. When words cease, music has scarcely begun. I know
+now--I did not know it then--that Diaz was playing as perhaps he had
+never played before. The very air was charged with exquisite emotion,
+which went in waves across the hall, changing and blanching faces,
+troubling hearts, and moistening eyes.... And then he finished. It was
+over. In every trembling breast was a pang of regret that this spell,
+this miracle, this divine revolution, could not last into eternity....
+He stood bowing, one hand touching the piano. And as the revolution he
+had accomplished in us was divine, so was he divine. I felt, and many
+another woman in the audience felt, that no reward could be too great for
+the beautiful and gifted creature who had entranced us and forced us to
+see what alone in life was worth seeing: that the whole world should be
+his absolute dominion; that his happiness should be the first concern of
+mankind; that if a thousand suffered in order to make him happy for a
+moment, it mattered not; that laws were not for him; that if he sinned,
+his sin must not be called a sin, and that he must be excused from
+remorse and from any manner of woe.
+
+The applauding multitude stood up, and moved slightly towards the exits,
+and then stopped, as if ashamed of this readiness to desert the sacred
+temple. Diaz came forward three times, and each time the applause
+increased to a tempest; but he only smiled--smiled gravely. I could not
+see distinctly whether his eyes had sought mine, for mine were full of
+tears. No persuasions could induce him to show himself a fourth time, and
+at length a middle-aged man appeared and stated that Diaz was extremely
+gratified by his reception, but that he was also extremely exhausted and
+had left the hall.
+
+We departed, we mortals; and I was among the last to leave the
+auditorium. As I left the lights were being extinguished over the
+platform, and an attendant was closing the piano. The foyer was crowded
+with people waiting to get out. The word passed that it was raining
+heavily. I wondered how I should find my cab. I felt very lonely and
+unknown; I was overcome with sadness--with a sense of the futility and
+frustration of my life. Such is the logic of the soul, and such the force
+of reaction. Gradually the foyer emptied.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+'You think I am happy,' said Diaz, gazing at me with a smile
+suddenly grave; 'but I am not. I seek something which I cannot find.
+And my playing is only a relief from the fruitless search; only
+that. I am forlorn.'
+
+'You!' I exclaimed, and my eyes rested on his, long.
+
+Yes, we had met. Perhaps it had been inevitable since the beginning of
+time that we should meet; but it was none the less amazing. Perhaps I had
+inwardly known that we should meet; but, none the less, I was astounded
+when a coated and muffled figure came up swiftly to me in the emptying
+foyer, and said: 'Ah! you are here! I cannot leave without thanking you
+for your sympathy. I have never before felt such sympathy while playing.'
+It was a golden voice, pitched low, and the words were uttered with a
+very slight foreign accent, which gave them piquancy. I could not reply;
+something rose in my throat, and the caressing voice continued: 'You are
+pale. Do you feel ill? What can I do? Come with me to the artists' room;
+my secretary is there.' I put out a hand gropingly, for I could not see
+clearly, and I thought I should reel and fall. It touched his shoulder.
+He took my arm, and we went; no one had noticed us, and I had not spoken
+a word. In the room to which he guided me, through a long and sombre
+corridor, there was no sign of a secretary. I drank some water. 'There,
+you are better!' he cried. 'Thank you,' I said, but scarcely whispering.
+'How fortunate I ventured to come to you just at that moment! You might
+have fallen'; and he smiled again. I shook my head. I said: 'It was your
+coming--that--that--made me dizzy!' 'I profoundly regret--' he began.
+'No, no,' I interrupted him; and in that instant I knew I was about to
+say something which society would, justifiably, deem unpardonable in a
+girl situated as I was. 'I am so glad you came'; and I smiled, courageous
+and encouraging. For once in my life--for the first time in my adult
+life--I determined to be my honest self to another. 'Your voice is
+exquisitely beautiful,' he murmured. I thrilled.
+
+Of what use to chronicle the steps, now halting, now only too hasty, by
+which our intimacy progressed in that gaunt and echoing room? He asked me
+no questions as to my identity. He just said that he would like to play
+to me in private if that would give me pleasure, and that possibly I
+could spare an hour and would go with him.... Afterwards his brougham
+would be at my disposal. His tone was the perfection of deferential
+courtesy. Once the secretary came in--a young man rather like
+himself--and they talked together in a foreign language that was not
+French nor German; then the secretary bowed and retired.... We were
+alone.... There can be no sort of doubt that unless I was prepared to
+flout the wisdom of the ages, I ought to have refused his suggestion. But
+is not the wisdom of the ages a medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I
+was prepared to flout it, as in our highest and our lowest moments we
+often are. Moreover, how many women in my place, confronted by that
+divine creature, wooed by that wondrous personality, intoxicated by that
+smile and that voice, allured by the appeal of those marvellous hands,
+would have found the strength to resist? I did not resist, I yielded; I
+accepted. I was already in disgrace with Aunt Constance--as well be
+drowned in twelve feet of water as in six!
+
+So we drove rapidly away in the brougham, through the miry,
+light-reflecting streets of Hanbridge in the direction of Knype. And the
+raindrops ran down the windows of the brougham, and in the cushioned
+interior we could see each other darkly. He did his best to be at ease,
+and he almost succeeded. My feeling towards him, as regards the external
+management, the social guidance, of the affair, was as though we were at
+sea in a dangerous storm, and he was on the bridge and I was a mere
+passenger, and could take no responsibility. Who knew through what
+difficult channels we might not have to steer, and from what lee-shores
+we might not have to beat away? I saw that he perceived this. When I
+offered him some awkward compliment about his good English, he seized the
+chance of a narrative, and told me about his parentage: how his mother
+was Scotch, and his father Danish, and how, after his father's death, his
+mother had married Emilio Diaz, a Spanish teacher of music in Edinburgh,
+and how he had taken, by force of early habit, the name of his
+stepfather. The whole world was familiar with these facts, and I was
+familiar with them; but their recital served our turn in the brougham,
+and, of course, Diaz could add touches which had escaped the
+_Staffordshire Recorder_, and perhaps all other papers. He was explaining
+to me that his secretary was his stepfather's son by another wife, when
+we arrived at the Five Towns Hotel, opposite Knype Railway Station. I
+might have foreseen that that would be our destination. I hooded myself
+as well as I could, and followed him quickly to the first-floor. I sank
+down into a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my
+cloak, and then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table
+were some glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that
+the secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly
+departed. My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its
+full enormity. 'Oh,' I sighed, 'if I were a man like you!' Then it was
+that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was not happy,
+that he was forlorn.
+
+'Yes,' he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; 'I am profoundly
+dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year it is a
+homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You do not
+know how I hate a strange piano. That one'--he pointed to a huge
+instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially for
+him--'is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only yesterday, and
+after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across the world,
+and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a museum, and
+bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.'
+
+'But have you no friends?' I ventured.
+
+'Who can tell?' he replied. 'If I have, I scarcely ever see them.'
+
+'And no home?'
+
+'I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I
+loathe it.'
+
+'Why do you loathe it?'
+
+'Ah! For what it has witnessed--for what it has witnessed.' He sighed.
+'Suppose we discuss something else.'
+
+You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in
+social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know
+that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath
+that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious,
+dazzling haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new
+being, excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said:
+
+'You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for
+love of you.'
+
+He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing.
+
+'Let me guess at your history,' he said. 'You have lived much alone with
+your thoughts, and you have read a great deal of the finest romantic
+poetry, and you have been silent, especially with men. You have seen
+little of men.'
+
+'But I understand them,' I answered boldly.
+
+'I believe you do,' he admitted; and he laughed. 'So I needn't explain to
+you that a thousand women dying of love for one man will not help that
+man to happiness, unless he is dying of love for the thousand and first.'
+
+'And have you never loved?'
+
+The words came of themselves out of my mouth.
+
+'I have deceived myself--in my quest of sympathy,' he said.
+
+'Can you be sure that, in your quest of sympathy, you are not deceiving
+yourself tonight?'
+
+'Yes,' he cried quickly, 'I can.' And he sprang up and almost ran to the
+piano. 'You remember the D flat Prelude?' he said, breaking into the
+latter part of the air, and looking at me the while. 'When I came to that
+note and caught your gaze'--he struck the B flat and held it--'I knew
+that I had found sympathy. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Do you
+remember?'
+
+'Remember what?'
+
+'The way we looked at each other.'
+
+'Yes,' I breathed, 'I remember.'
+
+'How can I thank you? How can I thank you?'
+
+He seemed to be meditating. His simplicity, his humility, his kindliness
+were more than I could bear.
+
+'Please do not speak like that,' I entreated him, pained. 'You are the
+greatest artist in the world, and I am nobody--nobody at all. I do not
+know why I am here. I cannot imagine what you have seen in me. Everything
+is a mystery. All I feel is that I am in your presence, and that I am not
+worthy to be. No matter how long I live, I shall never experience again
+the joy that I have now. But if you talk about thanking me, I must run
+away, because I cannot stand it--and--and--you haven't played for me, and
+you said you would.'
+
+He approached me, and bent his head towards mine, and I glanced up
+through a mist and saw his eyes and the short, curly auburn locks on
+his forehead.
+
+'The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most
+lasting things,' he said softly, 'are often mysterious and inexplicable
+and sudden. And let me tell you that you do not know how lovely you are.
+You do not know the magic of your voice, nor the grace of your gestures.
+But time and man will teach you. What shall I play?'
+
+He was very close to me.
+
+'Bach,' I ejaculated, pointing impatiently to the piano.
+
+I fancied that Bach would spread peace abroad in my soul.
+
+He resumed his place at the piano, and touched the keys.
+
+'Another thing that makes me more sure that I am not deceiving myself
+to-night,' he said, taking his fingers off the keys, but staring at the
+keyboard, 'is that you have not regretted coming here. You have not
+called yourself a wicked woman. You have not even accused me of taking
+advantage of your innocence.'
+
+And ere I could say a word he had begun the Chromatic Fantasia,
+smiling faintly.
+
+And I had hoped for peace from Bach! I had often suspected that deep
+passion was concealed almost everywhere within the restraint and the
+apparent calm of Bach's music, but the full force of it had not been
+shown to me till this glorious night. Diaz' playing was tenfold more
+impressive, more effective, more revealing in the hotel parlour than in
+the great hall. The Chromatic Fantasia seemed as full of the magnificence
+of life as that other Fantasia which he had given an hour or so earlier.
+Instead of peace I had the whirlwind; instead of tranquillity a riot;
+instead of the poppy an alarming potion. The rendering was masterly to
+the extreme of masterliness.
+
+When he had finished I rose and passed to the fireplace in silence; he
+did not stir.
+
+'Do you always play like that?' I asked at length.
+
+'No,' he said; 'only when you are there. I have never played the Chopin
+Fantasia as I played it to-night. The Chopin was all right; but do not
+be under any illusion: what you have just heard is Bach played by a
+Chopin player.'
+
+Then he left the piano and went to the small table where the
+glasses were.
+
+'You must be in need of refreshment,' he whispered gaily. 'Nothing is
+more exhausting than listening to the finest music.'
+
+'It is you who ought to be tired,' I replied; 'after that long concert,
+to be playing now.'
+
+'I have the physique of a camel,' he said. 'I am never tired so long as I
+am sure of my listeners. I would play for you till breakfast to-morrow.'
+
+The decanter contained a fluid of a pleasant green tint. He poured very
+carefully this fluid to the depth of half an inch in one glass and
+three-quarters of an inch in another glass. Then he filled both glasses
+to the brim with water, accomplishing the feat with infinite pains and
+enjoyment, as though it had been part of a ritual.
+
+'There!' he said, offering me in his steady hand the glass which had
+received the smaller quantity of the green fluid. 'Taste.'
+
+'But what is it?' I demanded.
+
+'Taste,' he repeated, and he himself tasted.
+
+I obeyed. At the first mouthful I thought the liquid was somewhat
+sinister and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my
+opinion, and found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet
+not strong.
+
+'Do you like it?' he asked.
+
+I nodded, and drank again.
+
+'It is wonderful,' I answered. 'What do you call it?'
+
+'Men call it absinthe,' he said.
+
+'But--'
+
+I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.
+
+'Don't be frightened,' he soothed me. 'I know what you were going to
+say. You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of all poisons,
+that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most terrible of all
+drunkards. So it is; so it does. But not as we are drinking it; not as I
+invariably drink it.'
+
+'Of course,' I said, proudly confident in him. 'You would not have
+offered it to me otherwise.'
+
+'Of course I should not,' he agreed. 'I give you my word that a few drops
+of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and the least
+harmful stimulant in the world.'
+
+'I am sure of it,' I said.
+
+'But drink slowly,' he advised me.
+
+I refused the sandwiches. I had no need of them. I felt sufficient unto
+myself. I no longer had any apprehension. My body, my brain, and my soul
+seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency. The fear of being
+maladroit departed from me. Ideas--delicate and subtle ideas--welled up
+in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them. I began
+to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric
+interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still
+stood by the fire.
+
+'Yes, he said, 'that is very interesting.'
+
+'What does the Fantasia mean to you?' I asked him.
+
+'Nothing,' he said.
+
+'Nothing!'
+
+'Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense.
+You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
+forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
+emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it
+can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the
+greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas.
+Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes
+direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but
+which the soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the
+Fantasia is that it moves me profoundly. I _know how_ it moves me, but I
+cannot tell you; I cannot even tell myself.'
+
+Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.
+
+'Oh, do go on,' I entreated him. 'Tell me more about music. Do you not
+think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do, since
+you always play him.'
+
+He smiled.
+
+'No,' he said, 'I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art. When
+fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes
+impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme.
+No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song.
+The whole last act of _The Twilight of the Gods_ is not greater than a
+little song of Grieg's.'
+
+'I see,' I murmured humbly. '_The Twilight of the Gods_--that is Wagner,
+isn't it?'
+
+'Yes. Don't you know your Wagner?'
+
+'No. I--'
+
+'You don't know _Tristan_?'
+
+He jumped up, excited.
+
+'How could I know it?' I expostulated. 'I have never seen any opera. I
+know the marches from _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_, and "O Star of Eve!"'
+
+'But it is impossible that you don't know _Tristan_!' he exclaimed. 'The
+second act of _Tristan_ is the greatest piece of love-music--No, it
+isn't.' He laughed. 'I must not contradict myself. But it is
+marvellous--marvellous! You know the story?'
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'Play me some of it.'
+
+'I will play the Prelude,' he answered.
+
+I gulped down the remaining drops in my glass and crossed the room to a
+chair where I could see his face. And he played the Prelude to the most
+passionately voluptuous opera ever written. It was my first real
+introduction to Wagner, my first glimpse of that enchanted field. I was
+ravished, rapt away.
+
+'Wagner was a great artist in spite of himself,' said Diaz, when he had
+finished. 'He assigned definite and precise ideas to all those melodies.
+Nothing could be more futile. I shall not label them for you. But perhaps
+you can guess the love-motive for yourself.'
+
+'Yes, I can,' I said positively. 'It is this.'
+
+I tried to hum the theme, but my voice refused obedience. So I came to
+the piano, and played the theme high up in the treble, while Diaz was
+still sitting on the piano-stool. I trembled even to touch the piano in
+his presence; but I did it.
+
+'You have guessed right,' he said; and then he asked me in a casual tone:
+'Do you ever play pianoforte duets?'
+
+'Often,' I replied unsuspectingly, 'with my aunt. We play the symphonies
+of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and overtures, and so on.'
+
+'Awfully good fun, isn't it?' he smiled.
+
+'Splendid!' I said.
+
+'I've got _Tristan_ here arranged for pianoforte duet,' he said.
+'Tony, my secretary, enjoys playing it. You shall play part of the
+second act with me.'
+
+'Me! With you!'
+
+'Certainly.'
+
+'Impossible! I should never dare! How do you know I can play at all?'
+
+'You have just proved it to me,' said he. 'Come; you will not
+refuse me this!'
+
+I wanted to leave the vicinity of the piano. I felt that, once out of the
+immediate circle of his tremendous physical influence, I might manage to
+escape the ordeal which he had suggested. But I could not go away. The
+silken nets of his personality had been cast, and I was enmeshed. And if
+I was happy, it was with a dreadful happiness.
+
+'But, really, I can't play with you,' I said weakly.
+
+His response was merely to look up at me over his shoulder. His beautiful
+face was so close to mine, and it expressed such a naïve and strong
+yearning for my active and intimate sympathy, and such divine frankness,
+and such perfect kindliness, that I had no more will to resist. I knew I
+should suffer horribly in spoiling by my coarse amateurishness the
+miraculous finesse of his performance, but I resigned myself to
+suffering. I felt towards him as I had felt during the concert: that he
+must have his way at no matter what cost, that he had already earned the
+infinite gratitude of the entire world--in short, I raised him in my soul
+to a god's throne; and I accepted humbly the great, the incredible honour
+he did me. And I was right--a thousand times right.
+
+And in the same moment he was like a charming child to me: such is always
+in some wise the relation between the creature born to enjoy and the
+creature born to suffer.
+
+'I'll try,' I said; 'but it will be appalling.'
+
+I laughed and shook my head.
+
+'We shall see how appalling it will be,' he murmured, as he got the
+volume of music.
+
+He fetched a chair for me, and we sat down side by side, he on the stool
+and I on the chair.
+
+'I'm afraid my chair is too low,' I said.
+
+'And I'm sure this stool is too high,' he said. 'Suppose we exchange.'
+
+So we both rose to change the positions of the chair and the stool, and
+our garments touched and almost our faces, and at that very moment there
+was a loud rap at the door.
+
+I darted away from him.
+
+'What's that?' I cried, low in a fit of terror.
+
+'Who's there?' he called quietly; but he did not stir.
+
+We gazed at each other.
+
+The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.
+
+'Who's there?' Diaz demanded again.
+
+'Go to the door,' I whispered.
+
+He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor.
+Diaz went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the
+corridor, and looked into the darkness.
+
+'Curious!' he commented tranquilly. 'I see no one.'
+
+He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby
+to shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of
+our own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on
+the small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a
+half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other
+room; one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ball,
+which caught the light of the candle on the piano.
+
+'You were startled,' he said. 'You must have a little more of our
+cordial--just a spoonful.'
+
+He poured out for me an infinitesimal quantity, and the same for himself.
+
+I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling
+incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and
+that did not leave me.
+
+We sat down a second time to the piano.
+
+'You understand,' he explained, staring absently at the double page of
+music, 'this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is dark in
+the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king, her
+husband, has just gone off hunting--you will hear the horns dying in the
+distance--and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch is burning
+in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the signal by
+extinguishing it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment when
+they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that you
+will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers. Are
+you ready?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous.
+I was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes.
+The notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was
+the big black letters at the top, 'Zweiter Aufzug.' And furthermore, on
+that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the bass of
+the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and
+closed my eyes.
+
+'I can't,' I whispered, 'I can't. I would if I could.'
+
+He gently took my hand.
+
+'My dear companion,' he said, 'tell me your name.'
+
+I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason,
+flashed through my mind.
+
+'Magdalen,' I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and sincere
+that he believed it.
+
+I could see that he was taken aback.
+
+'It is a holy name and a good name,' he said, after a pause. 'Magda, you
+are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read
+it, won't you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me, and
+play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.'
+
+And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The
+influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had
+resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and
+lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and
+dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in
+conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing
+out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had
+ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I
+abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not
+disgrace myself.'
+
+'Unless it was Chopin,' whispered Diaz. 'No one could ever see two things
+at once as well as Wagner.'
+
+We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the
+page, and then the hunters' horns were heard departing from the garden of
+love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a scarce-heard drone,
+out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the horns died away,
+so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the future. I
+surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty which we
+were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.
+
+The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once
+feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of
+modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of
+heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I
+might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and
+complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam
+about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a
+background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they
+were the emotions of love--the sense of the splendour of love, the
+headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the
+finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the
+universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: 'Where love is,
+there is God also.'
+
+The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be
+approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy,
+but I held on, and the climax arrived--a climax which touched the
+limits of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in
+coming together.
+
+'Tristan has come into the garden,' I muttered.
+
+And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.
+
+We plunged forward into the love-scene itself--the scene in which the
+miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all
+miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then
+occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces,
+what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what
+sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In
+what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that
+marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond
+the common lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more
+fully than I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a
+supreme experience, and that another such could not be contained in my
+life.... And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on
+the music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the
+left hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar,
+and becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air
+fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of
+the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The
+whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought
+gently and persistently against the rhythm.
+
+'Hear the beating of their hearts,' Diaz' whisper floated over the
+chords.
+
+It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the
+vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands
+fell from the keyboard. He looked at me--and with what a glance!
+
+'I can bear no more,' I cried wildly. 'It is too beautiful, too
+beautiful!'
+
+And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my
+face in my hands.
+
+He came to me, and bent over me.
+
+'Magda,' he whispered, 'show me your face.' With his hands he delicately
+persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to look on him. 'How
+dark and splendid you are, Magda!' he said, still holding my hands. 'How
+humid and flashing your eyes! And those eyelashes, and that hair--dark,
+dark! And that bosom, with its rise and fall! And that low, rich voice,
+that is like dark wine! And that dress--dark, and full of mysterious
+shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known each other in a
+previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this moment is the
+fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You were to be
+mine. You are mine, Magda!'
+
+There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny
+to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief
+instant, to this noble and glorious creature, on whom the gods had
+showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not
+already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of
+society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the
+resistless tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable,
+and everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we
+were together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in
+contact. He held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at
+once that those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was
+proud and glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that
+point I ceased to have volition....
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+When I woke up, perplexed at first, but gradually remembering where I
+was, and what had occurred to me, the realistic and uncompromising light
+of dawn had commenced its pitiless inquiry, and it fell on the brass
+knob, which I had noticed a few hours before, from the other room, and
+on another brass knob a few feet away. My eyes smarted; I had
+disconcerting sensations at the back of my head; my hair was brittle,
+and as though charged with a dull electricity; I was conscious of actual
+pain, and an incubus, crushing but intangible, lay heavily, like a
+physical weight, on my heart. After the crest of the wave the trough--it
+must be so; but how profound the instinct which complains! I listened. I
+could hear his faint, regular breathing. I raised myself carefully on
+one elbow and looked at him. He was as beautiful in sleep as in
+consciousness; his lips were slightly parted, his cheek exquisitely
+flushed, and nothing could disarrange that short, curly hair. He slept
+with the calmness of the natural innocent man, to whom the assuaging of
+desires brings only content.
+
+I felt that I must go, and hastily, frantically. I could not face him
+when he woke; I should not have known what to say; I should have been
+abashed, timid, clumsy, unequal to myself. And, moreover, I had the
+egoist's deep need to be alone, to examine my soul, to understand it
+intimately and utterly. And, lastly, I wanted to pay the bill of pleasure
+at once. I could never tolerate credit; I was like my aunt in that.
+Therefore, I must go home and settle the account in some way. I knew not
+how; I knew only that the thing must be done. Diaz had nothing to do with
+that; it was not his affair, and I should have resented his interference.
+Ah! when I was in the bill-paying mood, how hard I could be, how stony,
+how blind! And that morning I was like a Malay running amok.
+
+Think not that when I was ready to depart I stopped and stooped to give
+him a final tender kiss. I did not even scribble a word of adieu or of
+explanation. I stole away on tiptoe, without looking at him. This sounds
+brutal, but it is a truth of my life, and I am writing my life--at
+least, I am writing those brief hours of my existence during which I
+lived. I had always a sort of fierce courage; and as I had proved the
+courage of my passion in the night, so I proved the courage of my--not
+my remorse, not my compunction, not my regret--but of my intellectual
+honesty in the morning. Proud and vain words, perhaps. Who can tell? No
+matter what sympathies I alienate, I am bound to say plainly that,
+though I am passionate, I am not sentimental. I came to him out of the
+void, and I went from him into the void. He found me, and he lost me.
+Between the autumn sunset and the autumn sunrise he had learnt to know
+me well, but he did not know my name nor my history; he had no clue, no
+cord to pull me back.
+
+I passed into the sitting-room, dimly lighted through the drawn curtains,
+and there was the score of _Tristan_ open on the piano. Yes; and if I
+were the ordinary woman I would add that there also were the ashes in the
+cold grate, and so symbolize the bitterness of memory and bring about a
+pang. But I have never regretted what is past. The cinders of that fire
+were to me cinders of a fire and nothing more.
+
+In the doorway I halted. To go into the corridor was like braving the
+blast of the world, and I hesitated. Possibly I hesitated for a very
+little thing. Only the women among you will guess it. My dress was dark
+and severe. I had a simple, dark cloak. But I had no hat. I had no hat,
+and the most important fact in the universe for me then was that I had no
+hat. My whole life was changed; my heart and mind were in the throes of a
+revolution. I dared not imagine what would happen between my aunt and me;
+but this deficiency in my attire distressed me more than all else. At the
+other end of the obscure corridor was a chambermaid kneeling down and
+washing the linoleum. Ah, maid! Would I not have exchanged fates with
+you, then! I walked boldly up to her. She seemed to be surprised, but she
+continued to wring out a cloth in her pail as she looked at me.
+
+'What time is it, please?' I asked her.
+
+'Better than half-past six, ma'am,' said she.
+
+She was young and emaciated.
+
+'Have you got a hat you can lend me? Or I'll buy it from you.'
+
+'A hat, ma'am?'
+
+'Yes, a hat,' I repeated impatiently. And I flushed. 'I must go out at
+once, and I've--I've no hat And I can't--'
+
+It is extraordinary how in a crisis one's organism surprises one. I had
+thought I was calm and full of self-control, but I had almost no command
+over my voice.
+
+'I've got a boat-shaped straw, ma'am, if that's any use to you,' said the
+girl kindly.
+
+What she surmised or what she knew I could not say. But I have found out
+since in my travels, that hotel chambermaids lose their illusions early.
+At any rate her tone was kindly.
+
+'Get it me, there's a good girl,' I entreated her.
+
+And when she brought it, I drew out the imitation pearl pins and put them
+between my teeth, and jammed the hat on my head and skewered it savagely
+with the pins.
+
+'Is that right?'
+
+'It suits you better than it does me, ma'am, I do declare,' she said.
+'Oh, ma'am, this is too much--I really couldn't!'
+
+I had given her five shillings.
+
+'Nonsense! I am very much obliged to you,' I whispered hurriedly,
+and ran off.
+
+She was a good girl. I hope she has never suffered. And yet I would
+not like to think she had died of consumption before she knew what
+life meant.
+
+I hastened from the hotel. A man in a blue waistcoat with shining black
+sleeves was moving a large cocoa-nut mat in the hall, and the pattern of
+the mat was shown in dust on the tiles where the mat had been. He glanced
+at me absently as I flitted past; I encountered no other person. The
+square between the hotel and the station was bathed in pure
+sunshine--such sunshine as reaches the Five Towns only after a rain-storm
+has washed the soot out of the air. I felt, for a moment, obscene in that
+sunshine; but I had another and a stronger feeling. Although there was
+not a soul in the square, I felt as if I was regarding the world and
+mankind with different eyes from those of yesterday. Then I knew nothing;
+to-day I knew everything--so it seemed to me. It seemed to me that I
+understood all sorts of vague, subtle things that I had not understood
+before; that I had been blind and now saw; that I had become kinder, more
+sympathetic, more human. What these things were that I understood, or
+thought I understood, I could not have explained. All I felt was that a
+radical change of attitude had occurred in me. 'Poor world!
+
+Poor humanity! My heart melts for you!' Thus spoke my soul, pouring
+itself out. The very stone facings of the station and the hotel seemed
+somehow to be humanized and to need my compassion.
+
+I walked with eyes downcast into the station. I had determined to take
+the train from Knype to Shawport, a distance of three miles, and then to
+walk up the hill from Shawport through Oldcastle Street to Bursley. I
+hoped that by such a route at such an hour, I should be unlikely to meet
+acquaintances, of whom, in any case, I had few. My hopes appeared to be
+well founded, for the large booking-hall at the station was thronged with
+a multitude entirely strange to me--workmen and workwomen and workgirls
+crowded the place. The first-class and second-class booking-windows were
+shut, and a long tail of muscular men, pale men, stout women, and thin
+women pushed to take tickets at the other window. I was obliged to join
+them, and to wait my turn amid the odour of corduroy and shawl, and the
+strong odour of humanity; my nostrils were peculiarly sensitive that
+morning. Some of the men had herculean arms and necks, and it was these
+who wore pieces of string tied round their trousers below the knee,
+disclosing the lines of their formidable calves. The women were mostly
+pallid and quiet. All carried cans, or satchels, or baskets; here and
+there a man swung lightly on his shoulder a huge bag of tools, which I
+could scarcely have raised from the ground. Everybody was natural,
+direct, and eager; and no one attempted to be genteel or refined; no one
+pretended that he did not toil with his hands for dear life. I
+anticipated that I should excite curiosity, but I did not. The people had
+a preoccupied, hurried air. Only at the window itself, when the
+ticket-clerk, having made me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of
+his lair to get my ticket, did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and
+inimical interest in this drone who caused delay to busy people.
+
+It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same
+on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I
+could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full
+tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they
+employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains
+generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at
+one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.
+
+'These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of
+_our_ wealth and luxury!' I thought; for I was just beginning, at that
+period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social
+organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on
+paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep
+of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable
+directness. They frightened me with their vivid humanity.
+
+I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a
+compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls
+were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her
+dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.
+From the young man's soiled white jacket under his black coat, I
+gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and
+left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession
+of compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people.
+None of my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance. It
+was uncanny.
+
+Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained
+prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn,
+musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life.
+'Ah,' I thought, 'you little know what I know! I may appear a butterfly,
+but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence. I am above you, beyond
+you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by the turmoil
+in my heart!' And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that they probably
+knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten more than I
+had ever learnt. I remembered an absorbing correspondence about the
+manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the _Staffordshire
+Recorder_--a correspondence which had driven Aunt Constance to conceal
+the paper after the second week. I guessed that they might smile at the
+simplicity of my heart could they see it. Meaning of existence! Why, they
+were reared in it! The naturalness of natural people and of natural acts
+struck me like a blow, and I withdrew, whipped, into myself. My adventure
+grew smaller. But I recalled its ecstasies. I dwelt on the romantic
+perfection of Diaz. It seemed to me amazing, incredible, that Diaz, the
+glorious and incomparable Diaz, had loved me--_me_! out of all the
+ardent, worshipping women that the world contained. I wondered if he had
+wakened up, and I felt sorry for him. So far, I had not decided how soon,
+if at all, I should communicate with him. My mind was incapable of
+reaching past the next few hours--the next hour.
+
+We stopped at a station surrounded by the evidences of that tireless,
+unceasing, and tremendous manufacturing industry which distinguishes the
+Five Towns, and I was left alone in the compartment. The train rumbled on
+through a landscape of fiery furnaces, and burning slag-heaps, and foul
+canals reflecting great smoking chimneys, all steeped in the mild
+sunshine. Could the toil-worn agents of this never-ending and gigantic
+productiveness find time for love? Perhaps they loved quickly and forgot,
+like animals. Thoughts such as these lurked sinister and carnal, strange
+beasts in the jungle of my poor brain. Then the train arrived at
+Shawport, and I was obliged to get out. I say 'obliged,' because I
+violently wished not to get out. I wished to travel on in that train to
+some impossible place, where things were arranged differently.
+
+The station clock showed only five minutes to seven. I was astounded. It
+seemed to me that all the real world had been astir and busy for hours.
+And this extraordinary activity went on every morning while Aunt
+Constance and I lay in our beds and thought well of ourselves.
+
+I shivered, and walked quickly up the street. I had positively not
+noticed that I was cold. I had scarcely left the station before Fred
+Ryley appeared in front of me. I saw that his face was swollen. My
+heart stopped. Of course, he would tell Ethel.... He passed me
+sheepishly without stopping, merely raising his hat, and murmuring the
+singular words:
+
+'We're both very, very sorry.'
+
+What in the name of Heaven could they possibly know, he and Ethel? And
+what right had he to ...? Did he smile furtively? Fred Ryley had
+sometimes a strange smile. I reddened, angry and frightened.
+
+The distance between the station and our house proved horribly short. And
+when I arrived in front of the green gates, and put my hand on the latch,
+I knew that I had formed no plan whatever. I opened the right-hand gate
+and entered the garden. The blinds were still down, and the house looked
+so decorous and innocent in its age. My poor aunt! What a night she must
+have been through! It was inconceivable that I should tell her what had
+happened to me. Indeed, under the windows of that house it seemed
+inconceivable that the thing had happened which had happened.
+Inconceivable! Grotesque! Monstrous!
+
+But could I lie? Could I rise to the height of some sufficient and
+kindly lie?
+
+A hand drew slightly aside the blind of the window over the porch. I
+sighed, and went wearily, in my boat-shaped straw, up the gravelled path
+to the door.
+
+Rebecca met me at the door. It was so early that she had not yet put on
+an apron. She looked tired, as if she had not slept.
+
+'Come in, miss,' she said weakly, holding open the door.
+
+It seemed to me that I did not need this invitation from a servant.
+
+'I suppose you've all been fearfully upset, wondering where I was,' I
+began, entering the hall.
+
+My adventure appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this
+buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything one
+hundredth part so dreadful.
+
+'No, miss; I wasn't upset on account of you. You're always so sensible
+like. You always know what to do. I knew as you must have stopped the
+night with friends in Hanbridge on account of the heavy rain, and perhaps
+that there silly cabman not turning up, and them tramcars all crowded;
+and, of course, you couldn't telegraph.'
+
+This view that I was specially sagacious and equal to emergencies rather
+surprised me.
+
+'But auntie?' I demanded, trembling.
+
+'Oh, miss!' cried Rebecca, glancing timidly over her shoulder, 'I want
+you to come with me into the dining-room before you go upstairs.'
+
+She snuffled.
+
+In the dining-room I went at once to the window to draw up the blinds.
+
+'Not that, not that!' Rebecca appealed, weeping. 'For pity's sake!' And
+she caught my hand.
+
+I then noticed that Lucy was standing in the doorway, also weeping.
+Rebecca noticed this too.
+
+'Lucy, you go to your kitchen this minute,' she said sharply, and then
+turned to me and began to cry again. 'Miss Peel--how can I tell you?'
+
+'Why do you call me Miss Peel?' I asked her.
+
+But I knew why. The thing flashed over me instantly. My dear aunt was
+dead.
+
+'You've got no aunt,' said Rebecca. 'My poor dear! And you at the
+concert!'
+
+I dropped my head and my bosom on the bare mahogany table and cried.
+Never before, and never since, have I spilt such tears--hot, painful
+drops, distilled plenteously from a heart too crushed and torn.
+
+'There, there!' muttered Rebecca. 'I wish I could have told you
+different--less cruel; but it wasn't in me to do it.'
+
+'And she's lying upstairs this very moment all cold and stiff,' a wailing
+voice broke in.
+
+It was Lucy, who could not keep herself away from us.
+
+'Will you go to your kitchen, my girl!'
+
+Rebecca drove her off. 'And the poor thing's not stiff either. Her poor
+body's as soft as if she was only asleep, and doctor says it will be for
+a day or two. It's like that when they're took off like that, he says.
+Oh, Miss Carlotta--'
+
+'Tell me all about it before I go upstairs,' I said.
+
+I had recovered.
+
+'Your poor aunt went to bed just as soon as you were gone, miss,' said
+Rebecca. 'She would have it she was quite well, only tired. I took her up
+a cup of cocoa at ten o'clock, and she seemed all right, and then I sends
+Lucy to bed, and I sits up in the kitchen to wait for you. Not a sound
+from your poor aunt. I must have dropped asleep, miss, in my chair, and I
+woke up with a start like, and the kitchen clock was near on one. Thinks
+I, perhaps Miss Carlotta's been knocking and ringing all this time and me
+not heard, and I rushes to the front door. But of course you weren't
+there. The porch was nothing but a pool o' water. I says to myself she's
+stopping somewhere, I says. And I felt it was my duty to go and tell your
+aunt, whether she was asleep or whether she wasn't asleep.... Well, and
+there she was, miss, with her eyes closed, and as soft as a child. I
+spoke to her, loud, more than once. "Miss Carlotta a'n't come," I says.
+"Miss Carlotta a'n't come, ma'am," I says. She never stirred. Thinks I,
+this is queer this is. And I goes up to her and touches her. Chilly! Then
+I takes the liberty of pushing back your poor aunt's eyelids, and I could
+but see the whites of her eyes; the eyeballs was gone up, and a bit
+outwards. Yes; and her poor dear chin was dropped. Thinks I, here's
+trouble, and Miss Carlotta at the concert. I runs to our bedroom, and I
+tells Lucy to put a cloak on and fetch Dr. Roycroft. "Who for?" she says.
+"Never you mind who for!" I says, says I. "You up and quick. But you can
+tell the doctor it's missis as is took." And in ten minutes he was here,
+miss. But it's only across the garden, like. "Yes," he said, "she's been
+dead an hour or more. Failure of the heart's action," he said. "She died
+in her sleep," he said. "Thank God she died in her sleep if she was to
+die, the pure angel!" I says. I told the doctor as you were away for the
+night, miss. And I laid her out, miss, and your poor auntie wasn't my
+first, either. I've seen trouble--I've--'
+
+And Rebecca's tears overcame her voice.
+
+'I'll go upstairs with you, miss,' she struggled out.
+
+One thought that flew across my mind was that Doctor Roycroft was very
+intimate with the Ryleys, and had doubtless somehow informed them of my
+aunt's death. This explained Fred Ryley's strange words and attitude to
+me on the way from the station. The young man had been too timid to stop
+me. The matter was a trifle, but another idea that struck me was not a
+trifle, though I strove to make it so. My aunt had died about midnight,
+and it was at midnight that Diaz and I had heard the mysterious knock on
+his sitting-room door. At the time I had remarked how it resembled my
+aunt's knock. Occasionally, when the servants overslept themselves, Aunt
+Constance would go to their rooms in her pale-blue dressing-gown and
+knock on their door exactly like that. Could it be that this was one of
+those psychical manifestations of which I had read? Had my aunt, in
+passing from this existence to the next, paused a moment to warn me of
+my terrible danger? My intellect replied that a disembodied soul could
+not knock, and that the phenomenon had been due simply to some guest or
+servant of the hotel who had mistaken the room, and discovered his error
+in time. Nevertheless, the instinctive part of me--that part of us which
+refuses to fraternize with reason, and which we call the superstitious
+because we cannot explain it--would not let go the spiritualistic
+theory, and during all my life has never quite surrendered it to the
+attacks of my brain.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+'No,' I said; 'I will go upstairs alone;' and I went, leaving my cloak
+and hat with Rebecca.
+
+Already, to my hypersensitive nostrils, there was a slight odour in the
+darkened bedroom. What lay on the bed, straight and long and thin,
+resembled almost exactly my aunt as she lived. I forced myself to look on
+it. Except that the face was paler than usual, and had a curious
+transparent, waxy appearance, and that the cheeks were a little hollowed,
+and the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth somewhat
+deepened, there had been no outward change.... And _this_ once was she! I
+thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved
+me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling,
+sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The
+shaft of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the
+same hour, and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled
+and quailed. I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul
+also was solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not
+a moral coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at
+that calm and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much
+I had lost. At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt
+Constance at over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among men for
+interminable years, and never _known_! It seemed impossible, shockingly
+against Nature, that my aunt's existence should have been so! I pitied
+her profoundly. I felt that essentially she was girlish compared to me.
+And yet--and yet--that which she had kept and which I had given away was
+precious, too--indefinably and wonderfully precious! The price of
+knowledge and of ecstasy seemed heavy to me then. The girl that had gone
+with Diaz into that hotel apartment had come out no more. She had expired
+there, and her extinction was the price, Oh, innocence! Oh, divine
+ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered
+you! And herein is the woman's tragedy.
+
+There in that mausoleum I decided that I must never see Diaz again. He
+was fast in my heart, a flashing, glorious treasure, but I must never see
+him again. I must devote myself to memory.
+
+On the dressing-table lay a brown-paper parcel which seemed out of place
+there. I opened it, and it contained a magnificently-bound copy of _The
+Imitation of Christ_. Upon the flyleaf was written: 'To dearest Carlotta
+on attaining her majority. With fondest love. C.P.'
+
+It was too much; it was overwhelming. I wept again. Soul so kind and
+pure! The sense of my loss, the sense of the simple, proud rectitude of
+her life, laid me low.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the
+conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or
+flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains
+loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy,
+wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of
+existence; trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the
+air of your own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night
+with your yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave
+the night behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that
+carry bread and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of
+fresh water; trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through
+the landscapes and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting,
+formidable, and yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your
+arrogance and your pathos.
+
+That little journey from Knype to Shawport had implanted itself painfully
+in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of
+life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months
+had elapsed--three months of growing misery and despair; three months of
+tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the
+exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange
+fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs
+of wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy,
+and no interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there
+by my secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of
+the Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been
+so minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would
+not. Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been
+able to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the
+house; I sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca
+and the clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as
+though I had sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week,
+I cut myself to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a
+sort of terrible languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony,
+and yet tortured by my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that
+no philosophy could stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more
+than the strapping and the labelling of my trunks that morning after I
+had slept, dreamfully, in the bed that I should never use again--the bed
+that, indeed, was even then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I
+wept at all, I should have wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks:
+'Miss Peel, passenger to Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,'
+with two thick lines drawn under the 'Euston.' That writing of labels was
+the climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and
+all bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some
+day, when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has
+been fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved
+passionately the disfigured hills and valleys of the Five Towns. And as I
+think of Oldcastle Street, dropping away sleepily and respectably from
+the Town Hall of Bursley, with the gold angel holding a gold crown on its
+spire, I vibrate with an inexplicable emotion. What is there in Oldcastle
+Street to disturb the dust of the soul?
+
+I must tell you here that Diaz had gone to South America on a triumphal
+tour of concerts, lest I forget! I read it in the paper.
+
+So I arrived in London on a February day, about one o'clock. And the
+hall-porter at the Golden Cross Hotel, and the two pale girls in the
+bureau of the hotel, were sympathetic and sweet to me, because I was
+young and alone, and in mourning, and because I had great rings round my
+eyes. It was a fine day, blue and mild. At half-past three I had nothing
+in the world to do. I had come to London without a plan, without a
+purpose, with scarcely an introduction; I wished simply to plunge myself
+into its solitude, and to be alone with my secret fear. I walked out into
+the street, slowly, like one whom ennui has taught to lose no chance of
+dissipating time. I neither liked nor disliked London. I had no feelings
+towards it save one of perplexity. I thought it noisy, dirty, and
+hurried. Its great name roused no thrill in my bosom. On the morrow, I
+said, I would seek a lodging, and perhaps write to Ethel Ryley.
+Meanwhile I strolled up into Trafalgar Square, and so into Charing Cross
+Road. And in Charing Cross Road--it was the curst accident of fate--I saw
+the signboard of the celebrated old firm of publishers, Oakley and
+Dalbiac. It is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in
+this history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt's
+death I had already written my first novel, _The Jest_, and sent it to
+precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful
+extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew
+nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had
+kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely
+formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance of
+success, and that they would be prepared to publish it on certain terms,
+but that I must not expect, etc. By that time I had lost my original
+sublime faith in the exceeding excellence of my story, and I replied that
+I preferred to withdraw the book. To this letter I had received no
+answer. When I saw the famous sign over a doorway the impulse seized me
+to enter and get the manuscript, with the object of rewriting it. Soon, I
+reflected, I might not be able to enter; the portals of mankind might be
+barred to me for a space.... I saw in a flash of insight that my
+salvation lay in work, and in nothing else. I entered, resolutely. A
+brougham was waiting at the doors.
+
+After passing along counters furnished with ledgers and clerks, through a
+long, lofty room lined with great pigeon-holes containing thousands of
+books each wrapped separately in white paper, I was shown into what the
+clerk who acted as chamberlain called the office of the principal. This
+room, too, was spacious, but so sombre that the electric light was
+already burning. The first thing I noticed was that the window gave on a
+wall of white tiles. In the middle of the somewhat dingy apartment was a
+vast, square table, and at this table sat a pale, tall man, whose youth
+astonished me--for the firm of Oakley and Dalbiac was historic.
+
+He did not look up exactly at the instant of my entering, but when he did
+look up, when he saw me, he stared for an instant, and then sprang from
+his chair as though magically startled into activity. His age was about
+thirty, and he had large, dark eyes, and a slight, dark moustache, and
+his face generally was interesting; he wore a dark gray suit. I was
+nervous, but he was even more nervous; yet in the moment of looking up he
+had not seemed nervous. He could not do enough, apparently, to make me
+feel at ease, and to show his appreciation of me and my work. He spoke
+enthusiastically of _The Jest_, begging me neither to suppress it nor to
+alter it. And, without the least suggestion from me, he offered me a
+considerable sum of money in advance of royalties. At that time I
+scarcely knew what royalties were. But although my ignorance of business
+was complete, I guessed that this man was behaving in a manner highly
+unusual among publishers. He was also patently contradicting the tenor of
+his firm's letter to me. I thanked him, and said I should like, at any
+rate, to glance through the manuscript.
+
+'Don't alter it, Miss Peel, I beg,' he said. 'It is "young," I know;
+but it ought to be. I remember my wife said--my wife reads many of our
+manuscripts--by the way--' He went to a door, opened it, and called
+out, 'Mary!'
+
+A tall and slim woman, extremely elegant, appeared in reply to this
+appeal. Her hair was gray above the ears, and I judged that she was four
+or five years older than the man. She had a kind, thin face, with shining
+gray eyes, and she was wearing a hat.
+
+'Mary, this is Miss Peel, the author of _The Jest_--you remember. Miss
+Peel, my wife.'
+
+The woman welcomed me with quick, sincere gestures. Her smile was very
+pleasant, and yet a sad smile. The husband also had an air of quiet,
+restrained, cheerful sadness.
+
+'My wife is frequently here in the afternoon like this,' said the
+principal.
+
+'Yes,' she laughed; 'it's quite a family affair, and I'm almost on the
+staff. I distinctly remember your manuscript, Miss Peel, and how very
+clever and amusing it was.'
+
+Her praise was spontaneous and cordial, but it was a different thing from
+the praise of her husband. He obviously noticed the difference.
+
+'I was just saying to Miss Peel--' he began, with increased nervousness.
+
+'Pardon me,' I interrupted. 'But am I speaking to Mr. Oakley or
+Mr. Dalbiac?'
+
+'To neither,' said he. 'My name is Ispenlove, and I am the nephew of the
+late Mr. Dalbiac. Mr. Oakley died thirty years ago. I have no partner.'
+
+'You expected to see a very old gentleman, no doubt,' Mrs.
+Ispenlove remarked.
+
+'Yes,' I smiled.
+
+'People often do. And Frank is so very young. You live in London?'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I have just come up.'
+
+'To stay?'
+
+'To stay.'
+
+'Alone?'
+
+'Yes. My aunt died a few months ago. I am all that is left of my
+family.'
+
+Mrs. Ispenlove's eyes filled with tears, and she fingered a gold chain
+that hung from her neck.
+
+'But have you got rooms--a house?'
+
+'I am at a hotel for the moment.'
+
+'But you have friends?'
+
+I shook my head. Mr. Ispenlove was glancing rapidly from one to the
+other of us.
+
+'My dear young lady!' exclaimed his wife. Then she hesitated, and said:
+'Excuse my abruptness, but do let me beg you to come and have tea with us
+this afternoon. We live quite near--in Bloomsbury Square. The carriage is
+waiting. Frank, you can come?'
+
+'I can come for an hour,' said Mr. Ispenlove.
+
+I wanted very much to decline, but I could not. I could not disappoint
+that honest and generous kindliness, with its touch of melancholy. I
+could not refuse those shining gray eyes. I saw that my situation and my
+youth had lacerated Mrs. Ispenlove's sensitive heart, and that she wished
+to give it balm by being humane to me.
+
+We seemed, so rapid was our passage, to be whisked on an Arabian carpet
+to a spacious drawing-room, richly furnished, with thick rugs and ample
+cushions and countless knicknacks and photographs and delicately-tinted
+lampshades. There was a grand piano by Steinway, and on it Mendelssohn's
+'Songs without Words.' The fire slumbered in a curious grate that
+projected several feet into the room--such a contrivance I had never seen
+before. Near it sat Mrs. Ispenlove, entrenched behind a vast copper disc
+on a low wicker stand, pouring out tea. Mr. Ispenlove hovered about. He
+and his wife called each other 'dearest.' 'Ring the bell for me,
+dearest.' 'Yes, dearest.' I felt sure that they had no children. They
+were very intimate, very kind, and always gently sad. The atmosphere was
+charmingly domestic, even cosy, despite the size of the room--a most
+pleasing contrast to the offices which we had just left. Mrs. Ispenlove
+told her husband to look after me well, and he devoted himself to me.
+
+'Do you know,' said Mrs. Ispenlove, 'I am gradually recalling the details
+of your book, and you are not at all the sort of person that I should
+have expected to see.'
+
+'But that poor little book isn't _me_,' I answered. 'I shall never write
+another like it. I only--'
+
+'Shall you not?' Mr. Ispenlove interjected. 'I hope you will, though.'
+
+I smiled.
+
+'I only did it to see what I could do. I am going to begin something
+quite different.'
+
+'It appears to me,' said Mrs. Ispenlove--'and I must again ask you to
+excuse my freedom, but I feel as if I had known you a long time--it
+appears to me that what you want immediately is a complete rest.'
+
+'Why do you say that?' I demanded.
+
+'You do not look well. You look exhausted and worn out.'
+
+I blushed as she gazed at me. Could she--? No. Those simple gray eyes
+could not imagine evil. Nevertheless, I saw too plainly how foolish I had
+been. I, with my secret fear, that was becoming less a fear than a
+dreadful certainty, to permit myself to venture into that house! I might
+have to fly ignominiously before long, to practise elaborate falsehood,
+to disappear.
+
+'Perhaps you are right,' I agreed.
+
+The conversation grew fragmentary, and less and less formal. Mrs.
+Ispenlove was the chief talker. I remember she said that she was always
+being thrown among clever people, people who could do things, and that
+her own inability to do anything at all was getting to be an obsession
+with her; and that people like me could have no idea of the tortures of
+self-depreciation which she suffered. Her voice was strangely wistful
+during this confession. She also spoke--once only, and quite shortly,
+but with what naïve enthusiasm!--of the high mission and influence of the
+novelist who wrote purely and conscientiously. After this, though my
+liking for her was undiminished, I had summed her up. Mr. Ispenlove
+offered no commentary on his wife's sentiments. He struck me as being a
+reserved man, whose inner life was intense and sufficient to him.
+
+'Ah!' I reflected, as Mrs. Ispenlove, with an almost motherly accent,
+urged me to have another cup of tea, 'if you knew me, if you knew me,
+what would you say to me? Would your charity be strong enough to overcome
+your instincts?' And as I had felt older than my aunt, so I felt older
+than Mrs. Ispenlove.
+
+I left, but I had to promise to come again on the morrow, after I had
+seen Mr. Ispenlove on business. The publisher took me down to my hotel in
+the brougham (and I thought of the drive with Diaz, but the water was not
+streaming down the windows), and then he returned to his office.
+
+Without troubling to turn on the light in my bedroom, I sank sighing on
+to the bed. The events of the afternoon had roused me from my terrible
+lethargy, but now it overcame me again. I tried to think clearly about
+the Ispenloves and what the new acquaintance meant for me; but I could
+not think clearly. I had not been able to think clearly for two months. I
+wished only to die. For a moment I meditated vaguely on suicide, but
+suicide seemed to involve an amount of complicated enterprise far beyond
+my capacity. It amazed me how I had managed to reach London. I must have
+come mechanically, in a heavy dream; for I had no hope, no energy, no
+vivacity, no interest. For many weeks my mind had revolved round an awful
+possibility, as if hypnotized by it, and that monotonous revolution
+seemed alone to constitute my real life. Moreover, I was subject to
+recurring nausea, and to disconcerting bodily pains and another symptom.
+
+'This must end!' I said, struggling to my feet.
+
+I summoned the courage of an absolute disgust. I felt that the power
+which had triumphed over my dejection and my irresolution and brought me
+to London might carry me a little further.
+
+Leaving the hotel, I crossed the Strand. Innumerable omnibuses were
+crawling past. I jumped into one at hazard, and the conductor put his arm
+behind my back to support me. He was shouting, 'Putney, Putney, Putney!'
+in an absent-minded manner: he had assisted me to mount without even
+looking at me. I climbed to the top of the omnibus and sat down, and the
+omnibus moved off. I knew not where I was going; Putney was nothing but a
+name to me.
+
+'Where to, lady?' snapped the conductor, coming upstairs.
+
+'Oh, Putney,' I answered.
+
+A little bell rang and he gave me a ticket. The omnibus was soon full. A
+woman with a young child shared my seat. But the population of the roof
+was always changing. I alone remained--so it appeared to me. And we moved
+interminably forward through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under the
+mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an arc-lamp,
+I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they were nothing
+but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were changed. A
+score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he never looked
+at me again. 'I've done with you,' his back seemed to say.
+
+The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly
+succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark;
+and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary
+window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the
+tragic romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to
+be almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London.
+Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction
+with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations,
+elbowing each other--No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I
+felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth,
+my inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the
+very things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in
+that despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of
+life, the beauty of life's exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like
+a red-hot iron.
+
+We crossed a great river by a great bridge--a mysterious and mighty
+stream; and then the streets closed in on us again. And at last, after
+hours and hours, the omnibus swerved into a dark road and
+stopped--stopped finally.
+
+'Putney!' cried the conductor, like fate.
+
+I descended. Far off, at the end of the vista of the dark road, I saw a
+red lamp. I knew that in large cities a red lamp indicated a doctor: it
+was the one useful thing that I did know.
+
+I approached the red lamp, cautiously, on the other side of the street.
+Then some power forced me to cross the street and open a wicket. And in
+the red glow of the lamp I saw an ivory button which I pushed. I could
+plainly hear the result; it made me tremble. I had a narrow escape of
+running away. The door was flung wide, and a middle-aged woman appeared
+in the bright light of the interior of the house. She had a kind face. It
+is astounding, the number of kind faces one meets.
+
+'Is the doctor in?' I asked.
+
+I would have given a year of my life to hear her say 'No.'
+
+'Yes, miss,' she said. 'Will you step in?'
+
+Events seemed to be moving all too rapidly.
+
+I passed into a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the
+surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano--scales,
+played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters
+of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano
+ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall
+man in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into the surgery.
+
+'Good-evening, madam,' he said gruffly. 'Won't you sit down?'
+
+'I--I--I want to ask you--'
+
+He put a chair for me, and I dropped into it.
+
+'There!' he said, after a moment. 'You felt as if you might faint,
+didn't you?'
+
+I nodded. The tears came into my eyes.
+
+'I thought so,' he said. 'I'll just give you a draught, if you
+don't mind.'
+
+He busied himself behind me, and presently I was drinking something out
+of a conical-shaped glass.
+
+My heart beat furiously, but I felt strong.
+
+'I want you to tell me, doctor,' I spoke firmly, 'whether I am about to
+become a mother.'
+
+'Ah?' he answered interrogatively, and then he hummed a fragment
+of an air.
+
+'I have lost my husband,' I was about to add; but suddenly I scorned such
+a weakness and shut my lips.
+
+'Since when--' the doctor began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'No,' I heard him saying. 'You have been quite mistaken. But I am not
+surprised. Such mistakes are frequently made--a kind of auto-suggestion.'
+
+'Mistaken!' I murmured.
+
+I could not prevent the room running round me as I reclined on the sofa;
+and I fainted.
+
+But in the night, safely in my room again at the hotel, I wondered
+whether that secret fear, now exorcised, had not also been a hope. I
+wondered....
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+And now I was twenty-six.
+
+Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the
+lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of
+avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary
+narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as
+for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire,
+and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder
+magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star;
+it held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so
+that if my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night
+in my drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy
+world. This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have
+loved I have loved much....
+
+My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama
+of my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I
+had achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had
+gradually passed away, and a new creature had replaced her--a creature
+rapidly developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of
+an extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my
+face had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given
+me fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the
+woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have
+prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no
+merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the
+accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy,
+and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage
+is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a
+caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in
+the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone
+lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.
+
+However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants
+to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once
+aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of
+another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her
+from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is
+a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing
+which will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule
+which I made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I
+lost much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And
+since elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a
+convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I
+surrounded myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is
+the business of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some
+persons after knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others
+after reading my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these
+persons lacked perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself,
+I had naturally sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest
+thinking, kindness of heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search
+had not been unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!
+
+That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes
+and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which
+Vicary, the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were
+perhaps a dozen guests assembled.
+
+Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent
+visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the
+usual quaint Vicary details--such as the solemn warning whisper of an
+equerry in Vicary's ear as he walked backwards, '_Mind the edge of the
+carpet';_ and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little
+hysterically--all save Vicary, whose foible was never to laugh. But
+immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those disconcerting,
+involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a chill hint of
+autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was over in an
+instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended that
+everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the
+beginning of the downfall.
+
+With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be
+interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from
+a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality
+in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since.
+I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and
+her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance.
+The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis
+Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano.
+Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what
+negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across
+to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.
+
+There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the difference
+between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord
+Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before
+mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of
+my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy,
+men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they
+are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their
+trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human
+wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and
+even their folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties
+enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of
+all luxuries--pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare
+man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening
+unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of
+English printing.
+
+As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude,
+elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me.
+And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out.
+He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air
+of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so,
+and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.
+
+'Pallor suits you,' he piped gallantly, and then added: 'But do not carry
+it to extremes.'
+
+'Am I so pale, then?' I faltered, trying to smile naturally.
+
+I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined
+it like a connoisseur.
+
+'Yes,' he said at length. 'What is the matter?'
+
+Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naïve question with a
+strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living
+as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, 'Does she really
+live without love? What does she conceal?' I have read this interrogation
+in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have
+had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually
+foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had
+nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this
+sage ruin of a male almost a confessor's freedom. Moreover, we had an
+affectionate regard for each other.
+
+I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:
+
+'What is the matter?'
+
+'Love is the matter!' I might have passionately cried out to him, had we
+been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked
+him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but
+thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:
+
+'I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.'
+
+It was my sixth novel in five years.
+
+'With you,' he said, 'work is simply a drug.'
+
+'Lord Francis,' I expostulated, 'how do you know that?'
+
+'And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,' he
+proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. 'Some women take to morphia,
+others take to work.'
+
+'On the contrary,' I said, 'I have quite determined to do no more work
+for twelve months.'
+
+'Seriously?'
+
+'Seriously.'
+
+He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.
+
+'Then you mean to give yourself time to love?' he murmured, as it were
+with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features
+was intensified by an enigmatic smile.
+
+'Why not?' I laughed encouragingly. 'Why not? What do you advise?'
+
+'I advise it,' he said positively. 'I advise it. You have already wasted
+the best years.'
+
+'The best?'
+
+'One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You
+have nothing to learn about love!'
+
+He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated
+their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the
+ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.
+
+The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing
+critically at his chandeliers.
+
+'Does love bring happiness?' I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring
+his remark.
+
+'For forty years,' he quavered, 'I made love to every pretty woman I
+met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent. return on
+my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I certainly
+did not get even that in happiness. I got it in--other ways.'
+
+'And if you had to begin afresh?'
+
+He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his
+bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.
+
+'I would do the same again,' he whispered.
+
+'Would you?' I said, looking up at him. 'Truly?'
+
+'Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely
+hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through
+this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one
+involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!'
+
+He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last
+spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted
+confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive
+meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the
+eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with
+admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.
+
+'What is the title of the new book?' he demanded casually, sinking
+into a chair.
+
+'_Burning Sappho_,' I answered. 'But the title is very misleading.'
+
+'Bright star!' he exclaimed, taking my hand. 'With such a title you will
+surely beat the record of the Good Dame.'
+
+'Hsh!' I enjoined him.
+
+Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.
+
+The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to
+conceal--or to display--his courteous disdain of the ideals represented
+by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that
+impeccable _doyenne_ of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had
+captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound
+problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one
+of them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her
+dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen
+thousand pounds a year.
+
+Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother's world, and she had
+apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she
+was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply
+sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in
+her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so
+anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just
+be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how
+much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....
+
+'Yes, I remember,' Lord Francis was saying. 'It was at St. Malo. And what
+did you think of the Breton peasant?'
+
+'Oh,' said Jocelyn, 'mamma has not yet allowed us to study the condition
+of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new
+Settlement.'
+
+'It must be very exhausting, my dear child,' said Lord Francis.
+
+I rose.
+
+'I came to ask you to play something,' the child appealed to me. 'I have
+never heard you play, and everyone says--'
+
+'Jocelyn, my pet,' the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis floated
+across the room.
+
+'What, mamma?'
+
+'You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal
+to playing.'
+
+My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I
+resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I
+was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became
+violently active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt
+murderous towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I
+said, with sugar in my voice:
+
+'But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.'
+
+It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the
+mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening
+phrase of Chopin's first Ballade, that composition so laden with
+formidable memories--begun it without thinking and without
+apprehension--showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the
+silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands
+filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I
+saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one
+of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind
+and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed
+unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and
+vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess.
+And then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in
+a truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience,
+my trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were
+stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love,
+to whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman
+expecting her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous;
+a woman with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who
+was at once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I
+called my dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and
+say that he, too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the
+instrument of the god?
+
+Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and
+smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my
+gaze suddenly to the keyboard. 'You too!' I thought sadly, 'You too!...
+One day! One day even you will know what life is, and the look in those
+innocent eyes will never be innocent again!'
+
+Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of
+the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and
+stopped. It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my
+longing for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My
+fingers stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey
+me; my pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting.
+And then I became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed
+and anxious faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my
+hands. It was useless to fight further; the battle was lost.
+
+'I will not play any more,' I said quickly. 'I ought not to have tried to
+play from memory. Excuse me.'
+
+And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I
+could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and
+the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.
+
+'Poor thing!' murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. 'Do sit down, dear.'
+
+'Won't you have something to drink?' said Vicary.
+
+'I am perfectly all right,' I said. 'I'm only sorry that my memory is not
+what it used to be.' And I persisted in standing for a few moments by the
+mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of a face as white as
+milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano, frightened by she knew
+not what, like a young child.
+
+'Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,' said Lord Francis
+shakily. He had followed me. 'She has wisely decided to take a long
+holiday. Good-bye, my dear.'
+
+These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We
+shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had
+ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even
+Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not
+come! My secret was my own--and his. And no one should surprise it unless
+we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as
+they filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the
+right to be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently
+woman of the world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.
+
+Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some
+lustre ware in the further drawing-room.
+
+'I'm afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,' I said,
+approaching her.
+
+'I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,' replied Mrs. Sardis. 'The
+carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk
+with you. Do you permit?'
+
+'I shall be delighted,' I said.
+
+'You are sure you are well enough?'
+
+'There is nothing whatever the matter with me,' I answered slowly and
+distinctly. 'Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I told
+Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared, that
+she might retire to bed.
+
+Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis,
+naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still
+furtively wandered to the door.
+
+'My dear co-worker,' she began, and hesitated.
+
+'Yes,' I encouraged her.
+
+She put her matron's lips together:
+
+'You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its
+honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists
+have in the work of regenerating the world.'
+
+I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing
+to be said.
+
+'I wonder,' Mrs. Sardis continued, 'if you have ever realized what a
+power _you_ are in England and America to-day.'
+
+'Power!' I echoed. 'I have done nothing but try to write as honestly and
+as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.'
+
+'No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,' Mrs. Sardis said. 'And
+I needn't tell you that I am a warm admirer of your talent, and that I
+rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work--'
+
+'Surely,' I interrupted her coldly, 'you are not taking the trouble to
+tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous
+Anglo-Saxon public!'
+
+'Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,' she protested. 'I
+personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though their
+originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but there
+exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly objects
+to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion, ignorant
+opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to employ the
+word "immoral."'
+
+'What, then?'
+
+'I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a
+motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of
+the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal
+life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find
+in it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.'
+
+'Mrs. Sardis!' I cried. 'What do you mean?'
+
+I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this
+incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth;
+and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had
+received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and
+detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the
+conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive
+that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then,
+as suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the
+painful earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I--what were we but
+two groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one
+mystery into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our
+characters? Mrs. Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a
+natural force, as I was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat
+of the sun.
+
+'What do you mean?' I repeated quietly. 'Tell me exactly what you mean.'
+
+I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the
+freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles
+were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours,
+I should find myself.
+
+'To put it in as few words as possible,' said she, 'I mean your relations
+with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.'
+
+'My--'
+
+Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We
+had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself
+a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque
+of existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a
+moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked
+steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.
+
+'You won't affect not to understand?' she said.
+
+I assented with a motion of the head.
+
+'Many persons say there is a--a liaison between you,' she said.
+
+'And do you think that?' I asked quickly.
+
+'If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,' she
+said solemnly. 'No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and I brought
+Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only heard the
+gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne in upon
+me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not everyone
+would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content to talk
+among themselves.'
+
+'About me? Oh!' It was the expression of an almost physical pain.
+
+'What can you expect them to do?' asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.
+
+'True,' I agreed.
+
+'You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship
+with her--'
+
+'Let me tell you'--I stopped her--'that not a single word has ever passed
+between me and--and the man you mean, that everybody might not hear. Not
+a single word!'
+
+'Dearest girl,' she exclaimed; 'how glad I am! How glad I am! Now I can
+take measures to--.
+
+'But--' I resumed.
+
+'But what?'
+
+In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like
+Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her
+own code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply
+to every conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast
+stolid London that hemmed me in--of attempting to explain to such an
+excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would
+not answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a
+church steeple.
+
+'Nothing,' I said, rising, 'except that I thank you. Be sure that I
+am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very
+unpleasant to you.'
+
+She smiled, virtuously happy.
+
+'You made it easy,' she murmured.
+
+I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I
+hated kissing women!
+
+'No more need be said,' she almost whispered, as I put my hand on the
+knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.
+
+'Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair
+fame of our calling.'
+
+My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and
+I opened the door.
+
+And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove,
+haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief
+stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified
+silence down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.
+
+'Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,' I reflected.
+
+It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of
+sensations caused by Ispenlove's presence.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Without a word, we passed together into the drawing-room, and I closed
+the door. Ispenlove stood leaning against the piano, as though intensely
+fatigued; he crushed his gibus with an almost savage movement, and then
+bent his large, lustrous black eyes absently on the flat top of it. His
+thin face was whiter even than usual, and his black hair, beard, and
+moustache all dishevelled; the collar of his overcoat was twisted, and
+his dinner-jacket rose an inch above it at the back of the neck.
+
+I wanted to greet him, but I could not trust my lips. And I saw that he,
+too, was trying in vain to speak.
+
+At length I said, with that banality which too often surprises us in
+supreme moments:
+
+'What is it? Do you know that your tie is under your ear?'
+
+And as I uttered these words, my voice, breaking of itself and in
+defiance of me, descended into a tone which sounded harsh and inimical.
+
+'Ah!' he murmured, lifting his eyes to mine, 'if you turn against me
+to-night, I shall--'
+
+'Turn against you!' I cried, shocked. 'Let me help you with your
+overcoat!'
+
+And I went near him, meaning to take his overcoat.
+
+'It's finished between Mary and me,' he said, holding me with his gaze.
+'It's finished. I've no one but you now; and I've come--I've come--'
+
+He stopped. We read one another's eyes at arm's length, and all the
+sorrow and pity and love that were in each of us rose to our eyes and
+shone there. I shivered with pleasure when I saw his arms move, and then
+he clutched and dragged me to him, and I hid my glowing face on his
+shoulder, in the dear folds of his overcoat, and I felt his lips on my
+neck. And then, since neither of us was a coward, we lifted our heads,
+and our mouths met honestly and fairly, and, so united, we shut our eyes
+for an eternal moment, and the world was not.
+
+Such was the avowal.
+
+I gave up my soul to him in that long kiss; all that was me, all that was
+most secret and precious in me, ascended and poured itself out through my
+tense lips, and was received by him. I kissed him with myself, with the
+entire passionate energy of my being--not merely with my mouth. And if I
+sighed, it was because I tried to give him more--more than I had--and
+failed. Ah! The sensation of his nearness, the warmth of his face, the
+titillation of his hair, the slow, luxurious intake of our breaths, the
+sweet cruelty of his desperate clutch on my shoulders, the glimpses of
+his skin through my eyelashes when I raised ever so little my eyelids!
+Pain and joy of life, you were mingled then!
+
+I remembered that I was a woman, and disengaged myself and withdrew from
+him. I hated to do it; but I did it. We became self-conscious. The
+brilliant and empty drawing-room scanned us unfavourably with all its
+globes and mirrors. How difficult it is to be natural in a great crisis!
+Our spirits clamoured for expression, beating vainly against a thousand
+barred doors of speech. There was so much to say, to explain, to define,
+and everything was so confused and dizzily revolving, that we knew not
+which door to open first. And then I think we both felt, but I more than
+he, that explanations and statements were futile, that even if all the
+doors were thrown open together, they would be inadequate. The
+deliciousness of silence, of wonder, of timidity, of things guessed at
+and hidden....
+
+'It makes me afraid,' he murmured at length.
+
+'What?'
+
+'To be loved like that.... Your kiss ... you don't know.'
+
+I smiled almost sadly. As if I did not know what my kiss had done! As if
+I did not know that my kiss had created between us the happiness which
+brings ruin!
+
+'You _do_ love me?' he demanded.
+
+I nodded, and sat down.
+
+'Say it, say it!' he pleaded.
+
+'More than I can ever show you,' I said proudly.
+
+'Honestly,' he said, 'I can't imagine what you have been able to see in
+me. I'm nothing--I'm nobody--'
+
+'Foolish boy!' I exclaimed. 'You are you.'
+
+The profound significance of that age-worn phrase struck me for the
+first time.
+
+He rushed to me at the word 'boy,' and, standing over me, took my hand in
+his hot hand. I let it lie, inert.
+
+'But you haven't always loved me. I have always loved _you_, from the
+moment when I drove with you, that first day, from the office to your
+hotel. But you haven't always loved me.'
+
+'No,' I admitted.
+
+'Then when did you--? Tell me.'
+
+'I was dull at first--I could not see. But when you told me that the end
+of _Fate and Friendship_ was not as good as I could make it--do you
+remember, that afternoon in the office?--and how reluctant you were to
+tell me, how afraid you were to tell me?--your throat went dry, and you
+stroked your forehead as you always do when you are nervous--There!
+you are doing it now, foolish boy!'
+
+I seized his left arm, and gently pulled it down from his face. Oh,
+exquisite moment!
+
+'It was brave of you to tell me--very brave! I loved you for telling me.
+You were quite wrong about the end of that book. You didn't see the fine
+point of it, and you never would have seen it--and I liked you, somehow,
+for not seeing it, because it was so feminine--but I altered the book to
+please you, and when I had altered it, against my conscience, I loved
+you more.'
+
+'It's incredible! incredible!' he muttered, half to himself. 'I never
+hoped till lately that you would care for me. I never dared to think of
+such a thing. I knew you oughtn't to! It passes comprehension.'
+
+'That is just what love does,' I said.
+
+'No, no,' he went on quickly; 'you don't understand; you can't understand
+my feelings when I began to suspect, about two months ago, that, after
+all, the incredible had happened. I'm nothing but your publisher. I can't
+talk. I can't write. I can't play. I can't do anything. And look at the
+men you have here! I've sometimes wondered how often you've been
+besieged--'
+
+'None of them was like you,' I said. 'Perhaps that is why I have always
+kept them off.'
+
+I raised my eyes and lips, and he stooped and kissed me. He wanted to
+take me in his arms again, but I would not yield myself.
+
+'Be reasonable,' I urged him. 'Ought we not to think of our situation?'
+
+He loosed me, stammering apologies, abasing himself.
+
+'I ought to leave you, I ought never to see you again.' He spoke roughly.
+'What am I doing to you? You who are so innocent and pure!'
+
+'I entreat you not to talk like that,' I gasped, reddening.
+
+'But I must talk like that,' he insisted. 'I must talk like that. You had
+everything that a woman can desire, and I come into your life and offer
+you--what?'
+
+'I _have_ everything a woman can desire,' I corrected him softly.
+
+'Angel!' he breathed. 'If I bring you disaster, you will forgive me,
+won't you?'
+
+'My happiness will only cease with your love,' I said.
+
+'Happiness!' he repeated. 'I have never been so happy as I am now; but
+such happiness is terrible. It seems to me impossible that such happiness
+can last.'
+
+'Faint heart!' I chided him.
+
+'It is for you I tremble,' he said. 'If--if--' He stopped. 'My darling,
+forgive me!'
+
+How I pitied him! How I enveloped him in an effluent sympathy that rushed
+warm from my heart! He accused himself of having disturbed my existence.
+Whereas, was it not I who had disturbed his? He had fought against me, I
+knew well, but fate had ordained his defeat. He had been swept away; he
+had been captured; he had been caught in a snare of the high gods. And he
+was begging forgiveness, he who alone had made my life worth living! I
+wanted to kneel before him, to worship him, to dry his tears with my
+hair. I swear that my feelings were as much those of a mother as of a
+lover. He was ten years older than me, and yet he seemed boyish, and I an
+aged woman full of experience, as he sat there opposite to me with his
+wide, melancholy eyes and restless mouth.
+
+'Wonderful, is it not,' he said, 'that we should be talking like this
+to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?'
+
+'Wonderful!' I responded. 'But yesterday we talked with our eyes, and our
+eyes did not say Mr. or Miss. Our eyes said--Ah, what they said can
+never be translated into words!'
+
+My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable
+curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun. Could it be true that
+Heaven had made that fine creature--noble and modest, nervous and full of
+courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things, fine and
+delicate--could it be true that Heaven had made him and then given him to
+me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves constituted
+perfection? Oh, wonder, wonder! Oh, miraculous bounty which I had not
+deserved! This thing had happened to me, of all women! How it showed, by
+comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my worldly
+splendour! I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled
+interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had
+almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water
+and the palm. And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade.
+Wonderful!
+
+'Why were you so late to-night?' I asked abruptly.
+
+'Late?' he replied absently. 'Is it late?'
+
+We both looked at the clock. It was yet half an hour from midnight.
+
+'Of course it isn't--not _very_,' I said. I was forgetting that.
+Everybody left so early.'
+
+'Why was that?'
+
+I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by
+reason of his failure to appear. He glanced at me with tender amaze.
+
+'But I am fortunate to-day,' I exclaimed. 'Was it not lucky they left
+when they did? Suppose you had arrived, in that state, dearest man, and
+burst into a room full of people? What would they have thought? Where
+should I have looked?'
+
+'Angel!' he cried. 'I'm so sorry. I forgot it was your evening. I must
+have forgotten. I forgot everything, except that I was bound to see you
+at once, instantly, with all speed.'
+
+Poor boy! He was like a bird fluttering in my hand. Millions of women
+must have so pictured to themselves the men who loved them, and whom
+they loved.
+
+'But still, you _were_ rather late, you know,' I smiled.
+
+'Do not ask me why,' he begged, with an expression of deep pain on his
+face. 'I have had a scene with Mary. It would humiliate me to tell
+you--to tell even you--what passed between us. But it is over. Our
+relations in the future can never, in any case, be more than formal.'
+
+A spasm of fierce jealousy shot through me--jealousy of Mary, my friend
+Mary, who knew him with such profound intimacy that they could go
+through a scene together which was 'humiliating.' I saw that my own
+intimacy with him was still crude with the crudity of newness, and that
+only years could mellow it. Mary, the good, sentimental Mary, had wasted
+the years of their marriage--had never understood the value of the
+treasure in her keeping. Why had they always been sad in their house?
+What was the origin of that resigned and even cheerful gloom which had
+pervaded their domestic life, and which I had remarked on my first visit
+to Bloomsbury Square? Were these, too, mysteries that I must not ask my
+lover to reveal? Resentment filled me. I came near to hating Mary, not
+because she had made him unhappy--oh no!--but because she had had the
+priority in his regard, and because there was nothing about him, however
+secret and recondite, that I could be absolutely sure of the sole
+knowledge of. She had been in the depths with him. I desired fervently
+that I also might descend with him, and even deeper. Oh, that I might
+have the joy and privilege of humiliation with him!
+
+'I shall ask you nothing, dearest,' I murmured.
+
+I had risen from my seat and gone to him, and was lightly touching his
+hair with my fingers. He did not move, but sat staring into the fire.
+Somehow, I adored him because he made no response to the fondling of
+my hand. His strange acceptance of the caress as a matter of course
+gave me the illusion that I was his wife, and that the years had
+mellowed our intimacy.
+
+'Carlotta!'
+
+He spoke my name slowly and distinctly, savouring it.
+
+'Yes,' I answered softly and obediently.
+
+'Carlotta! Listen! Our two lives are in our hands at this moment--this
+moment while we talk here.'
+
+His rapt eyes had not stirred from the fire.
+
+'I feel it,' I said.
+
+'What are we to do? What shall we decide to do?'
+
+He slowly turned towards me. I lowered my glance.
+
+'I don't know,' I said.
+
+'Yes, you do, Carlotta,' he insisted. 'You do know.'
+
+His voice trembled.
+
+'Mary and I are such good friends,' I said. 'That is what makes it
+so--'
+
+'No, no, no!' he objected loudly. His nervousness had suddenly increased.
+'Don't, for God's sake, begin to argue in that way! You are above
+feminine logic. Mary is your friend. Good. You respect her; she respects
+you. Good. Is that any reason why our lives should be ruined? Will that
+benefit Mary? Do I not tell you that everything has ceased between us?'
+
+'The idea of being false to Mary--'
+
+'There's no question of being false. And if there was, would you be false
+to love rather than to friendship? Between you and me there is love;
+between Mary and me there is not love. It isn't her fault, nor mine,
+least of all yours. It is the fault of the secret essence of existence.
+Have you not yourself written that the only sacred thing is instinct? Are
+we, or are we not, to be true to ourselves?'
+
+'You see,' I said, 'your wife is so sentimental. She would be incapable
+of looking at the affair as--as we do; as I should in her place.'
+
+I knew that my protests were insincere, and that all my heart and brain
+were with him, but I could not admit this frankly. Ah! And I knew also
+that the sole avenue to peace and serenity, not to happiness, was the
+path of renunciation and of obedience to the conventions of society, and
+that this was precisely the path which we should never take. And on the
+horizon of our joy I saw a dark cloud. It had always been there, but I
+had refused to see it. I looked at it now steadily.
+
+'Of course,' he groaned, 'if we are to be governed by Mary's
+sentimentality--'
+
+'Dear love,' I whispered, 'what do you want me to do?'
+
+'The only possible, honest, just thing. I want you to go away with me, so
+that Mary can get a divorce.'
+
+He spoke sternly, as it were relentlessly.
+
+'Does she guess--about me?' I asked, biting my lip, and looking
+away from him.
+
+'Not yet. Hasn't the slightest notion, I'm sure. But I'll tell her,
+straight and fair.'
+
+'Dearest friend,' I said, after a silence. 'Perhaps I know more of the
+world than you think. Perhaps I'm a girl only in years and situation.
+Forgive me if I speak plainly. Mary may prove unfaithfulness, but she
+cannot get a decree unless she can prove other things as well.'
+
+He stroked his forehead. As for me, I shuddered with agitation. He walked
+across the room and back.
+
+'Angel!' he said, putting his white face close to mine like an actor. 'I
+will prove whether your love for me is great enough. I have struck her. I
+struck her to-night in the presence of a servant. And I did it purposely,
+in cold blood, so that she might be able to prove cruelty. Ah! Have I
+not thought it all out? Have I not?'
+
+A sob, painfully escaping, shook my whole frame.
+
+'And this was before you had--had spoken to me!' I said bitterly.
+
+Not myself, but some strange and frigid force within me uttered
+those words.
+
+'That is what love will do. That is the sort of thing love drives one
+to,' he cried despairingly. 'Oh! I was not sure of you--I was not sure of
+you. I struck her, on the off chance.'
+
+And he sank on the sofa and wept passionately, unashamed, like a child.
+
+I could not bear it. My heart would have broken if I had watched, without
+assuaging, my boy's grief an instant longer than I did. I sprang to him.
+I took him to my breast. I kissed his eyes until the tears ceased to
+flow. Whatever it was or might be, I must share his dishonour.
+
+'My poor girl!' he said at length. 'If you had refused me, if you had
+even judged me, I intended to warn you plainly that it meant my death;
+and if that failed, I should have gone to the office and shot myself.'
+
+'Do not say such things,' I entreated him.
+
+'But it is true. The revolver is in my pocket. Ah! I have made you cry!
+You're frightened! But I'm not a brute; I'm only a little beside myself.
+Pardon me, angel!'
+
+He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour. He did not understand
+me. He did not suspect the risk he had run. If I had hesitated to
+surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should
+never have surrendered. I knew myself well enough to know that. I had a
+conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have
+parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man! But I forgave him.
+Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.
+
+'Carlotta,' he said, 'we shall leave everything. You grasp
+it?--everything.'
+
+'Yes,' I replied. 'Of all the things we have now, we shall have nothing
+but ourselves.'
+
+'If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see
+you again.'
+
+Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He
+meant what he said.
+
+'It is no sacrifice for me,' I murmured. 'The sacrifice would be not to
+give up all in exchange for you.'
+
+'We shall be exiles,' he went on, 'until the divorce business is over.
+And then perhaps we shall creep back--shall we?--and try to find out how
+many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.'
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'We shall come back. They all do.'
+
+'What do you mean?' he demanded.
+
+'Thousands have done what we are going to do,' I said. 'And all of them
+have thought that their own case was different from the other cases.'
+
+'Ah!'
+
+'And a few have been happy. A few have not regretted the price. A few
+have retained the illusion.'
+
+'Illusion? Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?'
+
+I could see that my heart's treasure was ruffled. He clasped my hand
+tenaciously.
+
+'I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen,' I answered
+quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous passion. 'In me there
+are two beings--myself and the observer of myself. It is the novelist's
+disease, this duplication of personality. When I said illusion, I meant
+the supreme illusion of love. Is it not an illusion? I have seen it in
+others, and in exactly the same way I see it in myself and I see it in
+you. Will it last?--who knows? None can tell.'
+
+'Angel!' he expostulated.
+
+'No one can foresee the end of love,' I said, with an exquisite gentle
+sorrow. 'But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if
+its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of
+disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night alone would
+not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life.'
+
+He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and
+his disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely
+round my neck.
+
+'Call it illusion if you like,' he said. 'Words are nothing. I only know
+that for me it will be eternal. I only know that my one desire is to be
+with you always, never to leave you, not to miss a moment of you; to have
+you for mine, openly, securely. Carlotta, where shall we go?'
+
+'We must travel, mustn't we?'
+
+'Travel?' he repeated, with an air of discontent. 'Yes. But where to?'
+
+'Travel,' I said. 'See things. See the world.'
+
+'I had thought we might find some quiet little place,' he said wistfully,
+and as if apologetically, where we could be alone, undisturbed, some spot
+where we could have ourselves wholly to ourselves, and go walks into
+mountains and return for dinner; and then the long, calm evenings!
+Dearest, our honeymoon!'
+
+Our honeymoon! I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human
+nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I
+not talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and
+killed by a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence!
+Inexperienced as I was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the
+experience of my impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very
+thought of calculation would have been abhorrent. But I saw, I felt, I
+lived through in a few seconds the interminable and monotonous length of
+those calm days, and especially those calm evenings succeeding each other
+with a formidable sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And
+I knew that our love--miraculously sweet as it was--probably was not
+greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive
+the cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the
+survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman
+must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she
+might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme,
+devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely
+and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion, for her, is a
+campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart,
+and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the
+beautiful plant must not be exposed to hazard. Suppose it sickened, such
+a love as ours--what then? The misery of hell, the torture of the damned!
+Only its rich and ample continuance could justify us.
+
+'My dear,' I said submissively, 'I shall leave everything to you. The
+idea of travelling occurred to me; that was all. I have never travelled
+further than Cannes. Still, we have all our lives before us.'
+
+'We will travel,' he said unselfishly. 'We'll go round the world--slowly.
+I'll get the tickets at Cook's to-morrow.'
+
+'But, dearest, if you would rather--'
+
+'No, no! In any case we shall always have our evenings.'
+
+'Of course we shall. Dearest, how good you are!'
+
+'I wish I was,' he murmured.
+
+I was glad, then, that I had never allowed my portrait to appear in a
+periodical. We could not prevent the appearance in American newspapers of
+heralding paragraphs, but the likelihood of our being recognised was
+sensibly lessened.
+
+'Can you start soon?' he asked. 'Can you be ready?'
+
+'Any time. The sooner the better, now that it is decided.'
+
+'You do not regret? We have decided so quickly. Ah! you are the merest
+girl, and I have taken advantage--'
+
+I put my hand over his mouth. He seized it, and kept it there and kissed
+it, and his ardent breath ran through my fingers.
+
+'What about your business?' I said.
+
+'I shall confide it to old Tate--tell him some story--he knows quite
+as much about it as I do. To-morrow I will see to all that. The day
+after, shall we start? No; to-morrow night. To-morrow night, eh? I'll
+run in to-morrow and tell you what I've arranged. I must see you
+to-morrow, early.'
+
+'No,' I said. 'Do not come before lunch.'
+
+'Not before lunch! Why?'
+
+He was surprised. But I had been my own mistress for five years, with my
+own habits, rules, privacies. I had never seen anyone before lunch. And
+to-morrow, of all days, I should have so much to do and to arrange. Was
+this man to come like an invader and disturb my morning? So felt the
+celibate in me, instinctively, thoughtlessly. That deep-seated objection
+to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common,
+I think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a
+rich dress, and donning the _peignoir_ of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a
+way which is an eternal enigma to men.... Then I saw, in a sudden flash,
+that I had renounced my individual existence, that I had forfeited my
+habits and rules, and privacies, that I was a man's woman. And the
+passionate lover in me gloried in this.
+
+'Come as soon as you like, dearest friend,' I said.
+
+'Nobody except Mary will know anything till we are actually gone,' he
+remarked. 'And I shall not tell her till the last thing. Afterwards,
+won't they chatter! God! Let 'em.'
+
+'They are already chattering,' I said. And I told him about Mrs. Sardis.
+'When she met you on the landing,' I added, 'she drew her own
+conclusions, my poor, poor boy!'
+
+He was furious. I could see he wanted to take me in his arms and protect
+me masculinely from the rising storm.
+
+'All that is nothing,' I soothed him. 'Nothing. Against it, we have
+our self-respect. We can scorn all that.' And I gave a short,
+contemptuous laugh.
+
+'Darling!' he murmured. 'You are more than a woman.'
+
+'I hope not.' And I laughed again, but unnaturally.
+
+He had risen; I leaned back in a large cushioned chair; we looked at
+each other in silence--a silence that throbbed with the heavy pulse of an
+unutterable and complex emotion--pleasure, pain, apprehension, even
+terror. What had I done? Why had I, with a word--nay, without a word,
+with merely a gesture and a glance--thrown my whole life into the
+crucible of passion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act,
+like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as
+an infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may
+shatter? Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when I gazed into
+those eyes?
+
+'I suppose I must go,' he said disconsolately.
+
+I nodded, and the next instant the clock struck.
+
+'Yes,' he urged himself, 'I must go.'
+
+He bent down, put his hands on the arms of the chair, and kissed me
+violently, twice. The fire that consumes the world ran scorchingly
+through me. Every muscle was suddenly strained into tension, and then
+fell slack. My face flushed; I let my head slip sideways, so that my left
+cheek was against the back of the chair. Through my drooping eyelashes I
+could see the snake-like glitter of his eyes as he stood over me. I
+shuddered and sighed. I was like someone fighting in vain against the
+sweet seduction of an overwhelming and fatal drug. I wanted to entreat
+him to go away, to rid me of the exquisite and sinister enchantment. But
+I could not speak. I shut my eyes. This was love.
+
+The next moment I heard the soft sound of his feet on the carpet. I
+opened my eyes. He had stepped back. When our glances met he averted his
+face, and went briskly for his overcoat, which lay on the floor by the
+piano. I rose freed, re-established in my self-control. I arranged his
+collar, straightened his necktie with a few touches, picked up his hat,
+pushed back the crown, which flew up with a noise like a small explosion,
+and gave it into his hands.
+
+'Thank you,' he said. 'To-morrow morning, eh? I shall get to know
+everything necessary before I come. And then we will fix things up.'
+
+'Yes,' I said.
+
+'I can let myself out,' he said.
+
+I made a vague gesture, intended to signify that I could not think of
+permitting him to let himself out. We left the drawing-room, and passed,
+with precautions of silence, to the front-door, which I gently opened.
+
+'Good-night, then,' he whispered formally, almost coldly.
+
+I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.
+
+We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.
+
+'Too late for the lift,' I murmured out there with him in the vast,
+glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above
+us and below us into the mysterious unseen.
+
+He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted
+steps, firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the
+baluster. When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below
+me, he stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he
+resolutely dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I
+had glimpses of parts of his figure as he passed story after story. Then
+I heard his tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the
+distant clatter of double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.
+
+This was love, at last--the reality of love! He would have killed himself
+had he failed to win me--killed himself! With the novelist's habit, I ran
+off into a series of imagined scenes--the dead body, with the hole in the
+temples and the awkward attitude of death; the discovery, the rush for
+the police, the search for a motive, the inquest, the rapid-speaking
+coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself, cold and
+impassive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said.... But he
+lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his
+spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was
+inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my
+mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous,
+bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and
+injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense
+fact that he was mine.
+
+'How calm I am!' I thought.
+
+It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized
+the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give
+the brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind
+factitiously active. And I began at once to anticipate Frank's coming,
+and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had determined
+that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and it
+occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which had, in
+fact, wakened me. Save on special occasions, I was never wakened, and
+Emmeline and my maid had injunctions not to come to me until I rang. My
+thoughts ran instantly to Frank. He had arrived thus early, merely
+because he could not keep away.
+
+'How extremely indiscreet of him!' I thought. 'What detestable
+prevarications with Emmeline this will lead to! I cannot possibly be
+ready in time if he is to be in and out all day.'
+
+Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing him quickly, and the idea of his
+splendid impatience, drenched me with joy.
+
+'What is it?' I called out.
+
+Emmeline entered in that terrible mauve dressing-gown which I had been
+powerless to persuade her to discard.
+
+'So sorry to disturb you,' said Emmeline, feeling her loose golden hair
+with one hand, 'but Mrs. Ispenlove has called, and wants to see you at
+once. I'm afraid something has happened.'
+
+'_Mrs_. Ispenlove?'
+
+My voice shook.
+
+'Yes. Yvonne came to my room and told me that Mrs. Ispenlove was here,
+and was either mad or very unwell, and would I go to her? So I got up at
+once. What shall I do? Perhaps it's something very serious. Not
+half-past eight, and calling like this!'
+
+'Let her come in here immediately,' I said, turning my head on the
+pillow, so that Emmeline should not see the blush which had spread over
+my face and my neck.
+
+It was inevitable that a terrible and desolating scene must pass between
+Mary Ispenlove and myself. I could not foresee how I should emerge from
+it, but I desperately resolved that I would suffer the worst without a
+moment's delay, and that no conceivable appeal should induce me to
+abandon Frank. I was, as I waited for Mrs. Ispenlove to appear, nothing
+but an embodied and fierce instinct to guard what I had won. No
+consideration of mercy could have touched me.
+
+She entered with a strange, hysterical cry:
+
+'Carlotta!'
+
+I had asked her long ago to use my Christian name--long before I ever
+imagined what would come to pass between her husband and me; but I
+always called her Mrs. Ispenlove. The difference in our ages justified
+me. And that morning the difference seemed to be increased. I realized,
+with a cruel justice of perception quite new in my estimate of her,
+that she was old--an old woman. She had never been beautiful, but she
+was tall and graceful, and her face had been attractive by the
+sweetness of the mouth and the gray beneficence of the eyes; and now
+that sweetness and that beneficence appeared suddenly to have been
+swallowed up in the fatal despair of a woman who discovers that she has
+lived too long. Gray hair, wrinkles, crow's-feet, tired eyes, drawn
+mouth, and the terrible tell-tale hollow under the chin--these were
+what I saw in Mary Ispenlove. She had learnt that the only thing worth
+having in life is youth. I possessed everything that she lacked. Surely
+the struggle was unequal. Fate might have chosen a less piteous victim.
+I felt profoundly sorry for Mary Ispenlove, and this sorrow was
+stronger in me even than the uneasiness, the false shame (for it was
+not a real shame) which I experienced in her presence. I put out my
+hands towards her, as it were, involuntarily. She sprang to me, took
+them, and kissed me as I lay in bed.
+
+'How beautiful you look--like that!' she exclaimed wildly, and with a
+hopeless and acute envy in her tone.
+
+'But why--' I began to protest, astounded.
+
+'What will you think of me, disturbing you like this? What will you
+think?' she moaned. And then her voice rose: 'I could not help it; I
+couldn't, really. Oh, Carlotta! you are my friend, aren't you?'
+
+One thing grew swiftly clear to me: that she was as yet perfectly
+unaware of the relations between Frank and myself. My brain searched
+hurriedly for an explanation of the visit. I was conscious of an
+extraordinary relief.
+
+'You are my friend, aren't you?' she repeated insistently.
+
+Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her
+friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in
+the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an
+understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart
+bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness
+that I could not bring myself to reply directly, 'Yes, I am your friend.'
+
+'We have known each other a long time,' I ventured.
+
+'There was no one else I could come to,' she said.
+
+Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pass my
+dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.
+
+'What are you going to do?' she demanded fearfully.
+
+'I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and
+then we will talk.
+
+Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You'll be more
+yourself after a cup of tea.'
+
+How young I was then! I remember my naïve satisfaction in this exhibition
+of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be--hard in spite of
+the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for her.
+And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I
+regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will
+read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she
+did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one
+is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one,
+defenceless as a rabbit.
+
+'You are very kind to me,' she said, putting her cup on the mantelpiece
+with a nervous rattle; 'and I need it.'
+
+'Tell me,' I murmured. 'Tell me--what I can do.'
+
+I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace. A distance between us
+seemed necessary.
+
+'You can't do anything, my dear,' she said. 'Only I was obliged to talk
+to someone, after all the night. It's about Frank.'
+
+'Mr. Ispenlove!' I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not
+very well.
+
+'Yes. He has left me.'
+
+'But why? What is the matter?'
+
+Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates
+me. But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation. Still, could I
+have behaved differently?
+
+'You won't understand unless I begin a long time ago,' said Mary
+Ispenlove. 'Carlotta, my married life has been awful--awful--a tragedy.
+It has been a tragedy both for him and for me. But no one has suspected
+it; we have hidden it.'
+
+I nodded. I, however, had suspected it.
+
+'It's just twenty years--yes, twenty--since I fell in love,' she
+proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.
+
+'With--Frank,' I assumed. I lay back in bed.
+
+'No,' she said. 'With another man. That was in Brixton, when I was a
+girl living with my father; my mother was dead. He was a barrister--I
+mean the man I was in love with. He had only just been called to the Bar.
+I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him. Certainly he
+did; he could not help seeing it. I could not conceal it. Of course I can
+understand now that it flattered him. Naturally it did. Any man is
+flattered when a woman falls in love with him. And my father was rich,
+and so on, and so on. We saw each other a lot. I hoped, and I kept on
+hoping. Some people even said it was a match, and that I was throwing
+myself away. Fancy--throwing myself away--me!--who have never been good
+for anything! My father did not care much for the man; said he was
+selfish and grasping. Possibly he was; but I was in love with him all the
+same. Then I met Frank, and Frank fell in love with me. You know how
+obstinate Frank is when he has once set his mind on a thing. Frank
+determined to have me; and my father was on his side. I would not listen.
+I didn't give him so much as a chance to propose to me. And this state of
+things lasted for quite a long time. It wasn't my fault; it wasn't
+anybody's fault.'
+
+'Just so,' I agreed, raising my head on one elbow, and listening
+intently. It was the first sincere word I had spoken, and I was glad
+to utter it.
+
+'The man I had fallen in love with came nearer. He was decidedly tempted.
+I began to feel sure of him. All I wanted was to marry him, whether he
+loved me a great deal or only a little tiny bit. I was in that state.
+Then he drew away. He scarcely ever came to the house, and I seemed never
+to be able to meet him. And then one day my father showed me something
+in the _Morning Post_. It was a paragraph saying that the man I was in
+love with was going to marry a woman of title, a widow and the daughter
+of a peer. I soon found out she was nearly twice his age. He had done it
+to get on. He was getting on very well by himself, but I suppose that
+wasn't fast enough for him. Carlotta, it nearly killed me. And I felt so
+sorry for him. You can't guess how sorry I felt for him. I felt that he
+didn't know what he had missed. Oh, how happy I should have made him! I
+should have lived for him. I should have done everything for him. I
+should have ... You don't mind me telling you all this?'
+
+I made an imploring gesture.
+
+'What a shame!' I burst out.
+
+'Ah, my dear!' she said, 'he didn't love me. One can't blame him.'
+
+'And then?' I questioned, with an eagerness that I tried to overcome.
+
+'Frank was so persevering. And--and--I _did_ admire his character. A
+woman couldn't help admiring his character, could she? And, besides, I
+honestly thought I had got over the other affair, and that I was in love
+with him. I refused him once, and then I married him. He was as mad for
+me as I had been for the other one. Yes, I married him, and we both
+imagined we were going to be happy.'
+
+'And why haven't you been?' I asked.
+
+'This is my shame,' she said. 'I could not forget the other one. We soon
+found that out.'
+
+'Did you _talk_ about it, you--and Frank?' I put in, amazed.
+
+'Oh _no_!' she said. 'It was never mentioned--never once during fifteen
+years. But he knew; and I knew that he knew. The other one was always
+between us--always, always, always! The other one was always in my heart.
+We did our best, both of us; but it was useless. The passion of my life
+was--it was invincible. I _tried_ to love Frank. I could only like him.
+Fancy his position! And we were helpless. Because, you know, Frank and I
+are not the sort of people that go and make a scandal--at least, that was
+what I thought,' she sighed. 'I know different now. Well, he died the day
+before yesterday.'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'Crettell. He had just been made a judge. He was the youngest judge on
+the bench--only forty-six.'
+
+'Was _that_ the man?' I exclaimed; for Crettell's character was well
+known in London.
+
+'That was the man. Frank came in yesterday afternoon, and after he had
+glanced at the paper, he said: "By the way, Crettell's dead." I did not
+grasp it at first. He repeated: "Crettell--he's dead." I burst into
+tears. I couldn't help it. And, besides, I forgot. Frank asked me very
+roughly what I was crying for. You know, Frank has much changed these
+last few months. He is not as nice as he used to be. Excuse me talking
+like this, my dear. Something must be worrying him. Well, I said as well
+as I could while I was crying that the news was a shock to me. I tried to
+stop crying, but I couldn't. I sobbed. Frank threw down the paper and
+stamped on it, and he swore. He said: "I know you've always been in love
+with the brute, but you needn't make such a damn fuss about it." Oh, my
+dear, how can I tell you these things? That angered me. This was the
+first time in our married life that Crettell had been even referred to,
+and it seemed to me that Frank put all the hatred of fifteen years into
+that single sentence. Why was I angry? I didn't know. We had a scene.
+Frank lost his temper, for the first time that I remember, and then he
+recovered it. He said quietly he couldn't stand living with me any more;
+and that he had long since wanted to leave me. He said he would never see
+me again. And then one of the servants came in, and--'
+
+'What?'
+
+'Nothing. I sent her out. And--and--Fran didn't come home last night.'
+
+There was a silence. I could find nothing to say, and Mary had hidden her
+face. I utterly forgot myself and my own state in this extraordinary
+hazard of matrimony. I could only think of Mary's grief--a grief which,
+nevertheless, I did not too well comprehend.
+
+'Then you love him now?' I ventured at length.
+
+She made no reply.
+
+'You love him--is that so?' I pursued. 'Tell me honestly.'
+
+I spoke as gently as it was in me to speak.
+
+'Honestly!' she cried, looking up. 'Honestly! No! If I loved him, could I
+have been so upset about Crettell? But we have been together so long. We
+are husband and wife, Carlotta. We are so used to each other. And
+generally he is so good. We've got on very well, considering. And now
+he's left me. Think of the scandal! It will be terrible! terrible! A
+separation at my age! Carlotta, it's unthinkable! He's mad--that's the
+only explanation. Haven't I tried to be a good wife to him? He's never
+found fault with me--never! And I'm sure, as regards him, I've had
+nothing to complain of.'
+
+'He will come back,' I said. 'He'll think things over and see reason.'
+
+And it was just as though I heard some other person saying these words.
+
+'But he didn't come _home_ last night,' Mary insisted. 'What the servants
+are thinking I shouldn't like to guess.'
+
+'What does it matter what the servants think?' I said brusquely.
+
+'But it _does_ matter. He didn't come _home_. He must have slept at a
+hotel. Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for him! Oh,
+Carlotta, you're too young to understand what I feel! You're very clever,
+and you're very sympathetic; but you can't see things as I see them. Wait
+till you've been married fifteen years. The scandal! The shame! And me
+only too anxious to be a good wife, and to keep our home as it should be,
+and to help him as much as I can with my stupid brains in his business!'
+
+'I can understand perfectly,' I asserted. 'I can understand perfectly.'
+
+And I could. The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her
+ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her,
+was only too plainly apparent. She was--and naturally, sincerely,
+instinctively--the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the
+conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her
+quiet resentment. But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief
+and her resentment. Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her
+resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified.
+I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must
+always be inferior to emotion. I am intensely proud of my ability to see,
+then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary
+Ispenlove's attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural, exactly as
+free from artificiality, as my own. Can you go outside Nature? Is not the
+polity of Londoners in London as much a part of Nature as the polity of
+bees in a hive?
+
+'Not a word for fifteen years, and then an explosion like that!' she
+murmured, incessantly recurring to the core of her grievance. 'I did
+wrong to marry him, I know. But I _did_ marry him--I _did_ marry him! We
+are husband and wife. And he goes off and sleeps at a hotel! Carlotta, I
+wish I had never been born! What will people say? I shall never be able
+to look anyone in the face again.'
+
+'He will come back,' I said again.
+
+'Do you think so?'
+
+This time she caught at the straw.
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'And you will settle down gradually; and everything will
+be forgotten.'
+
+I said that because it was the one thing I could say. I repeat that I had
+ceased to think of myself. I had become a spectator.
+
+'It can never be the same between us again,' Mary breathed sadly.
+
+At that moment Emmeline Palmer plunged, rather than came, into my
+bedroom.
+
+'Oh, Miss Peel--' she began, and then stopped, seeing Mrs. Ispenlove by
+the fireplace, though she knew that Mrs. Ispenlove was with me.
+
+'Anything wrong?' I asked, affecting a complete calm.
+
+It was evident that the good creature had lost her head, as she sometimes
+did, when I gave her too much to copy, or when the unusual occurred in no
+matter what form. The excellent Emmeline was one of my mistakes.
+
+'Mr. Ispenlove is here,' she whispered.
+
+None of us spoke for a few seconds. Mary Ispenlove stared at me, but
+whether in terror or astonishment, I could not guess. This was one of the
+most dramatic moments of my life.
+
+'Tell Mr. Ispenlove that I can see nobody,' I said, glancing at the wall.
+
+She turned to go.
+
+'And, Emmeline,' I stopped her. 'Do not tell him anything else.'
+
+Surely the fact that Frank had called to see me before nine o'clock in
+the morning, surely my uneasy demeanour, must at length arouse suspicion
+even in the simple, trusting mind of his wife!
+
+'How does he know that I am here?' Mary asked, lowering her voice, when
+Emmeline had shut the door; 'I said nothing to the servants.'
+
+I was saved. Her own swift explanation of his coming was, of course, the
+most natural in the world. I seized on it.
+
+'Never mind how,' I answered. 'Perhaps he was watching outside your
+house, and followed you. The important thing is that he has come. It
+proves,' I went on, inventing rapidly, 'that he has changed his mind and
+recognises his mistake. Had you not better go back home as quickly as
+you can? It would have been rather awkward for you to see him here,
+wouldn't it?'
+
+'Yes, yes,' she said, her eyes softening and gleaming with joy. 'I will
+go. Oh, Carlotta! how can I thank you? You are my best friend.'
+
+'I have done nothing,' I protested. But I had.
+
+'You are a dear!' she exclaimed, coming impulsively to the bed.
+
+I sat up. She kissed me fervently. I rang the bell.
+
+'Has Mr. Ispenlove gone?' I asked Emmeline.
+
+'Yes,' said Emmeline.
+
+In another minute his wife, too, had departed, timorously optimistic,
+already denying in her heart that it could never be the same between them
+again. She assuredly would not find Frank at home. But that was nothing.
+I had escaped! I had escaped!
+
+'Will you mind getting dressed at once?' I said to Emmeline. 'I should
+like you to go out with a letter and a manuscript as soon as possible.'
+
+I got a notebook and began to write to Frank. I told him all that had
+happened, in full detail, writing hurriedly, in gusts, and abandoning
+that regard for literary form which the professional author is apt to
+preserve even in his least formal correspondence.
+
+'After this,' I said, 'we must give up what we decided last night. I have
+no good reason to offer you. The situation itself has not been changed by
+what I have learnt from your wife. I have not even discovered that she
+loves you, though in spite of what she says, which I have faithfully told
+you, I fancy she does--at any rate, I think she is beginning to. My ideas
+about the rights of love are not changed. My feelings towards you are not
+changed. Nothing is changed. But she and I have been through that
+interview, and so, after all, everything is changed; we must give it all
+up. You will say I am illogical. I am--perhaps. It was a mere chance
+that your wife came to me. I don't know why she did. If she had not come,
+I should have given myself to you. Supposing she had written--I should
+still have given myself to you. But I have been in her presence. I have
+been with her. And then the thought that you struck her, for my sake! She
+said nothing about that. That was the one thing she concealed. I could
+have cried when she passed it over. After all, I don't know whether it is
+sympathy for your wife that makes me change, or my self-respect--say my
+self-pride; I'm a proud woman. I lied to her through all that interview.
+
+'Oh, if I had only had the courage to begin by telling her outright and
+bluntly that you and I had settled that I should take her place! That
+would have stopped her. But I hadn't. And, besides, how could I foresee
+what she would say to me and how she would affect me? No; I lied to her
+at every point. My whole attitude was a lie. Supposing you and I had
+gone off together before I had seen her, and then I had met her
+afterwards, I could have looked her in the face--sorrowfully, with a
+heart bleeding--but I could have looked her in the face. But after this
+interview--no; it would be impossible for me to face her with you at
+my side! Don't I put things crudely, horribly! I know everything that
+you will say. You could not bring a single argument that I have not
+thought of.
+
+'However, arguments are nothing. It is how I feel. Fate is against us.
+Possibly I have ruined your life and mine without having done anything to
+improve hers; and possibly I have saved us all three from terrible
+misery. Possibly fate is with us. No one can say. I don't know what will
+happen in the immediate future; I won't think about it. If you do as I
+wish, if you have any desire to show me that I have any influence over
+you, you will go back to live with your wife. Where did you sleep last
+night? Or did you walk the streets? You must not answer this letter at
+present. Write to me later. Do not try to see me. I won't see you. We
+_mustn't_ meet. I am going away at once. I don't think I could stand
+another scene with your wife, and she would be sure to come again to me.
+
+'Try to resume your old existence. You can do it if you try. Remember
+that your wife is no more to blame than you are, or than I am. Remember
+that you loved her once. And remember that I act as I am acting because
+there is no other way for me. _C'est plus fort que moi,_ I am going to
+Torquay. I let you know this--I hate concealment; and anyway you would
+find out. But I shall trust you not to follow me. I shall trust you. You
+are saying that this is a very different woman from last night. It is. I
+haven't yet realized what my feelings are. I expect I shall realize them
+in a few days. I send with this a manuscript. It is nothing. I send it
+merely to put Emmeline off the scent, so that she shall think that it is
+purely business. Now I shall _trust_ you.--C. P.'
+
+I commenced the letter without even a 'Dear Frank,' and I ended it
+without an affectionate word.
+
+'I should like you to take these down to Mr. Ispenlove's office,' I said
+to Emmeline. 'Ask for him and give them to him yourself. There's no
+answer. He's pretty sure to be in. But if he isn't, bring them back. I'm
+going to Torquay by that eleven-thirty express--isn't it?'
+
+'Eleven-thirty-five,' Emmeline corrected me coldly.
+
+When she returned, she said she had seen Mr. Ispenlove and given him the
+letter and the parcel.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+I had acquaintances in Torquay, but I soon discovered that the place was
+impossible for me. Torquay is the chosen home of the proprieties, the
+respectabilities, and all the conventions. Nothing could dislodge them
+from its beautiful hills; the very sea, as it beats primly, or with a
+violence that never forgets to be discreet, on the indented shore,
+acknowledges their sway. Aphrodite never visits there; the human race is
+not continued there. People who have always lived within the conventions
+go there to die within the conventions. The young do not flourish there;
+they escape from the soft enervation. Since everybody is rich, there are
+no poor. There are only the rich, and the servitors, who get rich. These
+two classes never mix--even in the most modest villas they live on
+opposite sides of the house. The life of the town is a vast conspiracy on
+the part of the servitors to guard against any danger of the rich taking
+all their riches to heaven. You can, if you are keen enough, detect
+portions of this conspiracy in every shop. On the hills each abode stands
+in its own undulating grounds, is approached by a winding drive of at
+least ten yards, is wrapped about by the silence of elms, is flanked by
+greenhouses, and exudes an immaculate propriety from all its windows. In
+the morning the rich descend, the servitors ascend; the bosky and
+perfectly-kept streets on the hills are trodden with apologetic celerity
+by the emissaries of the servitors. The one interminable thoroughfare of
+the town is graciously invaded by the rich, who, if they have not walked
+down for the sake of exercise, step cautiously from their carriages,
+enunciate a string of orders ending with the name of a house, and
+cautiously regain their carriages. Each house has a name, and the pride
+of the true servitor is his ability to deduce instantly from the name of
+the house the name of its owner and the name of its street. In the
+afternoon a vast and complicated game of visiting cards is played. One
+does not begin to be serious till the evening; one eats then, solemnly
+and fully, to the faint accompaniment of appropriate conversation. And
+there is no relief, no surcease from utmost conventionality. It goes on
+night and day; it hushes one to sleep, and wakes one up. On all but the
+strongest minds it casts a narcotizing spell, so that thought is
+arrested, and originality, vivacity, individuality become a crime--a
+shame that must be hidden. Into this strange organism I took my wounded
+heart, imagining that an atmosphere of coma might help to heal it. But
+no! Within a week my state had become such that I could have cried out in
+mid Union Street at noon: 'Look at me with your dead eyes, you dead who
+have omitted to get buried, I am among you, and I am an adulteress in
+spirit! And my body has sinned the sin! And I am alive as only grief can
+be alive. I suffer the torture of vultures, but I would not exchange my
+lot with yours!'
+
+And one morning, after a fortnight, I thought of Monte Carlo. And the
+vision of that place, which I had never seen, too voluptuously lovely to
+be really beautiful, where there are no commandments, where
+unconventionality and conventionality fight it out on even terms, where
+the adulteress swarms, and the sin is for ever sinned, and wounded hearts
+go about gaily, where it is impossible to distinguish between virtue and
+vice, and where Toleration in fine clothes is the supreme social
+goddess--the vision of Monte Carlo, as a place of refuge from the
+exacerbating and moribund and yet eternal demureness of Torquay, appealed
+to me so persuasively that I was on my way to the Riviera in two hours.
+In that crisis of my life my moods were excessively capricious. Let me
+say that I had not reached Exeter before I began to think kindly of
+Torquay. What was Torquay but an almost sublime example of what the
+human soul can accomplish in its unending quest of an ideal?
+
+I left England on a calm, slate-coloured sea--sea that more than any
+other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes
+wonderful the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me
+the mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters
+of the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical
+curiosity concerning each other, and then, mutually forgotten, took wing,
+and spread out into the unknown. I think that as I stood near the hot
+funnel, breasting the wind, and vacantly staring at the smooth expanse
+that continually slipped from under us, I understood myself better than I
+had done before. My soul was at peace--the peace of ruin after a
+conflagration, but peace. Sometimes a little flame would dart out--flame
+of regret, revolt, desire--and I would ruthlessly extinguish it. I felt
+that I had nothing to live for, that no energy remained to me, no
+interest, no hope. I saw the forty years of probable existence in front
+of me flat and sterile as the sea itself. I was coldly glad that I had
+finished my novel, well knowing that it would be my last. And the immense
+disaster had been caused by a chance! Why had I been born with a vein of
+overweening honesty in me? Why should I have sacrificed everything to the
+pride of my conscience, seeing that consciences were the product of
+education merely? Useless to try to answer the unanswerable! What is, is.
+And circumstances are always at the mercy of character. I might have been
+wrong, I might have been right; no ethical argument could have bent my
+instinct. I did not sympathize with myself--I was too proud and
+stern--but I sympathized with Frank. I wished ardently that he might be
+consoled--that his agony might not be too terrible. I wondered where he
+was, what he was doing. I had received no letter from him, but then I had
+instructed that letters should not be forwarded to me. My compassion went
+out after him, followed him into the dark, found him (as I hoped), and
+surrounded him like an alleviating influence. I thought pityingly of the
+ravage that had been occasioned by our love. His home was wrecked. Our
+lives were equally wrecked. Our friends were grieved; they would think
+sadly of my closed flat. Even the serio-comic figure of Emmeline touched
+me; I had paid her three months' wages and dismissed her. Where would she
+go with her mauve _peignoir_? She was over thirty, and would not easily
+fall into another such situation. Imagine Emmeline struck down by a
+splinter from our passionate explosion! Only Yvonne was content at the
+prospect of revisiting France.
+
+'_Ah! Qu'on est bien ici, madame_!' she said, when we had fixed ourselves
+in the long and glittering _train de grand luxe_ that awaited us at
+Calais. Once I had enjoyed luxury, but now the futility of all this
+luxurious cushioned arrogance, which at its best only corresponded with a
+railway director's dreams of paradise, seemed to me pathetic. Could it
+detain youth, which is for ever flying? Could it keep out sorrow? Could
+it breed hope? As the passengers, so correct in their travelling
+costumes, passed to and fro in the corridors with the subdued murmurs
+always adopted by English people when they wish to prove that they are
+not excited, I thought: 'Does it matter how you and I go southwards? The
+pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs, what can it help
+us that this should be sated? We cannot leave our souls behind.' The
+history of many of these men and women was written on their faces. I
+wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the mirrors which
+were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had always seen.
+Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response. Was I not part
+of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life is good? On
+every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh flowers that had
+been torn from the South, and would return there dead, having ministered
+to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is good. I hated
+that. I could almost have wished that I was travelling southwards in a
+slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate does not wear a
+mask. Great grief is democratic, levelling--not downwards but upwards. It
+strips away the inessential, and makes brothers. It is impatient with all
+the unavailing inventions which obscure the brotherhood of mankind.
+
+I descended from the train restlessly--there were ten minutes to elapse
+before the departure--and walked along the platform, glimpsing the faces
+in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and napery in the
+two restaurant-cars: wistful all alike, I thought--flowers and faces! How
+fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was! Opposite the door of the first car
+stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery of the
+International Sleeping Car Company. He wore white gloves, like all the
+servants on the train: it was to foster the illusion; it was part of what
+we paid for.
+
+'When is luncheon served?' I asked him idly.
+
+He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs. He
+contemplated me for an instant. He seemed to add me up, antipathetically,
+as a product of Western civilization.
+
+'Soon as the train starts, madam,' he replied suavely, in good American,
+and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the platform.
+
+'Thank you!' I said.
+
+I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the
+African bush. I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression
+that had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it
+was. 'And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like
+me,' I mused. A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker were
+busy with coal and grease. 'Five minutes hence, and our lives, and our
+correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,' I said to
+myself. Strange world, the world of the _train de grand luxe_! But a
+world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as the
+inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.
+
+Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and
+varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all
+that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself
+up and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray
+landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a
+long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon;
+and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway
+director had received their most luscious expression--and had then been
+modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern
+flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes
+as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was
+finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car
+towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.
+
+'How do you do, Miss Kate?' I accosted her.
+
+It was the younger of Vicary's two maiden sisters. I guessed that the
+other could not be far away.
+
+She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had
+done.
+
+'Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?' she said distantly, with a nervous
+simper; and she passed on.
+
+This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world
+of my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from
+Miss Kate's attitude that something must have occurred, or something must
+have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a
+time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly.
+What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I
+left without delay and went back to my coupé; it would have been a pity
+to derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet
+it might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for.
+I read a little in the _Imitation of Christ_ which Aunt Constance had
+meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even
+Christianity itself. 'Think not that thou hast made any progress,' I
+read, 'unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far off
+thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be
+angry or indignant, with any except one's self.'
+
+Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its
+invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations,
+dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks
+through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored
+everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation
+seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after
+interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside,
+rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in
+the abandoned attitudes of fatigue--here and there a compartment with
+blinds discreetly drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and
+here and there a group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves
+nothing could affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train
+and every steamer a few such are to be found.
+
+More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we
+thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their façades
+occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under
+streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to
+see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to
+a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared
+haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to
+carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial
+quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations
+we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we
+trailed slowly our disgust.
+
+We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris
+would fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony
+magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we
+were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the
+splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by
+the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a _train de grand luxe_,
+while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms,
+guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at
+which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses
+Vicary had brought several pairs of white gloves in order to have me
+dismissed from the society of the train. A hand touched me. It was
+Yvonne's. I awoke to a renewal of the maddening vibration. We had quitted
+Paris long since. It was after seven o'clock. '_On dit que le diner est
+servi, madame_ said Yvonne. I told her to go, and I collected my wits to
+follow her. As I was emerging into the corridor, Miss Kate went by. I
+smiled faintly, perhaps timidly. She cut me completely. Then I went out
+into the corridor. A man was standing at the other end twirling his
+moustaches. He turned round.
+
+It was Frank.
+
+He came towards me, uncertainly swaying with the movement of the
+swaying train.
+
+'Good God!' he muttered, and stopped within a yard of me.
+
+I clung convulsively to the framework of the doorway. Our lives paused.
+
+'Why have you followed me, Frank?' I asked gloomily, in a whisper.
+
+I had meant to be severe, offended. I had not meant to put his name at
+the end of my question, much less to utter it tenderly, like an
+endearment. But I had little control over myself. I was almost breathless
+with a fatal surprise, shaken with terrible emotion.
+
+'I've not followed you,' he said. 'I joined the train at Paris. I'd no
+idea you were on the train till I saw you in the corner asleep, through
+the window of the compartment. I've been waiting here till you came out.'
+
+'Have you seen the Vicarys?'
+
+'Yes,' he answered.
+
+'Ah! You've been away from London all this time?'
+
+'I couldn't stay. I couldn't. I've been in Belgium and Holland. Then I
+went to Paris. And now--you see me.'
+
+'I'm going to Mentone,' I said. 'I had thought of Monte Carlo first, but
+I changed my mind. Where are you going to?'
+
+'Mentone,' he said.
+
+We talked in hard, strained tones, avoiding each other's eyes. A string
+of people passed along the car on their way to dinner. I withdrew into my
+compartment, and Frank flattened himself against a window.
+
+'Come in here a minute,' I said, when they were gone.
+
+He entered the compartment and sat down opposite to me and lifted his
+hand, perhaps unconsciously, to pull the door to.
+
+'No,' I said; 'don't shut it. Leave it like that.'
+
+He was dressed in a gray tourist suit. Never before had I seen him in any
+but the formal attire of London. I thought he looked singularly graceful
+and distinguished, even romantic, in that loose, soft clothing. But no
+matter what he wore, Frank satisfied the eye. We were both extremely
+nervous and excited and timid, fearing speech.
+
+'Carlotta,' he said at last--I had perceived that he was struggling to a
+resolution--'this is the best thing that could have happened. Whatever we
+do, everybody will believe that we are running off together.'
+
+'I think they have been believing that ever since we left London,' I
+said; and I told him about Miss Kate's treatment of me at lunch. 'But how
+can that affect us?' I demanded.
+
+'Mary will believe it--does believe, I'm sure. Long before this, people
+will have enlightened her. And now the Vicarys have seen us, it's all
+over. Our hand is forced, isn't it?'
+
+'Frank,' I said, 'didn't you think my letter was right?'
+
+'I obeyed it,' he replied heavily. 'I haven't even written to you. I
+meant to when I got to Mentone.'
+
+'But didn't you think I was right?'
+
+'I don't know. Yes--I suppose it was.' His lower lip fell. 'Of course I
+don't want you to do anything that you--'
+
+'Dinner, please,' said my negro, putting his head between us.
+
+We both informed the man that we should not dine, and I asked him to tell
+Yvonne not to wait for me.
+
+'There's your maid, too,' said Frank. 'How are we going to get out of it?
+The thing's settled for us.'
+
+'My dear, dear boy!' I exclaimed. 'Are we to outrage our consciences
+simply because people think we have outraged them?'
+
+'It isn't my conscience--it's yours,' he said.
+
+'Well, then--mine.'
+
+I drew down my veil; I could scarcely keep dry eyes.
+
+'Why are you so hard, Carlotta?' he cried. 'I can't understand you. I
+never could. But you'll kill me--that's what you'll do.'
+
+Impulsively I leaned forward; and he seized my hand. Our antagonism
+melted in tears. Oh the cruel joy of that moment! Who will dare to say
+that the spirit cannot burn with pleasure while drowning in grief? Or
+that tragedy may not be the highest bliss? That instant of renunciation
+was our true marriage. I realize it now--a union that nothing can soil
+nor impair.
+
+'I love you; you are fast and fast in my heart,' I murmured. 'But you
+must go back to Mary. There is nothing else.'
+
+And I withdrew my hand.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'You've no right, my dearest, to tell me to go back to Mary. I cannot.'
+
+'Forgive me,' I said. 'I have only the right to ask you to leave me.'
+
+'Then there is no hope?'
+
+His lips trembled. Ah! those lips!
+
+I made a sign that there was no hope. And we sat in silence, overcome.
+
+A servant came to arrange the compartment for sleeping, and we were
+obliged to assume nonchalance and go into the corridor. All the
+windows of the corridor were covered with frost traceries. The train
+with its enclosed heat and its gleaming lamps was plunging through an
+ice-gripped night. I thought of the engine-driver, perched on his
+shaking, snorting, monstrous machine, facing the weather, with our
+lives and our loves in his hand.
+
+'We'll leave each other now, Frank,' I said, 'before the people begin to
+come back from dinner. Go and eat something.'
+
+'But you?'
+
+'I shall be all right. Yvonne will get me some fruit. I shall stay in our
+compartment till we arrive.'
+
+'Yes. And when we do arrive--what then? What are your wishes? You see,
+I can't leave the train before we get to Mentone because of my
+registered luggage.'
+
+He spoke appealingly.
+
+The dear thing, with his transparent pretexts!
+
+'You can ignore us at the station, and then leave Mentone again
+during the day.'
+
+'As you wish,' he said.
+
+'Good-night!' I whispered. 'Good-bye!' And I turned to my compartment.
+
+'Carlotta!' he cried despairingly.
+
+But I shut the door and drew the blinds.
+
+Yvonne was discretion itself when she returned. She had surely seen
+Frank. No doubt she anticipated piquant developments at Mentone.
+
+All night I lay on my narrow bed, with Yvonne faintly snoring above me,
+and the harsh, metallic rattle of the swinging train beneath. I could
+catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow. The lamp burnt
+delicately within its green shade. I lay almost moveless, almost dead,
+shifting only at long intervals from side to side. Sometimes my brain
+would arouse itself, and I would live again through each scene of my
+relationship with Frank and Mary. I often thought of the engine-driver,
+outside, watching over us and unflinchingly dragging us on. I hoped that
+his existence had compensations.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Early on the second morning after that interview in the train I sat on
+my balcony in the Hôtel d'Écosse, full in the tremendous sun that had
+ascended over the Mediterranean. The shore road wound along beneath me
+by the blue water that never receded nor advanced, lopping always the
+same stones. A vivid yellow electric tram, like a toy, crept forward on
+my left from the direction of Vintimille and Italy, as it were swimming
+noiselessly on the smooth surface of the road among the palms of an
+intense green, against the bright blue background of the sea; and
+another tram advanced, a spot of orange, to meet it out of the
+variegated tangle of tinted houses composing the Old Town. High upon the
+summit of the Old Town rose the slim, rose-coloured cupola of the church
+in a sapphire sky. The regular smiting sound of a cracked bell,
+viciously rung, came from it. The eastern prospect was shut in by the
+last olive-clad spurs of the Alps, that tread violently and gigantically
+into the sea. The pathways of the hotel garden were being gently swept
+by a child of the sun, who could not have sacrificed his graceful
+dignity to haste; and many peaceful morning activities proceeded on the
+road, on the shore, and on the jetty. A procession of tawny
+fishing-boats passed from the harbour one after another straight into
+the eye of the sun, and were lost there. Smoke climbed up softly into
+the soft air from the houses and hotels on the level of the road. The
+trams met and parted, silently widening the distance between them which
+previously they had narrowed. And the sun rose and rose, bathing the
+blue sea and the rich verdure and the glaring white architecture in the
+very fluid of essential life. The whole azure coast basked in it like an
+immense cat, commencing the day with a voluptuous savouring of the fact
+that it was alive. The sun is the treacherous and tyrannical god of the
+South, and when he withdraws himself, arbitrary and cruel, the land and
+the people shiver and prepare to die.
+
+It was such a morning as renders sharp and unmistakable the division
+between body and soul--if the soul suffers. The body exults; the body
+cries out that nothing on earth matters except climate. Nothing can damp
+the glorious ecstasy of the body baptized in that air, caressed by that
+incomparable sun. It laughs, and it laughs at the sorrow of the soul. It
+imperiously bids the soul to choose the path of pleasure; it shouts aloud
+that sacrifice is vain and honour an empty word, full of inconveniences,
+and that to exist amply and vehemently, to listen to the blood as it
+beats strongly through the veins, is the end of the eternal purpose. Ah!
+how easy it is to martyrize one's self by some fatal decision made
+grandly in the exultation of a supreme moment! And how difficult to
+endure the martyrdom without regret! I regretted my renunciation. My body
+rebelled against it, and even my soul rebelled. I scorned myself for a
+fool, for a sentimental weakling--yes, and for a moral coward. Every
+argument that presented itself damaged the justice of my decision. After
+all, we loved, and in my secret dreams had I not always put love first,
+as the most sacred? The reality was that I had been afraid of what Mary
+would think. True, my attitude had lied to her, but I could not have
+avoided that. Decency would have forbidden me to use any other attitude;
+and more than decency--kindness. Ought the course of lives to be changed
+at the bidding of mere hazard? It was a mere chance that Mary had called
+on me. I bled for her grief, but nothing that I could do would assuage
+it. I felt sure that, in the impossible case of me being able to state my
+position to her and argue in its defence, I could force her to see that
+in giving myself to Frank I was not being false to my own ideals. What
+else could count? What other consideration should guide the soul on its
+mysterious instinctive way? Frank and I had a right to possess each
+other. We had a right to be happy if we could. And the one thing that had
+robbed us of that right was my lack of courage, caused partly by my
+feminine mentality (do we not realize sometimes how ignobly feminine we
+are?), and partly by the painful spectacle of Mary's grief.... And her
+grief, her most intimate grief, sprang not from thwarted love, but from
+a base and narrow conventionality.
+
+Thus I declaimed to myself in my heart, under the influence of the
+seductive temptations of that intoxicating atmosphere.
+
+'Come down,' said a voice firmly and quietly underneath me in the
+orange-trees of the garden.
+
+I started violently. It was Frank's voice. He was standing in the garden,
+his legs apart, and a broad, flat straw hat, which I did not admire, on
+his head. His pale face was puckered round about the eyes as he looked up
+at me, like the face of a person trying to look directly at the sun.
+
+'Why,' I exclaimed foolishly, glancing down over the edge of the balcony,
+and shutting my white parasol with a nervous, hurried movement,
+'have--have you come here?'
+
+He had disobeyed my wish. He had not left Mentone at once.
+
+'Come down,' he repeated persuasively, and yet commandingly.
+
+I could feel my heart beating against the marble parapet of the balcony.
+I seemed to be caught, to be trapped. I could not argue with him in that
+position. I could not leave him shouting in the garden. So I nodded to
+pacify him, and disappeared quickly from the balcony, almost scurrying
+away. And in the comparative twilight of my room I stopped and gave a
+glance in the mirror, and patted my hair, and fearfully examined the
+woman that I saw in the glass, as if to discern what sort of woman she
+truly was, and what was the root of her character. I hesitated and
+snatched up my gloves. I wanted to collect my thoughts, and I could not.
+It was impossible to think clearly. I moved in the room, dazed. I stood
+by the tumbled bed, fingering the mosquito curtains. They might have been
+a veil behind which was obscured the magic word of enlightenment I
+needed. I opened the door, shut it suddenly, and held the knob tight,
+defying an imagined enemy outside. 'Oh!' I muttered at last, angry with
+myself, 'what is the use of all this? You know you must go down to him.
+He's waiting for you. Show a little common-sense and go without so much
+fuss.' And so I descended the stairs swiftly and guiltily, relieved that
+no one happened to see me. In any case, I decided, nothing could induce
+me to yield to him after my letter and after what had passed in the
+train. The affair was beyond argument. I felt that I could not yield, and
+that though it meant the ruin of happiness by obstinacy, I could not
+yield. I shrank from yielding in that moment as men shrink from public
+repentance.
+
+He had not moved from his post in the garden. We shook hands. A band
+of Italian musicians wandered into the garden and began to sing Verdi
+to a vigorous thrumming of guitars. They sang as only Italians can
+sing--as naturally as they breathed, and with a rich and overflowing
+innocent joy in the art which Nature had taught them. They sang loudly,
+swingingly, glancing full of naive hope up at the windows of the vast,
+unresponsive hotel.
+
+'So you are still in Mentone,' I ventured.
+
+'Yes,' he said. 'Come for a walk.'
+
+'But--'
+
+'Come for a walk.'
+
+'Very well,' I consented. 'As I am?'
+
+'As you are. I saw you all in white on the balcony, and I was determined
+to fetch you out.'
+
+'But could you see who it was from the road?'
+
+'Of course I could. I knew in an instant.'
+
+We descended, he a couple of paces in front of me, the narrow zigzag path
+leading down between two other hotels to the shore road.
+
+'What will happen now?' I asked myself wildly. My head swam.
+
+It seemed that nothing would happen. We turned eastwards, walking slowly,
+and I began to resume my self-control. Only the simple and the humble
+were abroad at that early hour: purveyors of food, in cheerfully rattling
+carts, or hauling barrows with the help of grave and formidable dogs;
+washers and cleaners at the doors of highly-decorated villas, amiably
+performing their tasks while the mighty slept; fishermen and fat
+fisher-girls, industriously repairing endless brown nets on the other
+side of the parapet of the road; a postman and a little policeman; a
+porcelain mender, who practised his trade under the shadow of the wall; a
+few loafers; some stable-boys exercising horses; and children with
+adorable dirty faces, shouting in their high treble as they played at
+hopscotch. I felt very closely akin to these meek ones as we walked
+along. They were so human, so wistful. They had the wonderful simplicity
+of animals, uncomplicated by the disease of self-consciousness; they were
+the vital stuff without the embroidery. They preserved the customs of
+their ancestors, rising with the sun, frankly and splendidly enjoying the
+sun, looking up to it as the most important thing in the world. They
+never attempted to understand what was beyond them; they troubled not
+with progress, ideals, righteousness, the claims of society. They
+accepted humbly and uninquiringly what they found. They lived the life of
+their instincts, sometimes violent, often kindly, and always natural.
+Why should I have felt so near to them?
+
+A calm and gentle pleasure filled me, far from intense, but yet
+satisfying. I determined to enjoy the moment, or, perhaps, without
+determination, I gave myself up, gradually, to the moment. I forgot care
+and sorrow. I was well; I was with Frank; I was in the midst of
+enchanting natural beauty; the day was fair and fresh and virgin. I knew
+not where I was going. Shorewards a snowy mountain ridge rose above the
+long, wide slopes of olives, dotted with white dwellings. A single sail
+stood up seawards on the immense sheet of blue. The white sail appeared
+and disappeared in the green palm-trees as we passed eastwards. Presently
+we left the sea, and we lost the hills, and came into a street of poor
+little shops for simple folk, that naïvely exposed their cheap and tawdry
+goods to no matter what mightiness should saunter that way. And then we
+came to the end of the tram-line, and it was like the end of the world.
+And we saw in the distance abodes of famous persons, fabulously rich,
+defying the sea and the hills, and condescending from afar off to the
+humble. We crossed the railway, and a woman ran out from a cabin with a
+spoon in one hand and a soiled flag in the other, and waved the flag at
+a towering black engine that breathed stertorously in a cutting. Already
+we were climbing, and the road grew steeper, and then we came to
+custom-houses--unsightly, squalid, irregular, and mean--in front of which
+officials laughed and lounged and smoked.
+
+We talked scarcely at all.
+
+'You were up early this morning,' he said.
+
+'Yes; I could not sleep.'
+
+'It was the same with me.'
+
+We recovered the sea; but now it was far below us, and the footprints of
+the wind were marked on it, and it was not one blue, but a thousand
+blues, and it faded imperceptibly into the sky. The sail, making Mentone,
+was much nearer, and had developed into a two-masted ship. It seemed to
+be pushed, rather than blown, along by the wind. It seemed to have
+rigidity in all its parts, and to be sliding unwillingly over a vast
+slate. The road lay through craggy rocks, shelving away unseen on one
+hand, and rising steeply against the burning sky on the other. We mounted
+steadily and slowly. I did not look much at Frank, but my eye was
+conscious of his figure, striding leisurely along. Now and then, when I
+turned to glance behind, I saw our shadows there diagonally on the road,
+and again I did not care for his hat. I had not seen him in a straw hat
+till that morning. We arrived at a second set of French custom-houses,
+deserted, and then we saw that the gigantic side of the mountain was
+cleft by a fissure from base to summit. And across the gorge had been
+thrown a tiny stone bridge to carry the road. At this point, by the
+bridge, the face of the rock had been carved smooth, and a great black
+triangle painted on it. And on the road was a common milestone, with
+'France' on one side and 'Italia' on the other. And a very old man was
+harmlessly spreading a stock of picture postcards on the parapet of the
+bridge. My heart went out to that poor old man, whose white curls glinted
+in the sunlight. It seemed to me so pathetic that he should be just
+there, at that natural spot which the passions and the blood of men long
+dead had made artificial, tediously selling postcards in order to keep
+his worn and creaking body out of the grave.
+
+'Do give him something,' I entreated Frank.
+
+And while Frank went to him I leaned over the other parapet and
+listened for the delicate murmur of the stream far below. The split
+flank of the hill was covered with a large red blossom, and at the
+base, on the edge of the sea, were dolls' houses, each raising a
+slanted pencil of pale smoke.
+
+Then we were in Italy, and still climbing. We saw a row of narrow,
+slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched
+to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a
+rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged about
+four years and eight years, dirty, unkempt, delicious, shrill, their
+movements full of the ravishing grace of infancy. They attacked the laced
+soldier, chattering furiously, grumbling at him, intimidating him with
+the charming gestures of spoilt and pouting children. And he bent down
+stiffly in his superb uniform, and managed his long, heavy gun, and
+talked to them in a deep, vibrating voice. He reasoned with them till we
+could hear him no more. It was so touching, so exquisitely human!
+
+We reached the top of the hill, having passed the Italian customs,
+equally vile with the French. The terraced grounds of an immense deserted
+castle came down to the roadside; and over the wall, escaped from the
+garden, there bloomed extravagantly a tangle of luscious yellow roses,
+just out of our reach. The road was still and deserted. We could see
+nothing but the road and the sea and the hills, all steeped, bewitched,
+and glorious under the sun. The ship had nearly slid to Mentone. The
+curving coastline of Italy wavered away into the shimmering horizon. And
+there were those huge roses, insolently blooming in the middle of winter,
+the symbol of the terrific forces of nature which slept quiescent under
+the universal calm. Perched as it were in a niche of the hills, we were
+part of that tremendous and ennobling scene. Long since the awkward
+self-consciousness caused by our plight had left us. We did not use
+speech, but we knew that we thought alike, and were suffering the same
+transcendent emotion. Was it joy or sadness? Rather than either, it was
+an admixture of both, originating in a poignant sense of the grandeur of
+life and of the earth.
+
+'Oh, Frank,' I murmured, my spirit bursting, 'how beautiful it is!'
+
+Our eyes met. He took me and kissed me impetuously, as though my
+utterance had broken a spell which enchained him. And as I kissed him I
+wept, blissfully. Nature had triumphed.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+We departed from Mentone that same day after lunch. I could not remove to
+his hotel; he could not remove to mine, for this was Mentone. We went to
+Monte Carlo by road, our luggage following. We chose Monte Carlo partly
+because it was the nearest place, and partly because it has some of the
+qualities--incurious, tolerant, unprovincial--of a capital city. If we
+encountered friends there, so much the better, in the end. The great
+adventure, the solemn and perilous enterprise had begun. I sent Yvonne
+for a holiday to her home in Laroche. Why? Ah, why? Perhaps for the
+simple reason that I had not the full courage of my convictions. We
+seldom have--_nous autres_. I felt that, if she had remained, Yvonne
+would have been too near me in the enterprise. I could not at first have
+been my natural self with her. I told the astonished and dissatisfied
+Yvonne that I would write to her as soon as I wanted her. Yet in other
+ways I had courage, and I found a delicious pleasure in my courage. When
+I was finally leaving the hotel I had Frank by my side. I behaved to him
+as to a husband. I publicly called him 'dear.' I asked his advice in
+trifles. He paid my bill. He even provided the money necessary for
+Yvonne. My joy in the possession of this male creature, whose part it now
+was to do for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do
+for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's
+woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal
+significance of that word--I had a protector.
+
+Frank was able to get three rooms at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. I
+had only to approve them. We met in our sitting-room at half-past three,
+ready to go out for a walk. It would be inexact to say that we were not
+nervous. But we were happy. He had not abandoned his straw hat.
+
+'Don't wear that any more,' I said to him, smiling.
+
+'But why? It's quite new.'
+
+'It doesn't suit you,' I said.
+
+'Oh, that doesn't matter,' he laughed, and he put it on.
+
+'But I don't like to see you in it,' I persisted.
+
+'Well, you'll stand it this afternoon, my angel, and I'll get another
+to-morrow.'
+
+'Haven't you got another one here?' I asked, with discontent.
+
+'No,' and he laughed again.
+
+'But, dear--' I pouted.
+
+He seemed suddenly to realize that as a fact I did not like the hat.
+
+'Come here,' he said, charmingly grave; and he led me by the hand into
+his bedroom, which was littered with clothes, small parcels, boots, and
+brushes. One chair was overturned.
+
+'Heavens!' I muttered, pretending to be shocked at the disorder.
+
+He drew, me to a leather box of medium size.
+
+'You can open it,' he said.
+
+I opened it. The thing was rather a good contrivance, for a man. It
+held a silk hat, an opera hat, a bowler hat, some caps, and a soft
+Panama straw.
+
+'And you said you had no others!' I grumbled at him.
+
+'Well, which is it to be?' he demanded.
+
+'This, of course,' I said, taking the bowler. I reached up, removed the
+straw hat from his head, and put the bowler in its place. 'There!' I
+exclaimed, satisfied, giving the bowler a pat--there!'
+
+He laughed, immensely content, enraptured, foolishly blissful. We were
+indeed happy. Before opening the door leading to the corridor we stopped
+and kissed.
+
+On the seaward terrace of the vast, pale, floriated Casino, so
+impressive in its glittering vulgarity, like the bride-cake of a
+stockbroker's wedding, we strolled about among a multifarious crowd,
+immersed in ourselves. We shared a contempt for the architecture, the
+glaring flower-beds, and the false distinction of the crowd, and an
+enthusiasm for the sunshine and the hills and the sea, and whatever else
+had escaped the hands of the Casino administration. We talked lightly
+and freely. Care seemed to be leaving us; we had no preoccupations save
+those which were connected with our passion. Then I saw, standing in an
+attitude of attention, the famous body-servant of Lord Francis Alcar,
+and I knew that Lord Francis could not be far away. We spoke to the
+valet; he pointed out his master, seated at the front of the terrace,
+and told us, in a discreet, pained, respectful voice, that our venerable
+friend had been mysteriously unwell at Monte Carlo, and was now taking
+the air for the first time in ten days. I determined that we should go
+boldly and speak to him.
+
+'Lord Francis,' I said gently, after we had stood some seconds by his
+chair, unremarked.
+
+He was staring fixedly at the distance of the sea. He looked amazingly
+older than when I had last talked with him. His figure was shrunken, and
+his face rose thin and white out of a heavy fur overcoat and a large blue
+muffler. In his eyes there was such a sadness, such an infinite regret,
+such a profound weariness as can only be seen in the eyes of the senile.
+He was utterly changed.
+
+'Lord Francis,' I repeated, 'don't you know me?'
+
+He started slightly and looked at me, and a faint gleam appeared in his
+eyes. Then he nodded, and took a thin, fragile alabaster hand out of
+the pocket of his overcoat. I shook it. It was like shaking hands with
+a dead, starved child. He carefully moved the skin and bone back into
+his pocket.
+
+'Are you pretty well?' I said.
+
+He nodded. Then the faint gleam faded out of his eyes; his head fell a
+little, and he resumed his tragic contemplation of the sea. The fact of
+my presence had dropped like a pebble into the strange depths of that
+aged mind, and the waters of the ferocious egotism of senility had closed
+over it, and it was forgotten. His rapt and yet meaningless gaze
+frightened me. It was as if there was more desolation and disillusion in
+that gaze than I had previously imagined the whole earth to contain.
+Useless for Frank to rouse him for the second time. Useless to explain
+ourselves. What was love to him, or the trivial conventions of a world
+which he was already quitting?
+
+We walked away. From the edge of the terrace I could see a number of
+boats pulling to and fro in the water.
+
+'It's the pigeon-shooting,' Frank explained. 'Come to the railings and
+you'll be able to see.'
+
+I had already heard the sharp popping of rifles. I went to the railings,
+and saw a number of boxes arranged in a semicircle on a green, which was,
+as it were, suspended between the height of the terrace and the sea.
+Suddenly one of the boxes collapsed with a rattle, and a bird flew out of
+the ruin of it. There were two reports of a gun; the bird, its curving
+flight cut short, fell fluttering to the grass; a dog trotted out from
+the direction of the gun unseen beneath us, and disappeared again with
+the mass of ruffled feathers in its mouth. Then two men showed
+themselves, ran to the collapsed box, restored it, and put in it a fresh
+victim, and disappeared after the dog. I was horrified, but I could not
+remove my eyes from the green. Another box fell flat, and another bird
+flew out; a gun sounded; the bird soared far away, wavered, and sank on
+to the surface of the sea, and the boats converged towards it in furious
+haste. So the game proceeded. I saw a dozen deaths on the green; a few
+birds fell into the sea, and one escaped, settling ultimately on the roof
+of the Casino.
+
+'So that is pigeon-shooting,' I said coldly, turning to Frank. 'I suppose
+it goes on all day?'
+
+He nodded.
+
+'It's just as cruel as plenty of other sports, and no more,' he said, as
+if apologizing for the entire male sex.
+
+'I presume so,' I answered. 'But do you know, dear, if the idea once gets
+into my head that that is going on all day, I shan't be able to stop
+here. Let us have tea somewhere.'
+
+Not until dinner did I recover from the obsession of that continual
+slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the
+Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the
+mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot
+out all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now do I
+completely perceive how violent, how capricious and contradictory were
+my emotions in those unique and unforgettable hours.
+
+We dined late, because I had deprived myself of Yvonne. Already I was
+almost in a mind to send for her. The restaurant of the hotel was full,
+but we recognised no one as we walked through the room to our table.
+
+'There is one advantage in travelling about with you,' said Frank.
+
+'What is it?' I asked.
+
+'No matter where one is, one can always be sure of being with the most
+beautiful woman in the place.'
+
+I was content. I repaid him by being more than ever a man's woman. I
+knew that I was made for that. I understood why great sopranos have of
+their own accord given up even the stage on marriage. The career of
+literature seemed to me tedious and sordid in comparison with that of
+being a man's woman. In my rich black dress and my rings and bracelets I
+felt like an Eastern Empress; I felt that I could adequately reward
+homage with smiles, and love with fervid love. And I felt like a
+cat--idle, indolently graceful, voluptuously seeking warmth and
+caresses. I enveloped Frank with soft glances, I dazed him with glances.
+He ordered a wine which he said was fit for gods, and the waiter brought
+it reverently and filled our glasses, with a ritual of precautions.
+Later during the dinner Frank asked me if I would prefer champagne. I
+said, 'No, of course not.' But he said, 'I think you would,' and ordered
+some. 'Admit,' he said, 'that you prefer champagne.' 'Well, of course,'
+I replied. But I drank very little champagne, lest I should be too
+happy. Frank's wonderful face grew delicately flushed. The room
+resounded with discreet chatter, and the tinkle of glass and silver and
+porcelain. The upper part of it remained in shadow, but every table was
+a centre of rosy light, illuminating faces and jewels and napery. And in
+my sweet illusion I thought that every face had found the secret of joy,
+and that even the old had preserved it. Pleasure reigned. Pleasure was
+the sole goddess. And how satisfying then was the worship of her! Life
+had no inconveniences, no dark spots, no pitfalls. The gratification of
+the senses, the appeasing of appetites that instantly renewed
+themselves--this was the business of the soul. And as the wine sank
+lower in the bottles, and we cooled our tongues with ices, and the room
+began to empty, expectation gleamed and glittered in our eyes. At last,
+except a group of men smoking and talking in a corner, we were the only
+diners left.
+
+'Shall we go?' Frank said, putting a veil of cigarette smoke between us.
+
+I trembled. I was once more the young and timid girl. I could not
+speak. I nodded.
+
+In the hall was Vicary, talking to the head-porter. He saw us and
+started.
+
+'What! Vicary!' I murmured, suddenly cooled.
+
+'I want to speak to you,' said Vicary. 'Where can we go?'
+
+'This way,' Frank replied.
+
+We went to our sitting-room, silent and apprehensive.
+
+'Sit down,' said Vicary, shutting the door and standing against it.
+
+He was wearing a tourist suit, with a gray overcoat, and his grizzled
+hair was tumbling over his hard, white face.
+
+'What's the matter?' Frank asked. 'Anything wrong?'
+
+'Look here, you two,' said Vicary, 'I don't want to discuss your
+position, and I'm the last person in this world to cast the first stone;
+but it falls to me to do it. I was coming down to Nice to stay with my
+sisters, and I've come a little further. My sisters wired me they had
+seen you. I've been to Mentone, and driven here from there. I hoped I
+should get here earlier than the newspapers, and I have done, it seems.'
+
+'Earlier than the newspapers?' Frank repeated, standing up.
+
+'Try to keep calm,' Vicary continued. 'Your wife's body was found in the
+Thames at seven o'clock last night. The doctors say it had been in the
+water for forty-eight hours. Your servants thought she had gone to you.
+But doubtless some thoughtful person had told her that you two were
+wandering about Europe together.'
+
+'_My wife_' cried Frank.
+
+And the strange and terrible emphasis he put on the word 'wife' proved to
+me in the fraction of a second that in his heart I was not his wife. A
+fearful tragedy had swept away the structure of argument in favour of the
+rights of love which he had built over the original conventionality of
+his mind. Poor fellow!
+
+He fell back into his chair and covered his eyes.
+
+'I thank God my mother didn't live to see this!' he cried.
+
+And then he rushed to his bedroom and banged the door.
+
+'My poor girl!' said Vicary, approaching me. 'What can I--I'm awfully--'
+
+I waved him away.
+
+'What's that?' he exclaimed, in a different voice, listening.
+
+I ran to the bedroom, and saw Frank lifting a revolver.
+
+'You've brought me to this, Carlotta!' he shouted.
+
+I sprang towards him, but it was too late.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+When I came out of the house, hurried and angrily flushing, I perceived
+clearly that my reluctance to break a habit and my desire for physical
+comfort, if not my attachment to the girl, had led me too far. I was
+conscious of humiliation. I despised myself. The fact was that I had
+quarrelled with Yvonne--Yvonne, who had been with me for eight years,
+Yvonne who had remained sturdily faithful during my long exile. Now the
+woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with
+a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or
+both. Possibly I was both. I had permitted Yvonne too much liberty. I had
+spoilt her. She was fidelity itself, goodness itself; but her character
+had not borne the strain of realizing that she had acquired power over
+me, and that she had become necessary to me. So that morning we had
+differed violently; we had quarrelled as equals. The worst side of her
+had appeared suddenly, shockingly. And she had left me, demonstrating
+even as she banged the door that she was at least my mistress in
+altercation. All day I fought against the temptation to eat my pride, and
+ask her to return. It was a horrible, a deplorable, temptation. And
+towards evening, after seven hours of solitude in the hotel in the Avenue
+de Kleber, I yielded to it. I knew the address to which she had gone, and
+I took a cab and drove there, hating myself. I was received with
+excessive rudeness by a dirty and hag-like concierge, who, after refusing
+all information for some minutes, informed me at length that the young
+lady in question had quitted Paris in company with a gentleman.
+
+The insolence of the concierge, my weakness and my failure, the bitter
+sense of lost dignity, the fact that Yvonne had not hesitated even a few
+hours before finally abandoning me--all these things wounded me. But the
+sharpest stab of all was that during our stay in Paris Yvonne must have
+had secret relations with a man. I had hidden nothing from her; she,
+however, had not reciprocated my candour. I had imagined that she lived
+only for me....
+
+Well, the truth cannot be concealed that the years of wandering which had
+succeeded the fatal night at Monte Carlo had done little to improve me.
+What would you have? For months and months my ears rang with Frank's
+despairing shout: '_You've_ brought me to this, Carlotta!' And the
+profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of my
+immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my inmost
+soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem
+inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what
+it means to be broken--to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming
+calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the
+afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert
+me; I deserted them. For the second time in my career I tore myself up by
+the roots. I lived the nomad's life, in the usual European haunts of the
+nomad. And in five years I did not make a single new friend, scarcely an
+acquaintance. I lived in myself and on myself, nursing grief, nursing a
+rancour against fate, nursing an involuntary shame.... You know, the
+scandal of which I had been the centre was appalling; it touched the
+extreme. It must have nearly killed the excellent Mrs. Sardis. I did not
+dare to produce another novel. But after a year or so I turned to poetry,
+and I must admit that my poetry was accepted. But it was not enough to
+prevent me from withering--from shrivelling. I lost ground, and I was
+still losing it. I was becoming sinister, warped, peculiar, capricious,
+unaccountable. I guessed it then; I see it clearly now.
+
+The house of the odious concierge was in a small, shabby street off the
+Boulevard du Montparnasse. I looked in vain for a cab. Even on the wide,
+straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had
+been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great,
+glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession,
+but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither
+they went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car. Without a cab I was
+as helpless and as timid as a young girl, I who was thirty-one, and had
+travelled and lived and suffered! Never had I been alone in the streets
+of a large city at night. And the September night was sultry and
+forbidding. I was afraid--I was afraid of the men who passed me, staring
+at me. One man spoke to me, and I literally shook with fear as I hastened
+on. What would I have given to have had the once faithful Yvonne by my
+side! Presently I came to the crossing of the Boulevard Raspail, and this
+boulevard, equally long, uncharitable, and mournful with the other,
+endless, stretching to infinity, filled me with horror. Yes, with the
+horror of solitude in a vast city. Oh, you solitary, you who have felt
+that horror descending upon you, desolating, clutching, and chilling the
+heart, you will comprehend me!
+
+At the corner, of the two boulevards was a glowing cafe, the Café du
+Dome, with a row of chairs and little tables in front of its windows. And
+at one of these little tables sat a man, gazing absently at a green glass
+in a white saucer. I had almost gone past him when some instinct prompted
+me to the bravery of looking at him again. He was a stoutish man,
+apparently aged about forty-five, very fair, with a puffed face and
+melancholy eyes. And then it was as though someone had shot me in the
+breast. It was as if I must fall down and die--as if the sensations which
+I experienced were too acute--too elemental for me to support. I have
+never borne a child, but I imagine that the woman who becomes a mother
+may feel as I felt then, staggered at hitherto unsuspected possibilities
+of sensation. I stopped. I clung to the nearest table. There was ice on
+my shuddering spine, and a dew on my forehead.
+
+'Magda!' breathed the man.
+
+He had raised his eyes to mine.
+
+It was Diaz, after ten years.
+
+At first I had not recognised him. Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years
+older. I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the
+returned traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered
+landmarks. Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him.
+The magic of his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth
+reappeared.
+
+'It is I,' I murmured.
+
+He got up, and in doing so shook the table, and his glass was overturned,
+and scattered itself in fragments on the asphalte. At the noise a waiter
+ran out of the cafe, and Diaz, blushing and obviously making a great
+effort at self-control, gave him an order.
+
+'I should have known you anywhere,' said Diaz to me, taking my hand, as
+the waiter went.
+
+The ineptitude of the speech was such that I felt keenly sorry for him. I
+was not in the least hurt. My sympathy enveloped him. The position was so
+difficult, and he had seemed so pathetic, sitting there alone on the
+pavement of the vast nocturnal boulevard, so weighed down by sadness,
+that I wanted to comfort him and soothe him, and to restore him to all
+the brilliancy of his first period. It appeared to me unjust and cruel
+that the wheels of life should have crushed him too. And so I said,
+smiling as well as I could:
+
+'And I you.'
+
+'Won't you sit down here?' he suggested, avoiding my eyes.
+
+And thus I found myself seated outside a cafe, at night, conspicuous for
+all Montparnasse to see. We never know what may lie in store for us at
+the next turning of existence.
+
+'Then I am not much changed, you think?' he ventured, in an anxious tone.
+
+'No,' I lied. 'You are perhaps a little stouter. That's all.'
+
+How hard it was to talk! How lamentably self-conscious we were! How
+unequal to the situation! We did not know what to say.
+
+'You are far more beautiful than ever you were,' he said, looking at me
+for an instant. 'You are a woman; you were a girl--then.'
+
+The waiter brought another glass and saucer, and a second waiter
+followed him with a bottle, from which he poured a greenish-yellow
+liquid into the glass.
+
+'What will you have?' Diaz asked me.
+
+'Nothing, thank you,' I said quickly.
+
+To sit outside the cafe was already much. It would have been impossible
+for me to drink there.
+
+'Ah! as you please, as you please,' Diaz snapped. 'I beg your pardon.'
+
+'Poor fellow!' I reflected. 'He must be suffering from nervous
+irritability.' And aloud, 'I'm not thirsty, thank you,' as nicely
+as possible.
+
+He smiled beautifully; the irritability had passed.
+
+'It's awfully kind of you to sit down here with me,' he said, in a lower
+voice. 'I suppose you've heard about me?'
+
+He drank half the contents of the glass.
+
+'I read in the papers some years ago that you were suffering from
+neurasthenia and nervous breakdown,' I replied. 'I was very sorry.'
+
+'Yes,' he said; 'nervous breakdown--nervous breakdown.'
+
+'You haven't been playing lately, have you?'
+
+'It is more than two years since I played. And if you had heard me that
+time! My God!'
+
+'But surely you have tried some cure?'
+
+'Cure!' he repeated after me. 'There's no cure. Here I am! Me!'
+
+His glass was empty. He tapped on the window behind us, and the
+procession of waiters occurred again, and Diaz received a third glass,
+which now stood on three saucers.
+
+'You'll excuse me,' he said, sipping slowly. 'I'm not very well to-night.
+And you've--Why did you run away from me? I wanted to find you, but I
+couldn't.'
+
+'Please do not let us talk about that,' I stopped him. 'I--I must go.'
+
+'Oh, of course, if I've offended you--'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I'm not at all offended. But I think--'
+
+'Then, if you aren't offended, stop a little, and let me see you home.
+You're sure you won't have anything?'
+
+I shook my head, wishing that he would not drink so much. I thought it
+could not be good for his nerves.
+
+'Been in Paris long?' he asked me, with a slightly confused utterance.
+'Staying in this quarter? Many English and Americans here.'
+
+Then, in setting down the glass, he upset it, and it smashed on the
+pavement like the first one.
+
+'Damn!' he exclaimed, staring forlornly at the broken glass, as if in the
+presence of some irreparable misfortune. And before I could put in a
+word, he turned to me with a silly smile, and approaching his face to
+mine till his hat touched the brim of my hat, he said thickly: 'After
+all, you know, I'm the greatish pianist in the world.'
+
+The truth struck me like a blow. In my amazing ignorance of certain
+aspects of life I had not suspected it. Diaz was drunk. The ignominy of
+it! The tragedy of it! He was drunk. He had fallen to the beast. I drew
+back from that hot, reeking face.
+
+'You don't think I am?' he muttered. 'You think young What's-his-name can
+play Ch--Chopin better than me? Is that it?'
+
+I wanted to run away, to cease to exist, to hide with my shame in some
+deep abyss. And there I was on the boulevard, next to this animal,
+sharing his table and the degradation! And I could not move. There are
+people so gifted that in a dilemma they always know exactly the wisest
+course to adopt. But I did not know. This part of my story gives me
+infinite pain to write, and yet I must write it, though I cannot persuade
+myself to write it in full; the details would be too repulsive.
+Nevertheless, forget not that I lived it.
+
+He put his face to mine again, and began to stammer something, and I
+drew away.
+
+'You are ashamed of me, madam,' he said sharply.
+
+'I think you are not quite yourself--not quite well,' I replied.
+
+'You mean I am drunk.'
+
+'I mean what I say. You are not quite well. Please do not twist my
+words.'
+
+'You mean I am drunk,' he insisted, raising his voice. 'I am not drunk;
+I have never been drunk. That I can swear with my hand on my heart. But
+you are ashamed of being seen with me.'
+
+'I think you ought to go home,' I suggested.
+
+'That is only to get rid of me!' he cried.
+
+'No, no,' I appealed to him persuasively. 'Do not wound me. I will go
+with you as far as your house, if you like. You are too ill to be alone.'
+
+At that moment an empty open cab strolled by, and, without pausing for
+his answer, I signalled the driver. My heart beat wildly. My spirit was
+in an uproar. But I was determined not to desert him, not to abandon him
+to a public disgrace. I rose from my seat.
+
+'You're very good,' he said, in a new voice.
+
+The cab had stopped.
+
+'Come!' I entreated him.
+
+He rapped uncertainly on the window, and then, as the waiter did not
+immediately appear, he threw some silver on the table, and aimed himself
+in the direction of the cab. I got in. Diaz slipped on the step.
+
+'I've forgotten somethin',' he complained. 'What is it? My umbrella--yes,
+my umbrella--_pépin_ as they say here. 'Scuse me moment.'
+
+His umbrella was, in fact, lying under a chair. He stooped with
+difficulty and regained it, and then the waiter, who had at length
+arrived, helped him into the cab, and he sank like a mass of inert clay
+on my skirts.
+
+'Tell the driver the address,' I whispered.
+
+The driver, with head turned and a grin on his face, was waiting.
+
+'Rue de Douai,' said Diaz sullenly.
+
+'What number?' the driver asked.
+
+'Does that regard you?' Diaz retorted crossly in French. 'I will tell
+you later.'
+
+'Tell him now,' I pleaded.
+
+'Well, to oblige you, I will. Twenty-seven. But what I can't stand is the
+impudence of these fellows.'
+
+The driver winked at me.
+
+'Just so,' I soothed Diaz, and we drove off.
+
+I have never been happier than in unhappiness. Happiness is not joy, and
+it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more
+disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realization of one's
+secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence.
+As I crossed Paris with the drunken Diaz leaning clumsily against my
+shoulder, I was profoundly unhappy. I was desolated by the sight of this
+ruin, and yet I was happier than I had been since Frank died. I had
+glimpses and intimations of the baffling essence of our human lives here,
+strange, fleeting comprehensions of the eternal wonder and the eternal
+beauty.... In vain, professional writer as I am, do I try to express
+myself. What I want to say cannot be said; but those who have truly lived
+will understand.
+
+We passed over the Seine, lighted and asleep in the exquisite Parisian
+night, and the rattling of the cab on the cobble-stones roused Diaz from
+his stupor.
+
+'Where are we?' he asked.
+
+'Just going through the Louvre,' I replied.
+
+'I don't know how I got to the other s-side of the river,' he said.
+'Don't remember. So you're coming home with me, eh? You aren't
+'shamed of me?'
+
+'You are hurting me,' I said coldly, 'with your elbow.'
+
+'Oh, a thousand pardons! a thous' parnds, Magda! That isn't your real
+name, is it?'
+
+He sat upright and turned his face to glance at mine with a fatuous
+smile; but I would not look at him. I kept my eyes straight in
+front. Then a swerve of the carriage swung his body away from me,
+and he subsided into the corner. The intoxication was gaining on him
+every minute.
+
+'What shall I do with him?' I thought.
+
+I blushed as we drove up the Avenue de l'Opera and across the Grand
+Boulevard, for it seemed to me that all the gay loungers must observe
+Diaz' condition. We followed darker thoroughfares, and at last the cab,
+after climbing a hill, stopped before a house in a street that appeared
+rather untidy and irregular. I got out first, and Diaz stumbled after me,
+while two women on the opposite side of the road stayed curiously to
+watch us. Hastily I opened my purse and gave the driver a
+five-franc-piece, and he departed before Diaz could decide what to say. I
+had told him to go.
+
+I did not wish to tell the driver to go. I told him in spite of myself.
+
+Diaz, grumbling inarticulately, pulled the bell of the great door of the
+house. But he had to ring several times before finally the door opened;
+and each second was a year for me, waiting there with him in the street.
+And when the door opened he was leaning against it, and so pitched
+forward into the gloom of the archway. A laugh--the loud, unrestrained
+laugh of the courtesan--came from across the street.
+
+The archway was as black as night.
+
+'Shut the door, will you?' I heard Diaz' voice. 'I can't see it.
+Where are you?'
+
+But I was not going to shut the door.
+
+'Have you got a servant here?' I asked him.
+
+'She comes in the mornings,' he replied.
+
+'Then there is no one in your flat?'
+
+'Not a shoul,' said Diaz. 'Needn't be 'fraid.'
+
+I'm not afraid,' I said. 'But I wanted to know. Which floor is it?'
+
+'Third. I'll light a match.'
+
+Then I pushed to the door, whose automatic latch clicked. We were fast in
+the courtyard.
+
+Diaz dropped his matches in attempting to strike one. The metal box
+bounced on the tiles. I bent down and groped with both hands till I found
+it. And presently we began painfully to ascend the staircase, Diaz
+holding his umbrella and the rail, and I striking matches from time to
+time. We were on the second landing when I heard the bell ring again, and
+the banging of the front-door, and then voices at the foot of the
+staircase. I trembled lest we should be over-taken, and I would have
+hurried Diaz on, but he would not be hurried. Happily, as we were halfway
+between the second and third story, the man and the girl whose voices I
+heard stopped at the second. I caught sight of them momentarily through
+the banisters. The man was striking matches as I had been. '_C'est ici_,'
+the girl whispered. She was dressed in blue with a very large hat. She
+put a key in the door when they had stopped, and then our matches went
+out simultaneously. The door shut, and Diaz and I were alone on the
+staircase again. I struck another match; we struggled on.
+
+When I had taken his key from Diaz' helpless hand, and opened his door
+and guided him within, and closed the door definitely upon the outer
+world, I breathed a great sigh. Every turn of the stair had been a
+station of the cross for me. We were now in utter darkness. The classical
+effluvium of inebriety mingled with the classical odour of the furnished
+lodging. But I cared not. I had at last successfully hidden his shame. No
+one could witness it now but me. So I was glad.
+
+Neither of us said anything as, still with the aid of matches, I
+penetrated into the flat. Silently I peered about until I perceived a
+pair of candles, which I lighted. Diaz, with his hat on his head and his
+umbrella clasped tightly in his hand, fell into a chair. We glanced at
+each other.
+
+'You had better go to bed,' I suggested. 'Take your hat off. You will
+feel better without it.'
+
+He did not move, and I approached him and gently took his hat. I then
+touched the umbrella.
+
+'No, no, no!' he cried suddenly; 'I'm always losing this umbrella, and I
+won't let it out of my sight.'
+
+'As you wish,' I replied coldly.
+
+I was standing by him when he got up with a surprising lurch and put a
+hand on my shoulder. He evidently meant to kiss me. I kept him at arm's
+length, feeling a sort of icy anger.
+
+'Go to bed,' I repeated fiercely. 'It is the only place for you.'
+
+He made inarticulate noises in his throat, and ultimately achieved
+the remark:
+
+'You're very hard, Magda.'
+
+Then he bent himself towards the next room.
+
+'You will want a candle,' I said, with bitterness. 'No; I will carry it.
+Let me go first.'
+
+I preceded him through a tiny salon into the bedroom, and, leaving him
+there with one candle, came back into the first room. The whole place was
+deplorable, though not more deplorable than I had expected from the look
+of the street and the house and the stairs and the girl with the large
+hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless,
+and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel--a
+kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings
+and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with
+enormous red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once
+been a carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with
+actually a bed! It was the ready-made human kennel of commerce, which
+every large city supplies wholesale in tens of thousands to its victims.
+In that street there were hundreds such; in the house alone there were
+probably a score at least. Their sole virtue was their privacy. Ah the
+blessedness of the sacred outer door, which not even the tyrant concierge
+might violate! I thought of all the other interiors of the house, floor
+above floor, and serried one against another--vile, mean, squalid,
+cramped, unlovely, frowsy, fetid; but each lighted and intensely alive
+with the interplay of hearts; each cloistered, a secure ground where the
+instincts that move the world might show themselves naturally and in
+secret. There was something tragically beautiful in that.
+
+I had heard uncomfortable sounds from the bedroom. Then Diaz called out:
+
+'It's no use. Can't do it. Can't get into bed.' I went directly to him.
+He sat on the bed, still clasping the umbrella, one arm out of his coat.
+His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man who retires baffled
+from some tremendously complicated problem.
+
+'Put down your umbrella,' I said. 'Don't be foolish.'
+
+'I'm not foolish,' he retorted irritably. 'Don't want to loosh thish
+umbrella again.'
+
+'Well then,' I said, 'hold it in the other hand, and I will help you.'
+
+This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that
+revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He
+was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty
+centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should
+exist--there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened, shut
+in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted.
+Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his
+mother. I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed,
+clutching the umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it
+from both hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one
+clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left
+him to his inanimate companion.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was
+prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs
+alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to
+get out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a
+cab in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to
+walk even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was,
+seated in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself
+in the vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful,
+passionate city in the night--the night when the commonest noises seem to
+carry some mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth
+walks abroad naked and whispers her secrets.
+
+A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of
+the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night,
+the lamp was extinguished by a careful municipality, and I was left in
+utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and
+sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with
+difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow--as if the city had not
+been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was
+about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up,
+and I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound
+disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz' bedroom. As of old,
+he slept with the tranquillity of a child.
+
+And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished
+floor under the table. The night had passed, and it appeared to be almost
+a miracle that the night had passed, and that I had lived through it and
+was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed
+back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in
+blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom.
+She went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more
+sane, more astringent. And yet only a few hours--and it had been night,
+strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were
+warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dreaming souls. But
+that tall woman must go to bed in day, and rise to meet the first wind of
+the morning, and perhaps never have known the sweet poison of the night.
+I sank back into my chair....
+
+There was a sharp, decisive sound of a key in the lock of the
+entrance-door. I jumped up, fully awake, with beating heart and blushing
+face. Someone was invading the flat. Someone would catch me there.
+
+Of course it was his servant. I had entirely forgotten her.
+
+We met in the little passage. She was a stout creature and appeared to
+fill the flat. She did not seem very surprised at the sight of me, and
+she eyed me with the frigid disdain of one who conforms to a certain code
+for one who does not conform to it. She sat in judgment on my well-hung
+skirt and the rings on my fingers and the wickedness in my breast, and
+condemned me to everlasting obloquy.
+
+'Madame is going?' she asked coldly, holding open the door.
+
+'No, madame,' I said. 'Are you the _femme de ménage_ of monsieur?'
+
+'Yes, madame.'
+
+'Monsieur is ill,' I said, deciding swiftly what to do. 'He does not wish
+to be disturbed. He would like you to return at two o'clock.'
+
+Long before two I should have departed.
+
+'Monsieur knows well that I have another _ménage_ from twelve to two,'
+protested the woman.
+
+'Three o'clock, then,' I said.
+
+_Bien_, madame,' said she, and, producing the contents of a reticule:
+'Here are the bread, the butter, the milk, and the newspaper, madame.'
+
+'Thank you, madame.'
+
+I took the things, and she left, and I shut the door and bolted it.
+
+In anticipation, the circumstances of such an encounter would have caused
+me infinite trouble of spirit. 'But after all it was not so very
+dreadful,' I thought, as I fastened the door. 'Do I care for his _femme
+de ménage_?'
+
+The great door of the house would be open now, and the stairs no longer
+affrighting, and I might slip unobserved away. But I could not bring
+myself to leave until I had spoken with Diaz, and I would not wake him.
+It was nearly noon when he stirred. I heard his movements, and a slight
+moaning sigh, and he called me.
+
+'Are you there, Magda?'
+
+How feeble and appealing his voice!
+
+For answer I stepped into his bedroom.
+
+The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a quiver
+of the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is is the
+ordered and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be abhorrent,
+nothing blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In
+the presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we
+maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin and of justice? We are, and
+that is all we should dare to say. And yet, when I saw Diaz stretched on
+that wretched bed my first movement was one of physical disgust. He had
+not shaved for several days. His hair was like a doormat. His face was
+unclean and puffed; his lips full and cracked; his eyes all discoloured.
+If aught can be vile, he was vile. If aught can be obscene, he was
+obscene. His limbs twitched; his features were full of woe and desolation
+and abasement.
+
+He looked at me heavily, mournfully.
+
+'Diaz, Diaz!' said my soul. 'Have you come to this?'
+
+A great and overmastering pity seized me, and I went to him, and laid my
+hand gently on his. He was so nervous and tremulous that he drew away his
+hand as if I had burnt it.
+
+'Oh, Magda,' he murmured, 'my head! There was a piece of hot brick in my
+mouth, and I tried to take it out. But it was my tongue. Can I have some
+tea? Will you give me some cold water first?'
+
+Strange that the frank and simple way in which he accepted my presence
+there, and assumed my willingness to serve him, filled me with a new joy!
+He said nothing of the night. I think that Diaz was one of the few men
+who are strong enough never to regret the past. If he was melancholy, it
+was merely because he suffered bodily in the present.
+
+I gave him water, and he thanked me.
+
+'Now I will make some tea,' I said.
+
+And I went into the tiny kitchen and looked around, lifting my skirts.
+
+'Can you find the things?' he called out.
+
+'Yes,' I said.
+
+'What's all that splashing?' he inquired.
+
+'I'm washing a saucepan,' I said.
+
+'I never have my meals here,' he called. 'Only tea. There are two taps to
+the gas-stove--one a little way up the chimney.'
+
+Yes, I was joyous, actively so. I brought the tea to the bedroom with a
+glad smile. I had put two cups on the tray, which I placed on the
+night-table; and there were some biscuits. I sat at the foot of the bed
+while we drank. And the umbrella, unperceived by Diaz, lay with its
+handle on a pillow, ludicrous and yet accusing.
+
+'You are an angel,' said Diaz.
+
+'Don't call me that,' I protested.
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'Because I wish it,' I said. 'Angel' was Ispenlove's word.
+
+'Then, what shall I call you?'
+
+'My name is Carlotta Peel,' I said. 'Not Magdalen at all.'
+
+It was astounding, incredible, that he should be learning my name then
+for the first time.
+
+'I shall always call you Magda,' he responded.
+
+'And now I must go,' I stated, when I had explained to him about
+the servant.
+
+'But you'll come back?' he cried.
+
+No question of his coming to me! I must come to him!
+
+'To a place like this?' I demanded.
+
+Unthinkingly I put into my voice some of the distaste I felt for his
+deplorable apartments, and he was genuinely hurt. I believe that in all
+honesty he deemed his apartments to be quite adequate and befitting. His
+sensibilities had been so dulled.
+
+He threw up his head.
+
+'Of course,' he said, 'if you--'
+
+'No, no!' I stopped him quickly. 'I will come here. I was only teasing
+you. Let me see. I'll come back at four, just to see how you are. Won't
+you get up in the meantime?'
+
+He smiled, placated.
+
+'I may do,' he said. 'I'll try to. But in case I don't, will you take my
+key? Where did you put it last night?'
+
+'I have it,' I said.
+
+He summoned me to him just as I was opening the door.
+
+'Magda!'
+
+'What is it?'
+
+I returned.
+
+'You are magnificent,' he replied, with charming, impulsive eagerness,
+his eyes resting upon me long. He was the old Diaz again. 'I can't thank
+you. But when you come back I shall play to you.'
+
+I smiled.
+
+'Till four o'clock,' I said.
+
+'Magda,' he called again, just as I was leaving, 'bring one of your books
+with you, will you?'
+
+I hesitated, with my hand on the door. When I gave him my name he had
+made no sign that it conveyed to him anything out of the ordinary. That
+was exactly like Diaz.
+
+'Have you read any of them?' I asked loudly, without moving from the
+door.
+
+'No,' he answered. 'But I have heard of them.'
+
+'Really!' I said, keeping my tone free from irony. 'Well, I will not
+bring you one of my books.'
+
+'Why not?'
+
+I looked hard at the door in front of me.
+
+'For you I will be nothing but a woman,' I said.
+
+And I fled down the stairs and past the concierge swiftly into the
+street, as anxious as a thief to escape notice. I got a fiacre at once,
+and drove away. I would not analyze my heart. I could not. I could but
+savour the joy, sweet and fresh, that welled up in it as from some secret
+source. I was so excited that I observed nothing outside myself, and when
+the cab stopped in front of my hotel, it seemed to me that the journey
+had occupied scarcely a few seconds. Do you imagine I was saddened by the
+painful spectacle of Diaz' collapse in life? No! I only knew that he
+needed sympathy, and that I could give it to him with both hands. I could
+give, give! And the last thing that the egotist in me told me before it
+expired was that I was worthy to give. My longing to assuage the lot of
+Diaz became almost an anguish.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I returned at about half-past five, bright and eager, with vague
+anticipations. I seemed to have become used to the house. It no longer
+offended me, and I had no shame in entering it. I put the key into the
+door of Diaz' flat with a clear, high sense of pleasure. He had entrusted
+me with his key; I could go in as I pleased; I need have no fear of
+inconveniencing him, of coming at the wrong moment. It seemed wonderful!
+And as I turned the key and pushed open the door my sole wish was to be
+of service to him, to comfort him, to render his life less forlorn.
+
+'Here I am!' I cried, shutting the door.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+In the smaller of the two tiny sitting-rooms the piano, which had
+been closed, was open, and I saw that it was a Pleyel. But both rooms
+were empty.
+
+'Are you still in bed, then?' I said.
+
+There was still no answer.
+
+I went cautiously into the bedroom. It, too, was empty. The bed was made,
+and the flat generally had a superficial air of tidiness. Evidently the
+charwoman had been and departed; and doubtless Diaz had gone out, to
+return immediately. I sat down in the chair in which I had spent most of
+the night. I took off my hat and put it by the side of a tiny satchel
+which I had brought, and began to wait for him. How delicious it would be
+to open the door to him! He would notice that I had taken off my hat, and
+he would be glad. What did the future, the immediate future, hold for me?
+
+A long time I waited, and then I yawned heavily, and remembered that for
+several days I had had scarcely any sleep. I shut my eyes to relieve the
+tedium of waiting. When I reopened them, dazed, and startled into sudden
+activity by mysterious angry noises, it was quite dark. I tried to recall
+where I was, and to decide what the noises could be. I regained my
+faculties with an effort. The noises were a beating on the door.
+
+'It is Diaz,' I said to myself; 'and he can't get in!'
+
+And I felt very guilty because I had slept. I must have slept for hours.
+Groping for a candle, I lighted it.
+
+'Coming! coming!' I called in a loud voice.
+
+And I went into the passage with the candle and opened the door.
+
+It was Diaz. The gas was lighted on the stairs. Between that and my
+candle he stood conspicuous in all his details. Swaying somewhat, he
+supported himself by the balustrade, and was thus distant about two feet
+from the door. He was drunk--viciously drunk; and in an instant I knew
+the cruel truth concerning him, and wondered that I had not perceived it
+before. He was a drunkard--simply that. He had not taken to drinking as a
+consequence of nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdown was a euphemism for
+the result of alcoholic excess. I saw his slow descent as in a vision,
+and everything was explained. My heart leapt.
+
+'I can save him,' I said to myself. 'I can restore him.'
+
+I was aware of the extreme difficulty of curing a drunkard, of the
+immense proportion of failures. But, I thought, if a woman such as I
+cannot by the lavishing of her whole soul and body deliver from no matter
+what fiend a man such as Diaz, then the world has changed, and the
+eternal Aphrodite is dead.
+
+'I can save him!' I repeated.
+
+Oh, heavenly moment!
+
+'Aren't you coming in?' I addressed him quietly. 'I've been
+waiting for you.'
+
+'Have you?' he angrily replied. 'I waited long enough for you.'
+
+'Well,' I said, 'come in.'
+
+'Who is it?' he demanded. 'I inzizt--who is it?'
+
+'It's I,' I answered; 'Magda.'
+
+'That's no' wha' I mean,' he went on. 'And wha's more--you know it. Who
+is it addrezzes you, madame?'
+
+'Why,' I humoured him, 'it's you, of course--Diaz.'
+
+There was the sound of a door opening on one of the lower storeys, and I
+hoped I had pacified him, and that he would enter; but I was mistaken. He
+stamped his foot furiously on the landing.
+
+'Diaz!' he protested, shouting. 'Who dares call me Diaz? Wha's my
+full name?'
+
+'Emilio Diaz,' I murmured meekly.
+
+'That's better,' he grumbled. 'What am I?'
+
+I hesitated.
+
+'Wha' am I?' he roared; and his voice went up and down the echoing
+staircase. 'I won't put foot ev'n on doormat till I'm told wha' I am
+here.'
+
+'You are the--the master,' I said. 'But do come in.'
+
+'The mas'r! Mas'r of wha'?'
+
+'Master of the pianoforte,' I answered at once.
+
+He smiled, suddenly appeased, and put his foot unsteadily on the
+doormat.
+
+'Good!' he said. 'But, un'stan', I wouldn't ev'n have pu' foot on
+doormat--no, not ev'n on doormat--'
+
+And he came in, and I shut the door, and I was alone with my wild beast.
+
+'Kiss me,' he commanded.
+
+I kissed him on the mouth.
+
+'You don't put your arms roun' me,' he growled.
+
+So I deposited the candle on the floor, and put my arms round his neck,
+standing on tip-toe, and kissed him again.
+
+He went past me, staggering and growling, into the sitting-room at the
+end of the passage, and furiously banged down the lid of the piano, so
+that every cord in it jangled deafeningly.
+
+'Light the lamp,' he called out.
+
+'In one second,' I said.
+
+I locked the outer door on the inside, slipped the key into my pocket,
+and picked up the candle.
+
+'What were you doing out there?' he demanded.
+
+'Nothing,' I said. 'I had to pick the candle up.'
+
+He seized my hat from the table and threw it to the floor. Then
+he sat down.
+
+'Nex' time,' he remarked, 'you'll know better'n to keep me waiting.'
+
+I lighted a lamp.
+
+'I'm very sorry,' I said. 'Won't you go to bed?'
+
+'I shall go to bed when I want,' he answered. 'I'm thirsty. In the
+cupboard you'll see a bottle. I'll trouble you to give it me, with a
+glass and some water.'
+
+'This cupboard?' I said questioningly, opening a cupboard papered to
+match the rest of the wall.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'But surely you can't be thirsty, Diaz?' I protested.
+
+'Must I repea' wha' I said?' he glared at me. 'I'm thirsty. Give me
+the bottle.'
+
+I took out the bottle nearest to hand. It was of a dark green colour, and
+labelled 'Extrait d'Absinthe. Pernod fils.'
+
+'Not this one, Diaz?'
+
+'Yes,' he insisted. 'Give it me. And get a glass and some water.'
+
+'No,' I said firmly.
+
+'Wha'? You won't give it me?'
+
+'No.'
+
+He jumped up recklessly and faced me. His hat fell off the back
+of his head.
+
+'Give me that bottle!'
+
+His breath poisoned the room.
+
+I retreated in the direction of the window, and put my hand on the knob.
+
+'No,' I said.
+
+He sprang at me, but not before I had opened the window and thrown out
+the bottle. I heard it fall in the roadway with a crash and scattering of
+glass. Happily it had harmed no one. Diaz was momentarily checked. He
+hesitated. I eyed him as steadily as I could, closing the while the
+window behind me with my right hand.
+
+'He may try to kill me,' I thought.
+
+My heart was thudding against my dress, not from fear, but from
+excitement. My situation seemed impossible to me, utterly passing belief.
+Yesterday I had been a staid spinster, attended by a maid, in a hotel of
+impeccable propriety. Today I had locked myself up alone with a riotous
+drunkard in a vile flat in a notorious Parisian street. Was I mad? What
+force, secret and powerful, had urged me on?... And there was the foul
+drunkard, with clenched hands and fiery eyes, undecided whether or not to
+murder me. And I waited.
+
+He moved away, inarticulately grumbling, and resumed with
+difficulty his hat.
+
+'Ver' well,' he hiccupped morosely, 'ver' well; I'm going. Tha's all.'
+
+He lurched into the passage, and then I heard him fumbling a long time
+with the outer door. He left the door and went into his bedroom, and
+finally returned to me. He held one hand behind his back. I had sunk into
+a chair by the small table on which the lamp stood, with my satchel
+beside it.
+
+'Now!' he said, halting in front of me. 'You've locked tha' door. I
+can't go out.'
+
+'Yes,' I admitted.
+
+'Give me the key.'
+
+I shook my head.
+
+'Give me the key,' he cried. 'I mus' have the key.'
+
+I shook my head.
+
+Then he showed his right hand, and it held a revolver. He bent slightly
+over the table, staring down at me as I stared up at him. But as his chin
+felt the heat rising from the chimney of the lamp, he shifted a little to
+one side. I might have rushed for shelter into some other room; I might
+have grappled with him; I might have attempted to soothe him. But I could
+neither stir nor speak. Least of all, could I give him the key--for him
+to go and publish his own disgrace in the thoroughfares. So I just gazed
+at him, inactive.
+
+'I s'll kill you!' he muttered, and raised the revolver.
+
+My throat became suddenly dry. I tried to make the motion of swallowing,
+and could not. And looking at the revolver, I perceived in a swift
+revelation the vast folly of my inexperience. Since he was already drunk,
+why had I not allowed him to drink more, to drink himself into a stupor?
+Drunkards can only be cured when they are sober. To commence a course of
+moral treatment at such a moment as I had chosen was indeed the act of a
+woman. However, it was too late to reclaim the bottle from the street.
+
+I saw that he meant to kill me. And I knew that previously, during our
+encounter at the window, I had only pretended to myself that I thought
+there was a risk of his killing me. I had pretended, in order to increase
+the glory of my martyrdom in my own sight. Moreover, my brain, which was
+working with singular clearness, told me that for his sake I ought to
+give up the key. His exposure as a helpless drunkard would be infinitely
+preferable to his exposure as a murderer.
+
+Yet I could not persuade myself to relinquish the key. If I did so, he
+would imagine that he had frightened me. But I had no fear, and I could
+not bear that he should think I had.
+
+He fired.
+
+My ears sang. The room was full of a new odour, and a cloud floated
+reluctantly upwards from the mouth of the revolver. I sneezed, and then I
+grew aware that, firing at a distant of two feet, he had missed me. What
+had happened to the bullet I could not guess. He put the revolver down on
+the table with a groan, and the handle rested on my satchel.
+
+'My God, Magda!' he sighed, pushing back his hair with his
+beautiful hand.
+
+He was somewhat sobered. I said nothing, but I observed that the lamp was
+smoking, and I turned down the wick. I was so self-conscious, so
+irresolute, so nonplussed, that in sheer awkwardness, like a girl at a
+party who does not know what to do with her hands, I pushed the revolver
+off the satchel, and idly unfastened the catch of the satchel. Within it,
+among other things, was my sedative. I, too, had fallen the victim of a
+habit. For five years a bad sleeper, I had latterly developed into a very
+bad sleeper, and my sedative was accordingly strong.
+
+A notion struck me.
+
+'Drink a little of this, my poor Diaz!' I murmured.
+
+'What is it?' he asked.
+
+'It will make you sleep,' I said.
+
+With a convulsive movement he clutched the bottle and uncorked it, and
+before I could interfere he had drunk nearly the whole of its contents.
+
+'Stop!' I cried. 'You will kill yourself!'
+
+'What matter!' he exclaimed; and staggered off to the darkness of
+the bedroom.
+
+I followed him with the lamp, but he had already fallen on the bed, and
+seemed to be heavily asleep. I shook him; he made no response.
+
+'At any cost he must he roused,' I said aloud. 'He must be forced to
+walk.'
+
+There was a knocking at the outer door, low, discreet, and continuous. It
+sounded to me like a deliverance. Whoever might be there must aid me to
+waken Diaz. I ran to the door, taking the key out of my pocket, and
+opened it. A tall woman stood on the doormat. It was the girl that I had
+glimpsed on the previous night in the large hat ascending the stairs with
+a man. But now her bright golden head was uncovered, and she wore a blue
+_peignoir_, such as is sold ready made, with its lace and its ribbons, at
+all the big Paris shops.
+
+We both hesitated.
+
+'Oh, pardon, madame,' she said, in a thin, sweet voice in French. 'I was
+at my door, and it seemed to me that I heard--a revolver. Nothing serious
+has passed, then? Pardon, madame.'
+
+'Nothing, thank you. You are very amiable, madame,' I replied stiffly.
+
+'All my excuses, madame,' said she, turning away.
+
+'No, no!' I exclaimed. 'I am wrong. Do not go. Someone is ill--very ill.
+If you would--'
+
+She entered.
+
+'Where? What is it?' she inquired.
+
+'He is in the bedroom--here.'
+
+We both spoke breathlessly, hurrying to the bedroom, after I had
+fetched the lamp.
+
+'Wounded? He has done himself harm? Ah!'
+
+'No,' I said, 'not that.'
+
+And I explained to her that Diaz had taken at least six doses of my
+strong solution of trional.
+
+I seized the lamp and held it aloft over the form of the sleeper, which
+lay on its side cross-wise, the feet projecting a little over the edge
+of the bed, the head bent forward and missing the pillow, the arms
+stretched out in front--the very figure of abandoned and perfect
+unconsciousness. And the girl and I stared at Diaz, our shoulders
+touching, in the kennel.
+
+'He must be made to walk about,' I said. 'You would be extremely kind
+to help me.'
+
+'No, madame,' she replied. 'He will be very well like that. When one is
+alcoholic, one cannot poison one's self; it is impossible. All the
+doctors will tell you as much. Your friend will sleep for twenty
+hours--twenty-four hours--and he will waken himself quite
+re-established.'
+
+'You are sure? You know?'
+
+'I know, madame. Be tranquil. Leave him. He could not have done better.
+It is perfect.'
+
+'Perhaps I should fetch a doctor?' I suggested.
+
+'It is not worth the pain,' she said, with conviction. 'You would have
+vexations uselessly. Leave him.'
+
+I gazed at her, studying her, and I was satisfied. With her fluffly
+locks, and her simple eyes, and her fragile face, and her long hands,
+she had, nevertheless, the air of knowing profoundly her subject. She
+was a great expert on males and all that appertained to them, especially
+their vices. I was the callow amateur. I was compelled to listen with
+respect to this professor in the professor's garb. I was impressed, in
+spite of myself.
+
+'One might arrange him more comfortably,' she said.
+
+And we lifted the senseless victim, and put him on his back, and
+straightened his limbs, as though he had been a corpse.
+
+'How handsome he is!' murmured my visitor, half closing her eyes.
+
+'You think so?' I said politely, as if she had been praising one of my
+private possessions.
+
+'Oh yes. We are neighbours, madame. I have frequently remarked him, you
+understand, on the stairs, in the street.'
+
+'Has he been here long?' I asked.
+
+'About a year, madame. You have, perhaps, not seen him since a long time.
+An old friend?'
+
+'It is ten years ago,' I replied.
+
+'Ah! Ten years! In England, without doubt?'
+
+'In England, yes.'
+
+'Ten years!' she repeated, musing.
+
+'I am certain she has a kind heart,' I said to myself, and I decided to
+question her: 'Will you not sit down, madame?' I invited her.
+
+'Ah, madame! it is you who should sit down,' she said quickly. 'You must
+have suffered.'
+
+We both sat down. There were only two chairs in the room.
+
+'I would like to ask you,' I said, leaning forward towards her, 'have
+you ever seen him--drunk--before?'
+
+'No,' she replied instantly; 'never before yesterday evening.'
+
+'Be frank,' I urged her, smiling sadly.
+
+'Why should I not be frank, madame?' she said, with a grave,
+gentle appeal.
+
+It was as if she had said: 'We are talking woman to woman. I know one of
+your secrets. You can guess mine. The male is present, but he is deaf.
+What reason, therefore, for deceit?'
+
+'I am much obliged to you,' I breathed.
+
+'Not at all,' she said. 'Decidedly he is alcoholic--that sees itself,'
+she proceeded. 'But drunk--no!... He was always alone.'
+
+'Always alone?'
+
+'Always.'
+
+Her eyes filled. I thought I had never seen a creature more gentle,
+delicate, yielding, acquiescent, and fair. She was not beautiful, but she
+had grace and distinction of movement. She was a Parisienne. She had won
+my sympathy. We met in a moment when my heart needed the companionship of
+a woman's heart, and I was drawn to her by one of those sudden impulses
+that sometimes draw women to each other. I cared not what she was.
+Moreover, she had excited my curiosity. She was a novelty in my life.
+She was something that I had heard of, and seen--yes, and perhaps envied
+in secret, but never spoken with. And she shattered all my preconceptions
+about her.
+
+'You are an old tenant of this house?' I ventured.
+
+'Yes,' she said; 'it suits me. But the great heats are terrible here.'
+
+'You do not leave Paris, then?'
+
+'Never. Except to see my little boy.'
+
+I started, envious of her, and also surprised. It seemed strange that
+this ribboned and elegant and plastic creature, whose long, thin arms
+were used only to dalliance, should be a mother.
+
+'So you have a little boy?'
+
+'Yes; he lives with my parents at Meudon. He is four years old.
+
+'Excuse me,' I said. 'Be frank with me once again. Do you love your
+child, honestly? So many women don't, it appears.'
+
+'Do I love him?' she cried, and her face glowed with her love. 'I adore
+him!' Her sincerity was touching and overwhelming. 'And he loves me, too.
+If he is naughty, one has only to tell him that he will make his _petite
+mère_ ill, and he will be good at once. When he is told to obey his
+grandfather, because his grandfather provides his food, he says bravely:
+"No, not grandpapa; it is _petite mère_!" Is it not strange he should
+know that I pay for him? He has a little engraving of the Queen of Italy,
+and he says it is his _petite mère_. Among the scores of pictures he has
+he keeps only that one. He takes it to bed with him. It is impossible to
+deprive him of it.'
+
+She smiled divinely.
+
+'How beautiful!' I said. 'And you go to see him often?'
+
+'As often as I have time. I take him out for walks. I run with him till
+we reach the woods, where I can have him to myself alone. I never stop; I
+avoid people. No one except my parents knows that he is my child. One
+supposes he is a nurse-child, received by my parents. But all the world
+will know now,' she added, after a pause. 'Last Monday I went to Meudon
+with my friend Alice, and Alice wanted to buy him some sweets at the
+grocer's. In the shop I asked him if he would like _dragées_, and he said
+"Yes." The grocer said to him, "Yes who, young man?" "Yes, _petite
+mère_," he said, very loudly and bravely. The grocer understood. We all
+lowered our heads.'
+
+There was something so affecting in the way she half whispered the last
+phrase, that I could have wept; and yet it was comical, too, and she
+appreciated that.
+
+'You have no child, madame?' she asked me.
+
+'No,' I said. 'How I envy you!'
+
+'You need not,' she observed, with a touch of hardness. 'I have been so
+unhappy, that I can never be as unhappy again. Nothing matters now. All I
+wish is to save enough money to be able to live quietly in a little
+cottage in the country.'
+
+'With your child,' I put in.
+
+'My child will grow up and leave me. He will become a man, and he will
+forget his _petite mère.'_
+
+'Do not talk like that,' I protested.
+
+She glanced at me almost savagely. I was astonished at the sudden change
+in her face.
+
+'Why not?' she inquired coldly. 'Is it not true, then? Do you still
+believe that there is any difference between one man and another?
+They are all alike--all, all, all! I know. And it is we who suffer,
+we others.'
+
+'But surely you have some tender souvenir of your child's father?' I
+said.
+
+'Do I know who my child's father is?' she demanded. 'My child has
+thirty-six fathers!'
+
+'You seem very bitter,' I said, 'for your age. You are much younger
+than I am.'
+
+She smiled and shook her honey-coloured hair, and toyed with the ribbons
+of her _peignoir_.
+
+'What I say is true,' she said gently. 'But, there, what would you have?
+We hate them, but we love them. They are beasts! beasts! but we cannot do
+without them!'
+
+Her eyes rested on Diaz for a moment. He slept without the least sound,
+the stricken and futile witness of our confidences.
+
+'You will take him away from Paris soon, perhaps?' she asked.
+
+'If I can,' I said.
+
+There was a sound of light footsteps on the stair. They stopped at the
+door, which I remembered we had not shut. I jumped up and went into the
+passage. Another girl stood in the doorway, in a _peignoir_ the exact
+counterpart of my first visitor's, but rose-coloured. And this one, too,
+was languorous and had honey-coloured locks. It was as though the
+mysterious house was full of such creatures, each with her secret lair.
+
+'Pardon, madame,' said my visitor, following and passing me; and then to
+the newcomer: 'What is it, Alice?'
+
+'It is Monsieur Duchatel who is arrived.'
+
+'Oh!' with a disdainful gesture. '_Je m'en fiche._ Let him go.'
+
+'But it is the nephew, my dear; not the uncle.'
+
+'Ah, the nephew! I come. _Bon soir, madams, et bonne nuit_.'
+
+The two _peignoirs_ fluttered down the stairs together. I returned to my
+Diaz, and seeing his dressing-gown behind the door of the bedroom, I took
+it and covered him with it.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+His first words were:
+
+'Magda, you look like a ghost. Have you been sitting there like that all
+the time?'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I lay down.'
+
+'Where?'
+
+'By your side.'
+
+'What time is it?'
+
+'Tea-time. The water is boiling.
+
+'Was I dreadful last night?'
+
+'Dreadful? How?'
+
+'I have a sort of recollection of getting angry and stamping about. I
+didn't do anything foolish?'
+
+'You took a great deal too much of my sedative,' I answered.
+
+'I feel quite well,' he said; 'but I didn't know I had taken any
+sedative at all. I'm glad I didn't do anything silly last night.'
+
+I ran away to prepare the tea. The situation was too much for me.
+
+'My poor Diaz!' I said, when we had begun to drink the tea, and he was
+sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes full of sleep, his chin rough,
+and his hair magnificently disarranged, 'you did one thing that was silly
+last night.'
+
+'Don't tell me I struck you?' he cried.
+
+'Oh no!' and I laughed. 'Can't you guess what I mean?'
+
+'You mean I got vilely drunk.'
+
+I nodded.
+
+'Magda,' he burst out passionately, seeming at this point fully to arouse
+himself, to resume acutely his consciousness, 'why were you late? You
+said four o'clock. I thought you had deceived me. I thought I had
+disgusted you, and that you didn't mean to return. I waited more than an
+hour and a quarter, and then I went out in despair.'
+
+'But I came just afterwards,' I protested. 'You had only to wait a few
+more minutes. Surely you could have waited a few more minutes?'
+
+'You said four o'clock,' he repeated obstinately.
+
+'It was barely half-past five when I came,' I said.
+
+'I had meant never to drink again,' he went on.
+
+'You were so kind to me. But then, when you didn't come--'
+
+'You doubted me, Diaz. You ought to have been sure of me.'
+
+'I was wrong.'
+
+'No, no!' I said. 'It was I who was wrong. But I never thought that an
+hour and a half would make any difference.'
+
+There was a pause.
+
+'Ah, Magda, Magda!'--he suddenly began to weep; it was
+astounding--'remember that you had deserted me once before. Remember
+that. If you had not done that, my life might have been different. It
+_would_ have been different.'
+
+'Don't say so,' I pleaded.
+
+'Yes, I must say so. You cannot imagine how solitary my life has been.
+Magda, I loved you.'
+
+And I too wept.
+
+His accent was sincerity itself. I saw the young girl hurrying secretly
+out of the Five Towns Hotel. Could it be true that she had carried away
+with her, unknowing, the heart of Diaz? Could it be true that her panic
+flight had ruined a career? The faint possibility that it was true made
+me sick with vain grief.
+
+'And now I am old and forgotten and disgraced,' he said.
+
+'How old are you, Diaz?'
+
+'Thirty-six,' he answered.
+
+'Why,' I said, 'you have thirty years to live.'
+
+'Yes; and what years?'
+
+'Famous years. Brilliant years.'
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'I am done for--' he murmured, and his head sank.
+
+'Are you so weak, then?' I took his hand. 'Are you so weak? Look at me.'
+
+He obeyed, and his wet eyes met mine. In that precious moment I lived.
+
+'I don't know,' he said.
+
+'You could not have looked at me if you had not been strong, very
+strong,' I said firmly. 'You told me once that you had a house near
+Fontainebleau. Have you still got it?'
+
+'I suppose so.'
+
+'Let us go there, and--and--see.'
+
+'But--'
+
+'I should like to go,' I insisted, with a break in my voice.
+
+'My God!' he exclaimed in a whisper, 'my God!'
+
+I was sobbing violently, and my forehead was against the rough stuff
+of his coat.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+And one morning, long afterwards, I awoke very early, and the murmuring
+of the leaves of the forest came through the open window. I had known
+that I should wake very early, in joyous anticipation of that day. And
+as I lay he lay beside me, lost in the dreamless, boyish, natural sleep
+that he never sought in vain. He lay, as always, slightly on his right
+side, with his face a little towards me--his face that was young again,
+and from which the bane had passed. It was one of the handsomest,
+fairest faces in the world, one of the most innocent, and one of the
+strongest; the face of a man who follows his instincts with the direct
+simplicity of a savage or a child, and whose instincts are sane and
+powerful. Seen close, perfectly at rest, as I saw it morning after
+morning, it was full of a special and mysterious attraction. The fine
+curves of the nostrils and of the lobe of the ear, the masterful lines
+of the mouth, the contours of the cheek and chin and temples, the tints
+of the flesh subtly varying from rose to ivory, the golden crown of
+hair, the soft moustache. I had learned every detail by heart; my eyes
+had dwelt on them till they had become my soul's inheritance, till they
+were mystically mine, drawing me ever towards them, as a treasure draws.
+Gently moving, I would put my ear close, close, and listen to the breath
+of life as it entered regularly, almost imperceptibly, vivifying that
+organism in repose. There is something terrible in the still beauty of
+sleep. It is as though the spiritual fabric hangs inexplicably over the
+precipice of death. It seems impossible, or at least miraculous, that
+the intake and the expulsion upon which existence depends should
+continue thus, minute by minute, hour by hour. It is as though one stood
+on the very confines of life, and could one trace but one step more, one
+single step, one would unveil the eternal secret. I would not listen
+long; the torture was too sweet, too exquisite, and I would gently slide
+back to my place.... His hand was on the counterpane, near to my
+breast--the broad hand of the pianist, with a wrist of incredible force,
+and the fingers tapering suddenly at the end to a point. I let my own
+descend on it as softly as snow. Ah, ravishing contact! He did not move.
+And while my small hand touched his I gazed into the spaces of the
+bedroom, with its walls of faded blue tapestry and its white curtains,
+and its marble and rosewood, and they seemed to hold peace, as the
+hollows of a field hold dew; they seemed to hold happiness as a great
+tree holds sunlight in its branches; and outside was the murmuring of
+the leaves of the forest and the virginal freshness of the morning.
+
+Surely he must wake earlier that day! I pursed my lips and blew tenderly,
+mischievously, on his cheek, lying with my cheek full on the pillow, so
+that I could watch him. The muscles of his mouth twitched, his inner
+being appeared to protest. And then began the first instinctive blind
+movement of the day with him. His arms came forward and found my neck,
+and drew me forcibly to him, and then, just before our lips touched, he
+opened his eyes and shut them again. So it occurred every morning. Ere
+even his brain had resumed activity his heart had felt its need of me.
+This it was that was so wonderful, so overpowering! And the kiss, languid
+and yet warm, heavy with a human scent, with the scent of the night,
+honest, sensuous, and long--long! As I lay thus, clasped in his arms, I
+half closed my eyes, and looked into his eyes through my lashes, smiling,
+and all was a delicious blur....
+
+It was the summit of bliss! No! I have never mounted higher! I asked
+myself, astounded, what I had done that I should receive such happiness,
+what I had done that existence should have no flaw for me. And what _had_
+I done? I know not, I know not. It passes me. I am lost in my joy. For I
+had not even cured him. I had anticipated painful scenes, interminable
+struggles, perhaps a relapse. But nothing of the kind. He had simply
+ceased at once the habit--that was all. We never left each other. And his
+magnificent constitution had perfectly recovered itself in a few months.
+I had done nothing.
+
+'Magda,' he murmured indistinctly, drawing his mouth an inch away from
+mine, 'why can't your dark hair always be loose over your shoulders like
+that? It is glorious!'
+
+'What ideas you have!' I murmured, more softly than he. 'And do you know
+what it is to-day?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'You've forgotten?' I pouted.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Guess.'
+
+'No; you must tell me. Not your birthday? Not mine?'
+
+'It's just a year since I met you,' I whispered timidly.
+
+Our mouths met again, and, so enlocked, we rested, savouring the true
+savour of life. And presently my hand stole up to his head and stroked
+his curls.
+
+Every morning he began to practise at eight o'clock, and continued till
+eleven. The piano, a Steinway in a hundred Steinways, was in the further
+of the two drawing-rooms. He would go into the room smoking a cigarette,
+and when he had thrown away the cigarette I would leave him. And as soon
+as I had closed the door the first notes would resound, slow and solemn,
+of the five-finger exercises with which he invariably commenced his
+studies. That morning, as often, I sat writing in the enclosed garden. I
+always wrote in pencil on my knee. The windows of the drawing-room were
+wide open, and Diaz' music filled the garden. The sheer beauty of his
+tone was such that to hear him strike even an isolated note gave
+pleasure. He created beauty all the time. His five-finger exercises were
+lovely patterns of sound woven with exact and awful deliberation. It
+seemed impossible that these should be the same bald and meaningless
+inventions which I had been wont to repeat. They were transformed. They
+were music. The material in which he built them was music itself,
+enchanting the ear as much by the quality of the tone as by the
+impeccable elegance of the form. To hear Diaz play a scale, to catch that
+measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal
+splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born--this was to
+perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine
+magic that is the soul of the divinest art. I used to believe that
+nothing could surpass the beauty of a scale, until Diaz, after writing
+formal patterns in the still air innumerably, and hypnotizing me with
+that sorcery, would pass suddenly to the repetition of fragments of Bach.
+And then I knew that hitherto he had only been trying to be more purely
+and severely mechanical than a machine, and that now the interpreter was
+at work. I have heard him repeat a passage fifty times--and so
+slowly!--and each rendering seemed more beautiful than the last; and it
+was more beautiful than the last. He would extract the final drop of
+beauty from the most beautiful things in the world. Washed, drenched in
+this circumambient ether of beauty, I wrote my verse. Perhaps it may
+appear almost a sacrilege that I should have used the practising of a
+Diaz as a background for my own creative activity. I often thought so.
+But when one has but gold, one must put it to lowly use. So I wrote, and
+he passed from Bach to Chopin.
+
+Usually he would come out into the garden for five minutes at half-past
+nine to smoke a cigarette, but that morning it had struck ten before the
+music ceased. I saw him. He walked absent-minded along the terrace in
+the strange silence that had succeeded. He was wearing his
+riding-breeches, for we habitually rode at eleven. And that morning I did
+not hide my work when he came. It was, in fact, finished; the time had
+arrived to disclose it. He stopped in front of me in the sunlight,
+utterly preoccupied with himself and his labours. He had the rapt look on
+his face which results from the terrible mental and spiritual strain of
+practising as he practised.
+
+'Satisfied?' I asked him.
+
+He frowned.
+
+'There are times when one gets rather inspired,' he said, looking at me,
+as it were, without seeing me. 'It's as if the whole soul gets into one's
+hands. That's what's wanted.'
+
+'You had it this morning?'
+
+'A bit.'
+
+He smiled with candid joy.
+
+'While I was listening--' I began.
+
+'Oh!' he broke in impulsively, violently, 'it isn't you that have to
+listen. It's I that have to listen. It's the player that has to listen.
+He's got to do more than listen. He's got to be _in_ the piano with his
+inmost heart. If he isn't on the full stretch of analysis the whole
+blessed time, he might just as well be turning the handle of a
+barrel-organ.'
+
+He always talked about his work during the little 'recess' which he took
+in the middle of the morning. He pretended to be talking to me, but it
+was to himself that he talked. He was impatient if I spoke.
+
+'I shall be greater than ever,' he proceeded, after a moment. And his
+attitude towards himself was so disengaged, so apart and aloof, so
+critically appreciative, that it was impossible to accuse him of egoism.
+He was, perhaps, as amazed at his own transcendent gift as any other
+person could be, and he was incapable of hiding his sensations. 'Yes,' he
+repeated; 'I think I shall be greater than ever. You see, a Chopin player
+is born; you can't make him. With Chopin it's not a question of
+intellect. It's all tone with Chopin--_tone_, my child, even in the most
+bravura passages. You've got to get it.'
+
+'Yes,' I agreed.
+
+He gazed over the tree-tops into the blue sky.
+
+'I may be ready in six months,' he said.
+
+'I think you will,' I concurred, with a judicial air. But I honestly
+deemed him to be more than ready then.
+
+Twelve months previously he had said: 'With six hours' practice a day
+for two years I shall recover what I have lost.'
+
+He had succeeded beyond his hopes.
+
+'Are you writing in that book?' he inquired carelessly as he threw down
+the cigarette and turned away.
+
+'I have just finished something,' I replied.
+
+'Oh!' he said, 'I'm glad you aren't idle. It's so boring.'
+
+He returned to the piano, perfectly incurious about what I did,
+self-absorbed as a god. And I was alone in the garden, with the
+semicircle of trees behind me, and the façade of the old house and its
+terrace in front. And lying on the lawn, just under the terrace, was
+the white end of the cigarette which he had abandoned; it breathed
+upwards a thin spiral of blue smoke through the morning sunshine, and
+then it ceased to breathe. And the music recommenced, on a different
+plane, more brilliantly than before. It was as though, till then, he
+had been laboriously building the bases of a tremendous triumphal arch,
+and that now the two wings met, dazzlingly, soaringly, in highest
+heaven, and the completed arch became a rainbow glittering in the face
+of the infinite. He played two of his great concert pieces, and their
+intricate melodies--brocaded, embroidered, festooned--poured themselves
+through the windows into the garden in a procession majestic and
+impassioned, perturbing the intent soul of the solitary listener,
+swathing her in intoxicating sound. It was the unique virtuoso born
+again, proudly displaying the ultimate sublime end of all those
+slow-moving exercises to which he had subdued his fingers. Not for ten
+years had I heard him play so.
+
+When we first came into the house I had said bravely to myself: 'His
+presence shall not deter me from practising as I have always done.' And
+one afternoon I had sat down to the piano full of determination to
+practise without fear of him, without self-consciousness. But before my
+hands had touched the keys shame took me, unreasoning, terror-struck
+shame, and I knew in an instant that while he lived I should never more
+play the piano. He laughed lightly when I told him, and I called myself
+silly. Yet now, as I sat in the garden, I saw how right I had been. And I
+wondered that I should ever have had the audacity even to dream of
+playing in his house; the idea was grotesque. And he did not ask me to
+play, save when there arrived new orchestral music arranged for four
+hands. Then I steeled myself to the ordeal of playing with him, because
+he wished to try over the music. And he would thank me, and say that
+pianoforte duets were always very enjoyable. But he did not pretend that
+I was not an amateur, and he never--thank God!--suggested that we should
+attempt _Tristan_ again....
+
+At last he finished. And I heard distantly the bell which he had rung for
+his glass of milk. And, remembering that I was not ready for the ride, I
+ran with guilty haste into the house and upstairs.
+
+The two bay horses were waiting, our English groom at their heads, when I
+came out to the porch. Diaz was impatiently tapping his boot with his
+whip. He was not in the least a sporting man, but he loved the sensation
+of riding, and the groom would admit that he rode passably; but he loved
+more to strut in breeches, and to imitate in little ways the sporting
+man. I had learnt to ride in order to please him.
+
+'Come along,' he exclaimed.
+
+His eyes said: 'You are always late.' And I was. Some people always know
+exactly what point they have reached in the maze and jungle of the day,
+just as mariners are always aware, at the back of their minds, of the
+state of the tide. But I was not born so.
+
+Diaz helped me to mount, and we departed, jingling through the gate and
+across the road into a glade of the forest, one of those long sandy
+defiles, banked on either side, and over-shadowed with tall oaks, which
+pierce the immense forest like rapiers. The sunshine slanted through the
+crimsoning leafwork and made irregular golden patches on the dark sand to
+the furthest limit of the perspective. And though we could not feel the
+autumn wind, we could hear it in the tree-tops, and it had the sound of
+the sea. The sense of well-being and of joy was exquisite. The beauty of
+horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and irrational as young
+girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange is that their vast strength
+does not seem incongruous with it. To be above that proud and lovely
+organism, listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nervous far beyond the
+human, to feel one's self almost part of it by intimate contact, to yield
+to it, and make it yield, to draw from it into one's self some of its
+exultant vitality--in a word, to ride--yes, I could comprehend Diaz' fine
+enthusiasm for that! I could share it when he was content to let the
+horses amble with noiseless hoofs over the soft ways. But when he would
+gallop, and a strong wind sprang up to meet our faces, and the earth
+shook and thundered, and the trunks of the trees raced past us, then I
+was afraid. My fancy always saw him senseless at the foot of a tree while
+his horse calmly cropped the short grass at the sides of the path, or
+with his precious hand twisted and maimed! And I was in agony till he
+reined in. I never dared to speak to him of this fear, nor even hint to
+him that the joy was worth less than the peril. He would have been angry
+in his heart, and something in him stronger than himself would have
+forced him to increase the risks. I knew him! ... Ah! but when we went
+gently, life seemed to be ideal for me, impossibly perfect! It seemed to
+contain all that I could ever have demanded of it.
+
+I looked at him sideways, so noble and sane and self-controlled. And the
+days in Paris had receded, far and dim and phantom-like. Was it
+conceivable that they had once been real, and that we had lived through
+them? And was this Diaz, the world-renowned darling of capitals, riding
+by me, a woman whom he had met by fantastic chance? Had he really hidden
+himself in my arms from the cruel stare of the world and the insufferable
+curiosity of admirers who, instead of admiring, had begun to pity? Had I
+in truth saved him? Was it I who would restore him to his glory? Oh, the
+astounding romance that my life had been! And he was with me! He shared
+my life, and I his! I wondered what would happen when he returned to his
+bright kingdom. I was selfish enough to wish that he might never return
+to his kingdom, and that we might ride and ride for ever in the forest.
+
+And then we came to a circular clearing, with an iron cross in the
+middle, where roads met, a place such as occurs magically in some ballade
+of Chopin's. And here we drew rein on the leaf-strewn grass, breathing
+quickly, with reddened cheeks, and the horses nosed each other, with long
+stretchings of the neck and rattling of bits.
+
+'So you've been writing again?' said Diaz, smiling quizzically.
+
+'Yes,' I answered. 'I've been writing a long time, but I haven't let
+_you_ know anything about it; and just to-day I've finished it.'
+
+'What is it--another novel?'
+
+'No; a little drama in verse.'
+
+'Going to publish it?'
+
+'Why, naturally.'
+
+Diaz was aware that I enjoyed fame in England and America. He was
+probably aware that my books had brought me a considerable amount of
+money. He had read some of my works, and found them excellent--indeed, he
+was quite proud of my talent. But he did not, he could not, take
+altogether seriously either my talent or my fame. I knew that he always
+regarded me as a child gracefully playing at a career. For him there was
+only one sort of fame; all the other sorts were shadows. A supreme
+violinist might, perhaps, approach the real thing, in his generous mind;
+but he was incapable of honestly believing that any fame compared with
+that of a pianist. The other fames were very well, but they were paste to
+the precious stone, gewgaws to amuse simple persons. The sums paid to
+sopranos struck him as merely ridiculous in their enormity. He could not
+be called conceited; nevertheless, he was magnificently sure that he had
+been, and still was, the most celebrated person in the civilized world.
+Certainly he had no superiors in fame, but he would not admit the
+possibility of equals. Of course, he never argued such a point; it was a
+tacit assumption, secure from argument. And with that he profoundly
+reverenced the great composers. The death of Brahms affected him for
+years. He regarded it as an occasion for universal sorrow. Had Brahms
+condescended to play the piano, Diaz would have turned the pages for him,
+and deemed himself honoured--him whom queens had flattered!
+
+'Did you imagine,' I began to tease him, after a pause, 'that while you
+are working I spend my time in merely existing?'
+
+'You exist--that is enough, my darling,' he said. 'Strange that a
+beautiful woman can't understand that in existing she is doing her
+life's work!'
+
+And he leaned over and touched my right wrist below the glove.
+
+'You dear thing!' I murmured, smiling. 'How foolish you can be!'
+
+'What's the drama about?' he asked.
+
+'About La Vallière,' I said.
+
+'La Vallière! But that's the kind of subject I want for my opera!'
+
+'Yes,' I said; 'I have thought so.'
+
+'Could you turn it into a libretto, my child?'
+
+'No, dearest.'
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'Because it already is a libretto. I have written it as such.'
+
+'For me?'
+
+'For whom else?'
+
+And I looked at him fondly, and I think tears came to my eyes.
+
+'You are a genius, Magda!' he exclaimed. 'You leave nothing undone for
+me. The subject is the very thing to suit Villedo.'
+
+'Who is Villedo?'
+
+'My jewel, you don't know who Villedo is! Villedo is the director of the
+Opéra Comique in Paris, the most artistic opera-house in Europe. He used
+to beg me every time we met to write him an opera.'
+
+'And why didn't you?'
+
+'Because I had neither the subject nor the time. One doesn't write
+operas after lunch in hotel parlours; and as for a good libretto--well,
+outside Wagner, there's only one opera in the world with a good libretto,
+and that's _Carmen_.'
+
+Diaz, who had had a youthful operatic work performed at the Royal School
+of Music in London, and whose numerous light compositions for the
+pianoforte had, of course, enjoyed a tremendous vogue, was much more
+serious about his projected opera than I had imagined. He had frequently
+mentioned it to me, but I had not thought the idea was so close to his
+heart as I now perceived it to be. I had written the libretto to amuse
+myself, and perhaps him, and lo! he was going to excite himself; I well
+knew the symptoms.
+
+'You wrote it in that little book,' he said. 'You haven't got it in
+your pocket?'
+
+'No,' I answered. 'I haven't even a pocket.'
+
+He would not laugh.
+
+'Come,' he said--'come, let's see it.'
+
+He gathered up his loose rein and galloped off. He could not wait
+an instant.
+
+'Come along!' he cried imperiously, turning his head.
+
+'I am coming,' I replied; 'but wait for me. Don't leave me like
+that, Diaz.'
+
+The old fear seized me, but nothing could stop him, and I followed as
+fast as I dared.
+
+'Where is it?' he asked, when we reached home.
+
+'Upstairs,' I said.
+
+And he came upstairs behind me, pulling my habit playfully, in an effort
+to persuade us both that his impatience was a simulated one. I had to
+find my keys and unlock a drawer. I took the small, silk-bound volume
+from the back part of the drawer and gave it to him.
+
+'There!' I exclaimed. 'But remember lunch is ready.'
+
+He regarded the book.
+
+'What a pretty binding!' he said. 'Who worked it?'
+
+'I did.'
+
+'And, of course, your handwriting is so pretty, too!' he added, glancing
+at the leaves. '"La Vallière, an opera in three acts."'
+
+We exchanged a look, each of us deliciously perturbed, and then he ran
+off with the book.
+
+He had to be called three times from the garden to lunch, and he brought
+the book with him, and read it in snatches during the meal, and while
+sipping his coffee. I watched him furtively as he turned over the pages.
+
+'Oh, you've done it!' he said at length--'you've done it! You evidently
+have a gift for libretto. It is neither more nor less than perfect! And
+the subject is wonderful!'
+
+He rose, walked round the table, and, taking my head between his hands,
+kissed me.
+
+'Magda,' he said, 'you're the cleverest girl that was ever born.'
+
+'Then, do you think you will compose it?' I asked, joyous.
+
+'Do I think I will compose it! Why, what do you imagine? I've already
+begun. It composes itself. I'm now going to read it all again in the
+garden. Just see that I'm not worried, will you?'
+
+'You mean you don't want me there. You don't care for me any more.'
+
+It amused me to pretend to pout.
+
+'Yes,' he laughed; 'that's it. I don't care for you any more.'
+
+He departed.
+
+'Have no fear!' I cried after him. 'I shan't come into your horrid
+garden!'
+
+His habit was to resume his practice at three o'clock. The hour was then
+half-past one. I wondered whether he would allow himself to be seduced
+from the piano that afternoon by the desire to compose. I hoped not, for
+there could be no question as to the relative importance to him of the
+two activities. To my surprise, I heard the piano at two o'clock,
+instead of at three, and it continued without intermission till five.
+Then he came, like a sudden wind, on to the terrace where I was having
+tea. Diaz would never take afternoon tea. He seized my hand impulsively.
+
+'Come down,' he said--'down under the trees there.'
+
+'What for?'
+
+'I want you.'
+
+'But, Diaz, let me put my cup down. I shall spill the tea on my dress.'
+
+'I'll take your cup.'
+
+'And I haven't nearly finished my tea, either. And you're hurting me.'
+
+'I'll bring you a fresh cup,' he said. 'Come, come!'
+
+And he dragged me off, laughing, to the lower part of the garden, where
+were two chairs in the shade. And I allowed myself to be dragged.
+
+'There! Sit down. Don't move. I'll fetch your tea.'
+
+And presently he returned with the cup.
+
+'Now that you've nearly killed me,' I said, 'and spoilt my dress, perhaps
+you'll explain.'
+
+He produced the silk-bound book of manuscript from his pocket and put it
+in my unoccupied hand.
+
+'I want you to read it to me aloud, all of it,' he said.
+
+'Really?'
+
+'Really.'
+
+'What a strange boy you are!' I chided.
+
+Then I drank the tea, straightened my features into seriousness, and
+began to read.
+
+The reading occupied less than an hour. He made no remark when it was
+done, but held out his hand for the book, and went out for a walk. At
+dinner he was silent till the servants had gone. Then he said musingly:
+
+'That scene in the cloisters between Louise and De Montespan is a great
+idea. It will be magnificent; it will be the finest thing in the opera.
+What a subject you have found! what a subject!' His tone altered. 'Magda,
+will you do something to oblige me?'
+
+'If it isn't foolish.'
+
+'I want you to go to bed.'
+
+'Out of the way?' I smiled.
+
+'Go to bed and to sleep,' he repeated.
+
+'But why?'
+
+'I want to walk about this floor. I must be alone.'
+
+'Well,' I said, 'just to prove how humble and obedient I am, I will go.'
+
+And I held up my mouth to be kissed.
+
+Wondrous, the joy I found in playing the decorative, acquiescent,
+self-effacing woman to him, the pretty, pouting plaything! I liked him to
+dismiss me, as the soldier dismisses his charmer at the sound of the
+bugle. I liked to think upon his obvious conviction that the libretto was
+less than nothing compared to the music. I liked him to regard the whole
+artistic productivity of my life as the engaging foible of a pretty
+woman. I liked him to forget that I had brought him alive out of Paris. I
+liked him to forget to mention marriage to me. In a word, he was Diaz,
+and I was his.
+
+And as I lay in bed I even tried to go to sleep, in my obedience, because
+I knew he would wish it. But I could not easily sleep for anticipating
+his triumph of the early future. His habits of composition were extremely
+rapid. It might well occur that he would write the entire opera in a few
+months, without at all sacrificing the piano. And naturally any operatic
+manager would be loath to refuse an opera signed by Diaz. Villedo,
+apparently so famous, would be sure to accept it, and probably would
+produce it at once. And Diaz would have a double triumph, a dazzling and
+gorgeous re-entry into the world. He might give his first recital in the
+same week as the _première_ of the opera. And thus his shame would never
+be really known to the artistic multitude. The legend of a nervous
+collapse could be insisted on, and the opera itself would form a
+sufficient excuse for his retirement.... And I should be the secret cause
+of all this glory--I alone! And no one would ever guess what Diaz owed to
+me. Diaz himself would never appreciate it. I alone, withdrawn from the
+common gaze, like a woman of the East, Diaz' secret fountain of strength
+and balm--I alone should be aware of what I had done. And my knowledge
+would be enough for me.
+
+I imagine I must have been dreaming when I felt a hand on my cheek.
+
+'Magda, you aren't asleep, are you?'
+
+Diaz was standing over me.
+
+'No, no!' I answered, in a voice made feeble by sleep. And I looked
+up at him.
+
+'Put something on and come downstairs, will you?'
+
+'What time is it?'
+
+'Oh, I don't know. One o'clock.'
+
+'You've been working for over three hours, then!'
+
+I sat up.
+
+'Yes,' he said proudly. 'Come along. I want to play you my notion of the
+overture. It's only in the rough, but it's there.'
+
+'You've begun with the overture?'
+
+'Why not, my child? Here's your dressing-gown. Which is the top
+end of it?'
+
+I followed him downstairs, and sat close by him at the piano, with one
+limp hand on his shoulder. There was no light in the drawing-rooms, save
+one candle on the piano. My slipper escaped off my bare foot. As Diaz
+played he looked at me constantly, demanding my approval, my enthusiasm,
+which I gave him from a full heart. I thought the music charming, and, of
+course, as he played it...!
+
+'I shall only have three motives,' he said. 'That's the La Vallière
+motive. Do you see the idea?'
+
+'You mean she limps?'
+
+'Precisely. Isn't it delightful?'
+
+'She won't have to limp much, you know. She didn't.'
+
+'Just the faintest suggestion. It will be delicious. I can see Morenita
+in the part. Well, what do you think of it?'
+
+I could not speak. His appeal, suddenly wistful, moved me so. I leaned
+forward and kissed him.
+
+'Dear girl!' he murmured.
+
+Then he blew out the candle. He was beside himself with excitement.
+
+'Diaz,' I cried, 'what's the matter with you? Do have a little sense.
+And you've made me lose my slipper.'
+
+'I'll carry you upstairs,' he replied gaily.
+
+A faint illumination came from the hall, so that we could just see each
+other. He lifted me off the chair.
+
+'No!' I protested, laughing. 'And my slipper.... The servants!'
+
+'Stuff!'
+
+I was a trifle in those arms.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+The triumphal re-entry into the world has just begun, and exactly as Diaz
+foretold. And the life of the forest is over. We have come to Paris, and
+he has taken Paris, and already he is leaving it for other shores, and I
+am to follow. At this moment, while I write because I have not slept and
+cannot sleep, his train rolls out of St. Lazare.
+
+Last night! How glorious! But he is no longer wholly mine. The world has
+turned his face a little from my face....
+
+It was as if I had never before realized the dazzling significance of
+the fame of Diaz. I had only once seen him in public. And though he
+conquered in the Jubilee Hall of the Five Towns, his victory, personal
+and artistic, at the Opera Comique, before an audience as exacting,
+haughty, and experienced as any in Europe, was, of course, infinitely
+more striking--a victory worthy of a Diaz.
+
+I sat alone and hidden at the back of a _baignoire_ in the auditorium. I
+had drawn up the golden grille, by which the occupants of a _baignoire_
+may screen themselves from the curiosity of the _parterre_. I felt like
+some caged Eastern odalisque, and I liked so to feel. I liked to exist
+solely for him, to be mysterious, and to baffle the general gaze in order
+to be more precious to him. Ah, how I had changed! How he had changed me!
+
+It was Thursday, a subscription night, and, in addition, all Paris was in
+the theatre, a crowded company of celebrities, of experts, and of
+perfectly-dressed women. And no one knew who I was, nor why I was there.
+The vogue of a musician may be universal, but the vogue of an English
+writer is nothing beyond England and America. I had not been to a
+rehearsal. I had not met Villedo, nor even the translator of my verse. I
+had wished to remain in the background, and Diaz had not crossed me. Thus
+I gazed through the bars of my little cell across the rows of bald heads,
+and wonderful coiffures, and the waving arms of the conductor, and the
+restless, gliding bows of the violinists, and saw a scene which was
+absolutely strange and new to me. And it seemed amazing that these
+figures which I saw moving and chanting with such grace in a palace
+garden, authentic to the last detail of historical accuracy, were my La
+Vallière and my Louis, and that this rich and coloured music which I
+heard was the same that Diaz had sketched for me on the piano, from
+illegible scraps of ruled paper, on the edge of the forest. The full
+miracle of operatic art was revealed to me for the first time.
+
+And when the curtain fell on the opening act, the intoxicating human
+quality of an operatic success was equally revealed to me for the first
+time. How cold and distant the success of a novelist compared to this!
+The auditorium was suddenly bathed in bright light, and every listening
+face awoke to life as from an enchantment, and flushed and smiled, and
+the delicatest hands in France clapped to swell the mighty uproar that
+filled the theatre with praise. Paris, upstanding on its feet, and
+leaning over balconies and cheering, was charmed and delighted by the
+fable and the music, in which it found nothing but the sober and pretty
+elegance that it loves. And Paris applauded feverishly, and yet with a
+full sense of the value of its applause--given there in the only French
+theatre where the claque has been suppressed. And then the curtain rose,
+and La Vallière and Louis tripped mincingly forward to prove that after
+all they were Morenita and Montfériot, the darlings of their dear Paris,
+and utterly content with their exclusively Parisian reputation. Three
+times they came forward. And then the applause ceased, for Paris is not
+Naples, and it is not Madrid, and the red curtain definitely hid the
+stage, and the theatre hummed with animated chatter as elegant as Diaz'
+music, and my ear, that loves the chaste vivacity of the French tongue,
+was caressed on every side by its cadences.
+
+'This is the very heart of civilization,' I said to myself. 'And even in
+the forest I could not breathe more freely.'
+
+I stared up absently at Benjamin Constant's blue ceiling, meretricious
+and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of Paris, and
+my eyes moistened because the world is so beautiful in such various ways.
+
+Then the door of the _baignoire_ opened. It was Diaz himself who
+appeared. He had not forgotten me in the excitements of the stage and
+the dressing-rooms. He put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and I
+glanced at him.
+
+'Well?' he murmured, and gave me a box of bonbons elaborately tied with
+rich ribbons.
+
+And I murmured, 'Well?'
+
+The glory of his triumph was upon him. But he understood why my eyes were
+wet, and his fingers moved soothingly on my shoulder.
+
+'You won't come round?' he asked. 'Both Villedo and Morenita are dying to
+meet you.'
+
+I shook my head, smiling.
+
+'You're satisfied?'
+
+'More than satisfied,' I answered. 'The thing is wonderful.'
+
+'I think it's rather charming,' he said. 'By the way, I've just had an
+offer from New York for it, and another from Rome.'
+
+I nodded my appreciation.
+
+'You don't want anything?'
+
+'Nothing, thanks,' I said, opening the box of bonbons, 'except these.
+Thanks so much for thinking of them.'
+
+'Well--'
+
+And he left me again.
+
+In the second act the legend--has not the tale of La Vallière acquired
+almost the quality of a legend?--grew in persuasiveness and in
+magnificence. It was the hour of La Vallière's unwilling ascendancy, and
+it foreboded also her fall. The situations seemed to me to be poignantly
+beautiful, especially that in which La Vallière and Montespan and the
+Queen found themselves together. And Morenita had perceived my meaning
+with such a sure intuition. I might say that she showed me what I had
+meant. Diaz, too, had given to my verse a voice than which it appeared
+impossible that anything could be more appropriate. The whole effect was
+astonishing, ravishing. And within me--far, far within the recesses of my
+glowing heart--a thin, clear whisper spoke and said that I, and I alone,
+was the cause of that beauty of sight and sound. Not Morenita, and not
+Montfériot, not Diaz himself, but Magda, the self-constituted odalisque,
+was its author. I had thought of it; I had schemed it; I had fashioned
+it; I had evoked the emotion in it. The others had but exquisitely
+embroidered my theme. Without me they must have been dumb and futile. On
+my shoulders lay the burden and the glory. And though I was amazed,
+perhaps naively, to see what I had done, nevertheless I had done it--I!
+The entire opera-house, that complicated and various machine, was simply
+a means to express me. And it was to my touch on their heartstrings that
+the audience vibrated. With all my humility, how proud I was--coldly and
+arrogantly proud, as only the artist can be! I wore my humility as I wore
+my black gown. Even Diaz could not penetrate to the inviolable place in
+my heart, where the indestructible egoism defied the efforts of love to
+silence it. And yet people say there is nothing stronger than love.
+
+At the close of the act, while the ringing applause, much more
+enthusiastic than before, gave certainty of a genuine and extraordinary
+success, I could not help blushing. It was as if I was in danger of being
+discovered as the primal author of all that fleeting loveliness, as if my
+secret was bound to get about, and I to be forced from my seclusion in
+order to receive the acclamations of Paris. I played nervously and
+self-consciously with my fan, and I wrapped my humility closer round me,
+until at length the tumult died away, and the hum of charming, eager
+chatter reassured my ears again.
+
+Diaz did not come. The entr'acte stretched out long, and the chatter lost
+some of its eagerness, and he did not come. Perhaps he could not come.
+Perhaps he was too much engaged, too much preoccupied, to think of the
+gallantry which he owed to his mistress. A man cannot always be dreaming
+of his mistress. A mistress must be reconciled to occasional neglect; she
+must console herself with chocolates. And they were chocolates from
+Marquis's, in the Passage des Panoramas....
+
+Then he came, accompanied.
+
+A whirl of high-seasoned, laughing personalities invaded my privacy.
+Diaz, smiling humorously, was followed by a man and a cloaked woman.
+
+'Dear lady,' he said, with an intimate formality, 'I present Mademoiselle
+Morenita and Monsieur Villedo. They insisted on seeing you. Mademoiselle,
+Monsieur--Mademoiselle Peel.'
+
+I stood up.
+
+'All our excuses,' said Villedo, in a low, discreet voice, as he
+carefully shut the door. 'All our excuses, madame. But it was necessary
+that I should pay my respects--it was stronger than I.'
+
+And he came forward, took my hand, and raised it to his lips. He is a
+little finicking man, with a little gray beard, and the red rosette in
+his button-hole, and a most consummate ease of manner.
+
+'Monsieur,' I replied, 'you are too amiable. And you, madame. I cannot
+sufficiently thank you both.'
+
+Morenita rushed at me with a swift, surprising movement, her cloak
+dropping from her shoulders, and taking both my hands, she kissed me
+impulsively.
+
+'You have genius,' she said; 'and I am proud. I am ashamed that I cannot
+read English; but I have the intention to learn in order to read your
+books. Our Diaz says wonderful things of them.'
+
+She is a tall, splendidly-made, opulent creature, of my own age, born for
+the footlights, with an extremely sweet and thrilling voice, and that
+slight coarseness or exaggeration of gesture and beauty which is the
+penalty of the stage. She did not in the least resemble a La Vallière as
+she stood there gazing at me, with her gleaming, pencilled eyes and
+heavy, scarlet lips. It seemed impossible that she could refine herself
+to a La Vallière. But that woman is the drama itself. She would act no
+matter what. She has always the qualities necessary to a rôle. And the
+gods have given her green eyes, so that she may be La Vallière to the
+very life.
+
+I began to thank her for her superb performance.
+
+'It is I who should thank you,' she answered. 'It will be my greatest
+part. Never have I had so many glorious situations in a part. Do you
+like my limp?'
+
+She smiled, her head on one side. Success glittered in those orbs.
+
+'You limp adorably,' I said.
+
+'It is my profession to make compliments,' Villedo broke in; and then,
+turning to Morenita, '_N'est-ce pas, ma belle créature_? But really'--he
+turned to me again--'but very sincerely, all that there is of most
+sincerely, dear madame, your libretto is made with a virtuosity
+astonishing. It is _du théâtre_. And with that a charm, an emotion...!
+One would say--'
+
+And so it continued, the flattering stream, while Diaz listened, touched,
+and full of pride.
+
+'Ah!' I said. 'It is not I who deserve praise.'
+
+An electric bell trembled in the theatre.
+
+Morenita picked up her cloak.
+
+'_Mon ami_,' she warned Villedo. 'I must go. Diaz, _mon petit_! you will
+persuade Mademoiselle Peel to come to the room of the Directeur later.
+Madame, a few of us will meet there--is it not so, Villedo? We shall
+count on you, madame. You have hidden yourself too long.'
+
+I glanced at Diaz, and he nodded. As a fact, I wished to refuse; but I
+could not withstand the seduction of Morenita. She had a physical
+influence which was unique in my experience.
+
+'I accept,' I said.
+
+'_A tout à l'heure_, then,' she twittered gaily; and they left as they
+had come, Villedo affectionately toying with Morenita's hand.
+
+Diaz remained behind a moment.
+
+'I am so glad you didn't decline,' he said. 'You see, here in this
+theatre Morenita is a queen. I wager she has never before in all her life
+put herself out of the way as she has done for you to-night.'
+
+'Really!' I faltered.
+
+And, indeed, as I pondered over it, the politeness of these people
+appeared to be marvellous, and so perfectly accomplished. Villedo, who
+has made a European reputation and rejuvenated his theatre in a dozen
+years, is doubtless, as he said, a professional maker of compliments. In
+his position a man must be. But, nevertheless, last night's triumph is
+officially and very genuinely Villedo's. While as for Morenita and Diaz,
+the mere idea of these golden stars waiting on me, the librettist,
+effacing themselves, rendering themselves subordinate at such a moment,
+was fantastic. It passed the credible.... A Diaz standing silent and
+deferential, while an idolized prima donna stepped down from her throne
+to flatter me in her own temple! All that I had previously achieved of
+renown seemed provincial, insular.
+
+But Diaz took his own right place in the spacious salon of Villedo
+afterwards, after all the applause had ceased, and the success had been
+consecrated, and the enraptured audience had gone, and the lights were
+extinguished in the silent auditorium. It is a room that seems to be
+furnished with nothing but a grand piano and a large, flat writing-table
+and a few chairs. On the walls are numberless signed portraits of singers
+and composers, and antique playbills of the Opéra Comique, together with
+strange sinister souvenirs of the great fires which have destroyed the
+house and its patrons in the past. When Diaz led me in, only Villedo and
+the principal artists and Pouvillon, the conductor, were present.
+Pouvillon, astonishingly fat, was sitting on the table, idly swinging the
+electric pendant over his head; while Morenita occupied Villedo's
+armchair, and Villedo talked to Montfériot and another man in a corner.
+But a crowd of officials of the theatre ventured on Diaz' heels. And then
+came Monticelli, the _première danseuse_, in a coat and skirt, and then
+some of her rivals. And as the terrible Director did not protest, the
+room continued to fill until it was full to the doors, where stood a
+semicircle of soiled, ragged scene-shifters and a few fat old women, who
+were probably dressers. Who could protest on such a night? The democracy
+of a concerted triumph reigned. Everybody was joyous, madly happy.
+Everybody had done something; everybody shared the prestige, and the rank
+and file might safely take generals by the hand.
+
+Diaz was then the centre of attraction. It was recognised that he had
+entered that sphere from a wider one, bringing with him a radiance
+brighter than he found there. He was divine last night. All felt that he
+was divine. He spoke to everyone with an admirable modesty, gaily, his
+eyes laughing. Several women kissed him, including Morenita. Not that I
+minded. In the theatre the code is different, coarser, more banal. He
+alone raised this crowd above its usual level and gave it distinction.
+
+Someone suggested that, as the piano was there, he should play, and
+the demand ran from mouth to mouth. Villedo, appreciating its
+audacity, made a gesture to indicate that such a thing could not be
+asked. But Diaz instantly said that, if it would give pleasure, he
+would play with pleasure.
+
+And he sat down to the piano, and looked round, smiling, and the room was
+hushed in a moment, and each face was turned towards him.
+
+'What?' he ejaculated. And then, as no definite recommendation was
+offered, he said: 'Do you wish that I improvise?'
+
+The idea was accepted with passionate, noisy enthusiasm.
+
+A cold perspiration broke out over my whole body. I must have turned
+very pale.
+
+'You are not ill, madame?' asked that ridiculous fop, Montfèriot, who
+had been presented to me, and was whispering the most fatuous
+compliments.
+
+'No, I thank you.'
+
+The fact was that Diaz, since his retirement, had not yet played to
+anyone except myself. This was his first appearance. I was afraid for
+him. I trembled for him. I need not have done. He was absolutely master
+of his powers. His fingers announced, quite simply, one of the most
+successful airs from _La Vallière_, and then he began to decorate it with
+an amazing lacework of variations, and finished with a bravura display
+such as no pianist could have surpassed. The performance, marvellous in
+itself, was precisely suited to that audience, and it electrified the
+audience; it electrified even me. Diaz fought his way through kisses and
+embraces to Villedo, who stood on his toes and wept and put his arms
+round Diaz' neck.
+
+'_Cher maître_,' he cried, 'you overwhelm us!'
+
+'You are too kind, all of you,' said Diaz. 'I must ask permission to
+retire. I have to conduct Mademoiselle Peel to her hotel, and there is
+much for me to do during the night. You know I start very early
+to-morrow.'
+
+'_Hélas!_ Morenita sighed.
+
+I had blushed. Decidedly I behaved like a girl last night. But, indeed,
+the new, swift realization, as Diaz singled me out of that multitude,
+that after all he utterly belonged to me, that he was mine alone, was
+more than I could bear with equanimity. I was the proudest woman in the
+universe. I scorned the lot of all other women.
+
+The adieux were exchanged, and there were more kisses. '_Au revoir! Bon
+voyage_! Much success over there.'
+
+The majority of these good, generous souls were in tears.
+
+Villedo opened a side-door, and we escaped into a corridor, only Morenita
+and one or two others accompanying us to the street.
+
+And on the pavement a carpet had been laid. The electric brougham was
+waiting. I gathered up my skirt and sprang in. Diaz followed, smiling at
+me. He put his head out of the window and said a few words. Morenita blew
+a kiss. Villedo bowed profoundly. The carriage moved in the direction of
+the boulevard.... I had carried him off. Oh, the exquisite dark intimacy
+of the interior of that smooth-rolling brougham! When, after the theatre,
+a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory
+in the fact that she is his? Is it not the most delicious of avowals?
+There is something in the enforced bend of one's head as one steps in.
+And when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap--
+
+I wondered idly what Morenita and Villedo thought of our relations. They
+must surely guess.
+
+We went down the boulevard and by the Rue Royale into the Place de la
+Concorde, where vehicles flitted mysteriously in a maze of lights under
+the vast dome of mysterious blue. And Paris, in her incomparable toilette
+of a June night, seemed more than ever the passionate city of love that
+she is, recognising candidly, with the fearless intellectuality of the
+Latin temperament, that one thing only makes life worth living. How soft
+was the air! How languorous the pose of the dim figures that passed us
+half hidden in other carriages! And in my heart was the lofty joy of work
+done, definitely accomplished, and a vista of years of future pleasure.
+My happiness was ardent and yet calm--a happiness beyond my hopes, beyond
+what a mortal has the right to dream of. Nothing could impair it, not
+even Diaz' continued silence as to a marriage between us, not even the
+imminent brief separation that I was to endure.
+
+'My child,' said Diaz suddenly, 'I'm very hungry. I've never been
+so hungry.'
+
+'You surely didn't forget to have your dinner?' I exclaimed.
+
+'Yes, I did,' he admitted like a child; 'I've just remembered.'
+
+'Diaz!' I pouted, and for some strange reason my bliss was intensified,
+'you are really terrible! What can I do with you? You will eat before
+you leave me. I must see to that. We can get something for you at the
+hotel, perhaps.'
+
+'Suppose we go to a supper restaurant?' he said.
+
+Without waiting for my reply, he seized the dangling end of the
+speaking-tube and spoke to the driver, and we swerved round and regained
+the boulevard.
+
+And in the private room of a great, glittering restaurant, one of a long
+row of private rooms off a corridor, I ate strawberries and cream and
+sipped champagne while Diaz went through the entire menu of a supper.
+
+'Your eyes look sad,' he murmured, with a cigar between his teeth. 'What
+is it? We shall see each other again in a fortnight.'
+
+He was to resume his career by a series of concerts in the United States.
+A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents,
+had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and
+fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played
+at no concert before he played in New York. And in order to reach New
+York in time for the first concert, it was imperative that he should
+catch the _Touraine_ at Havre. I was to follow in a few days by a
+Hamburg-American liner. Diaz had judged it more politic that we should
+not travel together. In this he was undoubtedly right.
+
+I smiled proudly.
+
+'I am both sad and happy,' I answered.
+
+He moved his chair until it touched mine, and put his arm round my neck,
+and brought my face close to his.
+
+'Look at me,' he said.
+
+And I looked into his large, splendid eyes.
+
+'You mustn't think,' he whispered, 'that, because I don't talk about it,
+I don't feel that I owe everything to you.'
+
+I let my face fall on his breast. I knew I had flushed to the ears.
+
+'My poor boy,' I sobbed, 'if you talk about that I shall never
+forgive you.'
+
+It was heaven itself. No woman has ever been more ecstatically happy than
+I was then.
+
+He rang for the bill.
+
+We parted at the door of my hotel. In the carriage we had exchanged one
+long, long kiss. At the last moment I wanted to alter the programme, go
+with him to his hotel to assist in his final arrangements, and then see
+him off at early morning at the station. But he refused. He said he could
+not bear to part from me in public. Perhaps it was best so. Just as I
+turned away he put a packet into my hand. It contained seven banknotes
+for ten thousand francs each, money that it had been my delight to lend
+him from time to time. Foolish, vain, scrupulous boy! I knew not where he
+had obtained--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is now evening. Diaz is on the sea. While writing those last lines I
+was attacked by fearful pains in the right side, and cramp, so that I
+could not finish. I can scarcely write now. I have just seen the old
+English doctor. He says I have appendicitis, perhaps caused by pips of
+strawberries. And that unless I am operated on at once--And that even
+if--He is telephoning to the hospital. Diaz! No; I shall come safely
+through the affair. Without me Diaz would fall again. I see that now. And
+I have had no child. I must have a child. Even that girl in the blue
+_peignoir_ had a--Chance is a strange--
+
+_Extract translated from 'Le Temps,' the Paris Evening Paper_.
+
+OBSEQUIES OF MISS PELL (_sic_).
+
+The obsequies of Mademoiselle Pell, the celebrated English poetess, and
+author of the libretto of _La Vallière_, were celebrated this morning at
+eleven o'clock in the Church of St. Honoré d'Eylau.
+
+The chief mourners were the doctor who assisted at the last moments of
+Mademoiselle Pell, and M. Villedo, director of the Opéra-Comique.
+
+Among the wreaths we may cite those of the Association of Dramatic
+Artists, of Madame Morenita, of the management of the Opéra-Comique, and
+of the artists of the Opéra-Comique.
+
+Mass was said by a vicar of the parish, and general absolution given by
+M. le Curé Marbeau.
+
+During the service there was given, under the direction of M. Lêtang,
+chapel-master, the _Funeral March_ of Beethoven, the _Kyrie_ of
+Neidermeyer, the _Pie Jesu_ of Stradella, the _Ego Sum_ of Gounod, the
+_Libera Me_ of S. Rousseau.
+
+M. Deep officiated at the organ.
+
+After the ceremony the remains were transported to the cemetery of
+Père-Lachaise and cremated.
+
+
+
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diff --git a/old/11360-8.zip b/old/11360-8.zip
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+  <head>
+    <meta content="pg2html (binary v0.17)" name="linkgenerator" />
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Sacred and Profane Love, by Arnold Bennett
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .75em; margin-bottom: .75em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; text-align: justify; font-size: 80%; font-style: italic;}
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .xx-small {font-size: 60%;}
+    .x-small {font-size: 75%;}
+    .small {font-size: 85%;}
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+    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
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+    .indent20  { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .indent25  { margin-left: 25%;}
+    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
+    .indent35  { margin-left: 35%;}
+    .indent40  { margin-left: 40%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
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+                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
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+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+  <pre>
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sacred And Profane Love , by E. Arnold Bennett
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Sacred And Profane Love
+
+Author: E. Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: February 28, 2004  [eBook #11360]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE ***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      A Novel In Three Episodes
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      By Arnold Bennett
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1905
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      TO MY FRIEND EDEN PHILLPOTTS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Novelist For Whom Man And Nature Are Inseparable With Profound Respect
+      For The Classical Dignity Of His Aim And Equal Admiration For The Austere
+      Splendour Of His Performance
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> PART I &mdash; IN THE NIGHT </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> PART II &mdash; THREE HUMAN HEARTS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> PART III &mdash; THE VICTORY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <i>&lsquo;How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women
+        of the <br /> past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have
+        opened for the <br /> kiss, and who are dead! The kiss&mdash;it is
+        immortal! It passes from lip to <br /> lip, from century to century, from
+        age to age. Men gather it, give it <br /> back, and die.&lsquo;</i>&mdash;GUY
+        DE MAUPASSANT. <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART I &mdash; IN THE NIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love&mdash;and by love I
+      mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul,
+      fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level
+      of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of my
+      twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in amorous
+      dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the
+      piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to
+      conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me:
+      warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round
+      on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and I
+      asked myself: &lsquo;Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?&rsquo;
+      For even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and
+      the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at
+      the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of those
+      rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort of
+      beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian room,
+      large and stately and symmetrical, full&mdash;but not too full&mdash;of
+      twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes, gilt
+      tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and here and
+      there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, recalled the Empire period and
+      the deserted Napoleonic palaces of France. The expanse of yellow and green
+      carpet had been married to the floor by two generations of decorous feet,
+      and the meaning of its tints was long since explained away. Never have I
+      seen a carpet with less individuality of its own than that carpet; it was
+      so sweetly faded, amiable, and flat, that its sole mission in the world
+      seemed to be to make things smooth for the chairs. The wall-paper looked
+      like pale green silk, and the candles were reflected in it as they were
+      reflected in the crystals of the chandelier. The grand piano, a Collard
+      and Collard, made a vast mass of walnut in the chamber, incongruous,
+      perhaps, but still there was something in its mild and indecisive tone
+      that responded to the furniture. It, too, spoke of Evangelicalism, the
+      Christian Year, and a dignified reserved confidence in Christ&rsquo;s
+      blood. It, too, defied the assault of time and the invasion of ideas. It,
+      too, protested against Chopin and romance, and demanded Thalberg&rsquo;s
+      variations on &lsquo;Home, Sweet Home.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My great-grandfather, the famous potter&mdash;second in renown only to
+      Wedgwood&mdash;had built that Georgian house, and my grandfather had
+      furnished it; and my parents, long since dead, had placidly accepted it
+      and the ideal that it stood for; and it had devolved upon my Aunt
+      Constance, and ultimately it would devolve on me, the scarlet woman in a
+      dress of virginal white, the inexplicable offspring of two changeless and
+      blameless families, the secret revolutionary, the living lie! How had I
+      come there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to the window, and, pulling the curtain aside, looked vaguely out
+      into the damp, black garden, from which the last light was fading. The
+      red, rectangular house stood in the midst of the garden, and the garden
+      was surrounded by four brick walls, which preserved it from four streets
+      where dwelt artisans of the upper class. The occasional rattling of a cart
+      was all we caught of the peaceable rumour of the town; but on clear nights
+      the furnaces of Cauldon Bar Ironworks lit the valley for us, and we were
+      reminded that our refined and inviolate calm was hemmed in by rude
+      activities. On the east border of the garden was a row of poplars, and
+      from the window I could see the naked branches of the endmost. A gas-lamp
+      suddenly blazed behind it in Acre Lane, and I descried a bird in the tree.
+      And as the tree waved its plume in the night-wind, and the bird swayed on
+      the moving twig, and the gas-lamp burned meekly and patiently beyond, I
+      seemed to catch in these simple things a glimpse of the secret meaning of
+      human existence, such as one gets sometimes, startlingly, in a mood of
+      idle receptiveness. And it was so sad and so beautiful, so full of an
+      ecstatic melancholy, that I dropped the curtain. And my thought ranged
+      lovingly over our household&mdash;prim, regular, and perfect: my old aunt
+      embroidering in the breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in the
+      impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion that
+      Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in fancy
+      all over the house&mdash;the attics, my aunt&rsquo;s bedroom so
+      miraculously neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the
+      corridors where clocks ticked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had the sense of the curious compact organism of which my aunt was the
+      head, and into which my soul had strayed by some caprice of fate. What I
+      felt was that the organism was suspended in a sort of enchantment,
+      lifelessly alive, unconsciously expectant of the magic touch which would
+      break the spell, and I wondered how long I must wait before I began to
+      live. I know now that I was happy in those serene preliminary years, but
+      nevertheless I had the illusion of spiritual woe. I sighed grievously as I
+      went back to the piano, and opened the volume of Mikuli&rsquo;s Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as I was beginning to play, Rebecca came into the room. She was a
+      maid of forty years, and stout; absolutely certain of a few things, and
+      quite satisfied in her ignorance of all else; an important person in our
+      house, and therefore an important person in the created universe, of which
+      our house was for her the centre. She wore the white cap with distinction,
+      and when an apron was suspended round her immense waist it ceased to be an
+      apron, and became a symbol, like the apron of a Freemason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, Rebecca?&rsquo; I said, without turning my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I guessed urgency, otherwise Rebecca would have delegated Lucy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If you please, Miss Carlotta, your aunt is not feeling well, and she will
+      not be able to go to the concert to-night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not be able to go to the concert!&rsquo; I repeated mechanically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, miss.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will come downstairs.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I were you, I shouldn&rsquo;t, miss. She&rsquo;s dozing a bit just
+      now.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Very well.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went on playing. But Chopin, who was the chief factor in my emotional
+      life; who had taught me nearly all I knew of grace, wit, and tenderness;
+      who had discovered for me the beauty that lay in everything, in sensuous
+      exaltation as well as in asceticism, in grief as well as in joy; who had
+      shown me that each moment of life, no matter what its import, should be
+      lived intensely and fully; who had carried me with him to the dizziest
+      heights of which passion is capable; whose music I spiritually
+      comprehended to a degree which I felt to be extraordinary&mdash;Chopin had
+      almost no significance for me as I played then the most glorious of his
+      compositions. His message was only a blurred sound in my ears. And
+      gradually I perceived, as the soldier gradually perceives who has been hit
+      by a bullet, that I was wounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shock was of such severity that at first I had scarcely noticed it.
+      What? My aunt not going to the concert? That meant that I could not go.
+      But it was impossible that I should not go. I could not conceive my
+      absence from the concert&mdash;the concert which I had been anticipating
+      and preparing for during many weeks. We went out but little, Aunt
+      Constance and I. An oratorio, an amateur operatic performance, a ballad
+      concert in the Bursley Town Hall&mdash;no more than that; never the
+      Hanbridge Theatre. And now Diaz was coming down to give a pianoforte
+      recital in the Jubilee Hall at Hanbridge; Diaz, the darling of European
+      capitals; Diaz, whose name in seven years had grown legendary; Diaz, the
+      Liszt and the Rubenstein of my generation, and the greatest interpreter of
+      Chopin since Chopin died&mdash;Diaz! Diaz! No such concert had ever been
+      announced in the Five Towns, and I was to miss it! Our tickets had been
+      taken, and they were not to be used! Unthinkable! A photograph of Diaz
+      stood in a silver frame on the piano; I gazed at it fervently. I said:
+      &lsquo;I will hear you play the Fantasia this night, if I am cut in pieces
+      for it to-morrow!&rsquo; Diaz represented for me, then, all that I desired
+      of men. All my dreams of love and freedom crystallized suddenly into Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran downstairs to the breakfast-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You aren&rsquo;t going to the concert, auntie?&rsquo; I almost sobbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat in her rocking-chair, and the gray woollen shawl thrown round her
+      shoulders mingled with her gray hair. Her long, handsome face was a little
+      pale, and her dark eyes darker than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t feel well enough,&rsquo; she replied calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not observed the tremor in my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what&rsquo;s the matter?&rsquo; I insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing in particular, my dear. I do not feel equal to the exertion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, auntie&mdash;then I can&rsquo;t go, either.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m very sorry, dear,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;We will go to the
+      next concert.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz will never come again!&rsquo; I exclaimed passionately. &lsquo;And
+      the tickets will be wasted.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear,&rsquo; my Aunt Constance repeated, &lsquo;I am not equal to it.
+      And you cannot go alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was utterly selfish in that moment. I cared nothing whatever for my aunt&rsquo;s
+      indisposition. Indeed, I secretly accused her of maliciously choosing that
+      night of all nights for her mysterious fatigue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, auntie,&rsquo; I said, controlling myself, &lsquo;I must go, really.
+      I shall send Lucy over with a note to Ethel Ryley to ask her to go with
+      me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do,&rsquo; said my aunt, after a considerable pause, &lsquo;if you are
+      bent on going.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have often thought since that during that pause, while we faced each
+      other, my aunt had for the first time fully realized how little she knew
+      of me; she must surely have detected in my glance a strangeness, a
+      contemptuous indifference, an implacable obstinacy, which she had never
+      seen in it before. And, indeed, these things were in my glance. Yet I
+      loved my aunt with a deep affection. I had only one grievance against her.
+      Although excessively proud, she would always, in conversation with men,
+      admit her mental and imaginative inferiority, and that of her sex. She
+      would admit, without being asked, that being a woman she could not see
+      far, that her feminine brain could not carry an argument to the end, and
+      that her feminine purpose was too infirm for any great enterprise. She
+      seemed to find a morbid pleasure in such confessions. As regards herself,
+      they were accurate enough; the dear creature was a singularly good judge
+      of her own character. What I objected to was her assumption, so calm and
+      gratuitous, that her individuality, with all its confessed limitations,
+      was, of course, superior&mdash;stronger, wiser, subtler than mine. She
+      never allowed me to argue with her; or if she did, she treated my remarks
+      with a high, amused tolerance. &lsquo;Wait till you grow older,&rsquo; she
+      would observe, magnificently ignorant of the fact that my soul was already
+      far older than hers. This attitude naturally made me secretive in all
+      affairs of the mind, and most affairs of the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We took in the county paper, the <i>Staffordshire Recorder,</i> and the <i>Rock</i>
+      and the <i>Quiver</i>. With the help of these organs of thought, which I
+      detested and despised, I was supposed to be able to keep discreetly and
+      sufficiently abreast of the times. But I had other aids. I went to the
+      Girls&rsquo; High School at Oldcastle till I was nearly eighteen. One of
+      the mistresses there used to read continually a red book covered with
+      brown paper. I knew it to be a red book because the paper was gone at the
+      corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in
+      the book&mdash;she would pick it up at every spare moment&mdash;excited in
+      me an ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on
+      the title-page, <i>Introduction to the Study of Sociology</i>, by Herbert
+      Spencer. Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that
+      astonished and charmed me. I said: &lsquo;Why are not our school histories
+      like this?&rsquo; The owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it
+      to me, but she would not, nor would she give me any reason for declining.
+      Soon afterwards I left school. I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free
+      Library at the Wedgwood Institution. But the book was not in the
+      catalogue. (How often, in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the
+      reading-room, where men read the daily papers and the magazines, without
+      daring to enter!) At length I audaciously decided to buy the book. I
+      ordered it, not at our regular stationer&rsquo;s in Oldcastle Street, but
+      at a little shop of the same kind in Trafalgar Road. In three days it
+      arrived. I called for it, and took it home secretly in a cardboard
+      envelope-box. I went to bed early, and I began to read. I read all night,
+      thirteen hours. O book with the misleading title&mdash;for you have
+      nothing to do with sociology, and you ought to have been called <i>How to
+      Think Honestly</i>&mdash;my face flushed again and again as I perused your
+      ugly yellowish pages! Again and again I exclaimed: &lsquo;But this is
+      marvellous!&rsquo; I had not guessed that anything so honest, and so
+      courageous, and so simple, and so convincing had ever been written. I am
+      capable now of suspecting that Spencer was not a supreme genius; but he
+      taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing is sacred that
+      will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory. The next morning after
+      breakfast I fell asleep in a chair. &lsquo;My dear!&rsquo; protested Aunt
+      Constance. &lsquo;Ah,&rsquo; I thought, &lsquo;if you knew, Aunt
+      Constance, if you had the least suspicion, of the ideas that are surging
+      and shining in my head, you would go mad&mdash;go simply mad!&rsquo; I did
+      not care much for deception, but I positively hated clumsy concealment,
+      and the red book was in the house; at any moment it might be seized. On a
+      shelf of books in my bedroom was a novel called <i>The Old Helmet</i>,
+      probably the silliest novel in the world. I tore the pages from the
+      binding and burnt them; I tore the binding from Spencer and burnt it; and
+      I put my treasure in the covers of <i>The Old Helmet</i>. Once Rebecca, a
+      person privileged, took the thing away to read; but she soon brought it
+      back. She told me she had always understood that <i>The Old Helmet</i> was
+      more, interesting than that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, I discovered <i>The Origin of Species</i> in the Free Library. It
+      finished the work of corruption. Spencer had shown me how to think; Darwin
+      told me what to think. The whole of my upbringing went for naught
+      thenceforward. I lived a double life. I said nothing to my aunt of the
+      miracle wrought within me, and she suspected nothing. Strange and uncanny,
+      is it not, that such miracles can escape the observation of a loving
+      heart? I loved her as much as ever, perhaps more than ever. Thank Heaven
+      that love can laugh at reason!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for my intellectual inner life. My emotional inner life is less
+      easy to indicate. I became a woman at fifteen&mdash;years, interminable
+      years, before I left school. I guessed even then, vaguely, that my nature
+      was extremely emotional and passionate. And I had nothing literary on
+      which to feed my dreams, save a few novels which I despised, and the Bible
+      and the plays and poems of Shakespeare. It is wonderful, though, what good
+      I managed to find in those two use-worn volumes. I knew most of the Song
+      of Solomon by heart, and many of the sonnets; and I will not mince the
+      fact that my favourite play was <i>Measure for Measure</i>. I was an
+      innocent virgin, in the restricted sense in which most girls of my class
+      and age are innocent, but I obtained from these works many a lofty pang of
+      thrilling pleasure. They illustrated Chopin for me, giving precision and
+      particularity to his messages. And I was ashamed of myself. Yes; at the
+      bottom of my heart I was ashamed of myself because my sensuous being
+      responded to the call of these masterpieces. In my ignorance I thought I
+      was lapsing from a sane and proper ideal. And then&mdash;the second
+      miracle in my career, which has been full of miracles&mdash;I came across
+      a casual reference, in the <i>Staffordshire Recorder</i>, of all places,
+      to the <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i> of Théophile Gautier. Something in
+      the reference, I no longer remember what, caused me to guess that the book
+      was a revelation of matters hidden from me. I bought it. With the
+      assistance of a dictionary, I read it, nightly, in about a week. Except <i>Picciola</i>,
+      it was the first French novel I had ever read. It held me throughout; it
+      revealed something on nearly every page. But the climax dazzled and
+      blinded me. It was exquisite, so high and pure, so startling, so bold,
+      that it made me ill. When I recovered I had fast in my heart&rsquo;s
+      keeping the new truth that in the body, and the instincts of the body,
+      there should be no shame, but rather a frank, joyous pride. From that
+      moment I ceased to be ashamed of anything that I honestly liked. But I
+      dared not keep the book. The knowledge of its contents would have killed
+      my aunt. I read it again; I read the last pages several times, and then I
+      burnt it and breathed freely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was I, as I forced my will on my aunt in the affair of the concert.
+      And I say that she who had never suspected the existence of the real me,
+      suspected it then, when we glanced at each other across the
+      breakfast-room. Upon these apparent trifles life swings, as upon a pivot,
+      into new directions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat with my aunt while Lucy went with the note. She returned soon with
+      the reply, and the reply was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So sorry I can&rsquo;t accept your kind invitation. I should have liked
+      to go awfully. But Fred has got the toothache, and I must not leave him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The toothache! And my very life, so it seemed to me, hung in the balance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not hesitate one second.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hurrah!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;She can go. I am to call for her in the
+      cab.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I crushed the note cruelly, and threw it in the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell him to call at Ryleys&rsquo;,&rsquo; I said to Rebecca as she was
+      putting me and my dress into the cab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she told the cabman with that sharp voice of hers, always arrogant
+      towards inferiors, to call at Ryleys.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put my head out of the cab window as soon as we were in Oldcastle
+      Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Drive straight to Hanbridge,&rsquo; I ordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing was done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He was like his photograph, but the photograph had given me only the most
+      inadequate idea of him. The photograph could not render his extraordinary
+      fairness, nor the rich gold of his hair, nor the blue of his dazzling
+      eyes. The first impression was that he was too beautiful for a man, that
+      he had a woman&rsquo;s beauty, that he had the waxen beauty of a doll; but
+      the firm, decisive lines of the mouth and chin, the overhanging brows, and
+      the luxuriance of his amber moustache, spoke more sternly. Gradually one
+      perceived that beneath the girlish mask, beneath the contours and the
+      complexion incomparably delicate, there was an individuality intensely and
+      provocatively male. His body was rather less than tall, and it was
+      muscular and springy. He walked on to the platform as an unspoilt man
+      should walk, and he bowed to the applause as if bowing chivalrously to a
+      woman whom he respected but did not love. Diaz was twenty-six that year;
+      he had recently returned from a tour round the world; he was filled full
+      of triumph, renown, and adoration. As I have said, he was already
+      legendary. He had become so great and so marvellous that those who had
+      never seen him were in danger of forgetting that he was a living human
+      being, obliged to eat and drink, and practise scales, and visit his tailor&rsquo;s.
+      Thus it had happened to me. During the first moments I found myself
+      thinking, &lsquo;This cannot be Diaz. It is not true that at last I see
+      him. There must be some mistake.&rsquo; Then he sat down leisurely to the
+      piano; his gaze ranged across the hall, and I fancied that, for a second,
+      it met mine. My two seats were in the first row of the stalls, and I could
+      see every slightest change of his face. So that at length I felt that Diaz
+      was real, and that he was really there close in front of me, a seraph and
+      yet very human. He was all alone on the great platform, and the ebonized
+      piano seemed enormous and formidable before him. And all around was the
+      careless public&mdash;ignorant, unsympathetic, exigent, impatient, even
+      inimical&mdash;two thousand persons who would get value for their money or
+      know the reason why. The electric light and the inclement gaze of society
+      rained down cruelly upon that defenceless head. I wanted to protect it.
+      The tears rose to my eyes, and I stretched out towards Diaz the hands of
+      my soul. My passionate sympathy must have reached him like a beneficent
+      influence, of which, despite the perfect self-possession and
+      self-confidence of his demeanour, it seemed to me that he had need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had risked much that night. I had committed an enormity. No one but a
+      grown woman who still vividly remembers her girlhood can appreciate my
+      feelings as I drove from Bursley to Hanbridge in the cab, and as I got out
+      of the cab in the crowd, and gave up my ticket, and entered the glittering
+      auditorium of the Jubilee Hall. I was alone, at night, in the public
+      places, under the eye of the world. And I was guiltily alone. Every fibre
+      of my body throbbed with the daring and the danger and the romance of the
+      adventure. The horror of revealing the truth to Aunt Constance, as I was
+      bound to do&mdash;of telling her that I had lied, and that I had left my
+      maiden&rsquo;s modesty behind in my bedroom, gripped me at intervals like
+      some appalling and exquisite instrument of torture. And yet, ere Diaz had
+      touched the piano with his broad white hand, I was content, I was
+      rewarded, and I was justified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The programme began with Chopin&rsquo;s first Ballade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an imperative summons, briefly sustained, which developed into
+      an appeal and an invocation, ascending, falling, and still higher
+      ascending, till it faded and expired, and then, after a little pause, was
+      revived; then silence, and two chords, defining and clarifying the
+      vagueness of the appeal and the invocation. And then, almost before I was
+      aware of it, there stole forth from under the fingers of Diaz the song of
+      the soul of man, timid, questioning, plaintive, neither sad nor joyous,
+      but simply human, seeking what it might find on earth. The song changed
+      subtly from mood to mood, expressing that which nothing but itself could
+      express; and presently there was a low and gentle menace, thrice repeated
+      under the melody of the song, and the reply of the song was a proud cry, a
+      haughty contempt of these furtive warnings, and a sudden winged leap into
+      the empyrean towards the Eternal Spirit. And then the melody was lost in a
+      depth, and the song became turgid and wild and wilder, hysteric,
+      irresolute, frantically groping, until at last it found its peace and its
+      salvation. And the treasure was veiled in a mist of arpeggios, but one by
+      one these were torn away, and there was a hush, a pause, and a
+      preparation; and the soul of man broke into a new song of what it had
+      found on earth&mdash;the magic of the tenderness of love&mdash;an air so
+      caressing and so sweet, so calmly happy and so mournfully sane, so bereft
+      of illusions and so naïve, that it seemed to reveal in a few miraculous
+      phrases the secret intentions of God. It was too beautiful; it told me too
+      much about myself; it vibrated my nerves to such an unbearable spasm of
+      pleasure that I might have died had I not willed to live.... It gave place
+      momentarily to the song of the question and the search, but only to
+      return, and to return again, with a more thrilling and glorious assurance.
+      It was drowned in doubt, but it emerged triumphantly, covered with noble
+      and delicious ornaments, and swimming strongly on mysterious waves. And
+      finally, with speed and with fire, it was transformed and caught up into
+      the last ecstasy, the ultimate passion. The soul swept madly between earth
+      and heaven, fell, rose; and there was a dreadful halt. Then a loud blast,
+      a distortion of the magic, an upward rush, another and a louder blast, and
+      a thunderous fall, followed by two massive and terrifying chords....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was standing up and bowing to his public. What did they understand?
+      Did they understand anything? I cannot tell. But I know that they felt. A
+      shudder of feeling had gone through the hall. It was in vain that people
+      tried to emancipate themselves from the spell by the violence of their
+      applause. They could not. We were all together under the enchantment. Some
+      may have seen clearly, some darkly, but we were equal before the throne of
+      that mighty enchanter. And the enchanter bowed and bowed with a grave,
+      sympathetic smile, and then disappeared. I had not clapped my hands; I had
+      not moved. Only my full eyes had followed him as he left the platform; and
+      when he returned&mdash;because the applause would not cease&mdash;my eyes
+      watched over him as he came back to the centre of the platform. He stood
+      directly in front of me, smiling more gaily now. And suddenly our glances
+      met! Yes; I could not be mistaken. They met, and mine held his for several
+      seconds.... Diaz had looked at me. Diaz had singled me out from the crowd.
+      I blushed hotly, and I was conscious of a surpassing joy. My spirit was
+      transfigured. I knew that such a man was above kings. I knew that the
+      world and everything of loveliness that it contained was his. I knew that
+      he moved like a beautiful god through the groves of delight, and that what
+      he did was right, and whom he beckoned came, and whom he touched was
+      blessed. And my eyes had held his eyes for a little space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The enchantment deepened. I had read that the secret of playing Chopin had
+      died with Chopin; but I felt sure that evening, as I have felt sure since,
+      that Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have received
+      Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a superior. For Diaz
+      had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of the keyboard that
+      Chopin could not have possessed. Diaz had come to the front in a
+      generation of pianists who had lifted technique to a plane of which
+      neither Liszt nor Rubinstein dreamed. He had succeeded primarily by his
+      gigantic and incredible technique. And then, when his technique had
+      astounded the world, he had invited the world to forget it, as the glass
+      is forgotten through which is seen beauty. And Diaz&rsquo;s gift was now
+      such that there appeared to intervene nothing between his conception of
+      the music and the strings of the piano, so perfected was the mechanism.
+      Difficulties had ceased to exist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if they
+      were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they should
+      fall off. It was not so with Diaz. When Diaz played you experienced the
+      pure emotions caused by the unblurred contemplation of that beauty which
+      the great masters had created, and which Diaz had tinted with the rare
+      dyes of his personality. You forgot all but beauty. The piano was not a
+      piano; it was an Arabian magic beyond physical laws, and it, too, had a
+      soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Diaz laid upon us the enchantment of Chopin and of himself. Mazurkas,
+      nocturnes, waltzes, scherzos, polonaises, preludes, he exhibited to us in
+      groups those manifestations of that supreme spirit&mdash;that spirit at
+      once stern and tender, not more sad than joyous, and always sane, always
+      perfectly balanced, always preoccupied with beauty. The singular myth of a
+      Chopin decadent, weary, erratic, mournful, hysterical, at odds with fate,
+      was completely dissipated; and we perceived instead the grave artist
+      nourished on Bach and studious in form, and the strong soul that had dared
+      to look on life as it is, and had found beauty everywhere. Ah! how the air
+      trembled and glittered with visions! How melody and harmony filled every
+      corner of the hall with the silver and gold of sound! How the world was
+      changed out of recognition! How that which had seemed unreal became real,
+      and that which had seemed real receded to a horizon remote and
+      fantastic!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was playing the fifteenth Prelude in D flat now, and the water was
+      dropping, dropping ceaselessly on the dead body, and the beautiful calm
+      song rose serenely in the dream, and then lost itself amid the presaging
+      chords of some sinister fate, and came again, exquisite and fresh as ever,
+      and then was interrupted by a high note like a clarion; and while Diaz
+      held that imperious, compelling note, he turned his face slightly from the
+      piano and gazed at me. Several times since the first time our eyes had
+      met, by accident as I thought. But this was a deliberate seeking on his
+      part. Again I flushed hotly. Again I had the terrible shudder of joy. I
+      feared for a moment lest all the Five Towns was staring at me, thus
+      singled out by Diaz; but it was not so: I had the wit to perceive that no
+      one could remark me as the recipient of that hurried and burning glance.
+      He had half a dozen bars to play, yet his eyes did not leave mine, and I
+      would not let mine leave his. He remained moveless while the last chord
+      expired, and then it seemed to me that his gaze had gone further, had
+      passed through me into some unknown. The applause startled him to his
+      feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My thought was: &lsquo;What can he be thinking of me?... But hundreds of
+      women must have loved him!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the interval an attendant came on to the platform and altered the
+      position of the piano. Everybody asked: &lsquo;What&rsquo;s that for?&rsquo;
+      For the new position was quite an unusual one; it brought the tail of the
+      piano nearer to the audience, and gave a better view of the keyboard to
+      the occupants of the seats in the orchestra behind the platform. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+      a question of the acoustics, that&rsquo;s what it is,&rsquo; observed a
+      man near me, and a woman replied: &lsquo;Oh, I see!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Diaz returned and seated himself to play the Berceuse, I saw that he
+      could look at me without turning his head. And now, instead of flushing, I
+      went cold. My spine gave way suddenly. I began to be afraid; but of what I
+      was afraid I had not the least idea. I fixed my eyes on my programme as he
+      launched into the Berceuse. Twice I glanced up, without, however, moving
+      my head, and each time his burning blue eyes met mine. (But why did I
+      choose moments when the playing of the piece demanded less than all his
+      attention?) The Berceuse was a favourite. In sentiment it was simpler than
+      the great pieces that had preceded it. Its excessive delicacy attracted;
+      the finesse of its embroidery swayed and enraptured the audience; and the
+      applause at the close was mad, deafening, and peremptory. But Diaz was
+      notorious as a refuser of encores. It had been said that he would see a
+      hall wrecked by an angry mob before he would enlarge his programme. Four
+      times he came forward and acknowledged the tribute, and four times he went
+      back. At the fifth response he halted directly in front of me, and in his
+      bold, grave eyes I saw a question. I saw it, and I would not answer. If he
+      had spoken aloud to me I could not have more clearly understood. But I
+      would not answer. And then some power within myself, hitherto unsuspected
+      by me, some natural force, took possession of me, and I nodded my head....
+      Diaz went to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, brushing lightly the keys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The Prelude in F sharp,&rsquo; my thought ran. &lsquo;If he would play
+      that!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And instantly he broke into that sweet air, with its fateful hushed
+      accompaniment&mdash;the trifle which Chopin threw off in a moment of his
+      highest inspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is the thirteenth Prelude,&rsquo; I reflected. I was disturbed,
+      profoundly troubled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next piece was the last, and it was the Fantasia, the masterpiece of
+      Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Fantasia there speaks the voice of a spirit which has attained all
+      that humanity may attain: of wisdom, of power, of pride and glory. And now
+      it is like the roll of an army marching slowly through terrific defiles;
+      and now it is like the quiet song of royal wanderers meditating in vast
+      garden landscapes, with mossy masonry and long pools and cypresses, and a
+      sapphire star shining in the purple sky on the shoulder of a cypress; and
+      now it is like the cry of a lost traveller, who, plunging heavily through
+      a virgin forest, comes suddenly upon a green circular sward, smooth as a
+      carpet, with an antique statue of a beautiful nude girl in the midst; and
+      now it is like the oratory of richly-gowned philosophers awaiting death in
+      gorgeous and gloomy palaces; and now it is like the upward rush of winged
+      things that are determined to achieve, knowing well the while that the
+      ecstasy of longing is better than the assuaging of desire. And though the
+      voice of this spirit speaking in the music disguises itself so variously,
+      it is always the same. For it cannot, and it would not, hide the strange
+      and rare timbre which distinguishes it from all others&mdash;that quality
+      which springs from a pure and calm vision, of life. The voice of this
+      spirit says that it has lost every illusion about life, and that life
+      seems only the more beautiful. It says that activity is but another form
+      of contemplation, pain but another form of pleasure, power but another
+      form of weakness, hate but another form of love, and that it is well these
+      things should be so. It says there is no end, only a means; and that the
+      highest joy is to suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will
+      but live, it cries, that grave but yet passionate voice&mdash;if you will
+      but live! Were there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more
+      than live. The true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and
+      lose, and weep and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to
+      live, and blind your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of
+      existence....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, no; I cannot&mdash;I cannot describe further the experiences of my
+      soul while Diaz played. When words cease, music has scarcely begun. I know
+      now&mdash;I did not know it then&mdash;that Diaz was playing as perhaps he
+      had never played before. The very air was charged with exquisite emotion,
+      which went in waves across the hall, changing and blanching faces,
+      troubling hearts, and moistening eyes.... And then he finished. It was
+      over. In every trembling breast was a pang of regret that this spell, this
+      miracle, this divine revolution, could not last into eternity.... He stood
+      bowing, one hand touching the piano. And as the revolution he had
+      accomplished in us was divine, so was he divine. I felt, and many another
+      woman in the audience felt, that no reward could be too great for the
+      beautiful and gifted creature who had entranced us and forced us to see
+      what alone in life was worth seeing: that the whole world should be his
+      absolute dominion; that his happiness should be the first concern of
+      mankind; that if a thousand suffered in order to make him happy for a
+      moment, it mattered not; that laws were not for him; that if he sinned,
+      his sin must not be called a sin, and that he must be excused from remorse
+      and from any manner of woe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The applauding multitude stood up, and moved slightly towards the exits,
+      and then stopped, as if ashamed of this readiness to desert the sacred
+      temple. Diaz came forward three times, and each time the applause
+      increased to a tempest; but he only smiled&mdash;smiled gravely. I could
+      not see distinctly whether his eyes had sought mine, for mine were full of
+      tears. No persuasions could induce him to show himself a fourth time, and
+      at length a middle-aged man appeared and stated that Diaz was extremely
+      gratified by his reception, but that he was also extremely exhausted and
+      had left the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We departed, we mortals; and I was among the last to leave the auditorium.
+      As I left the lights were being extinguished over the platform, and an
+      attendant was closing the piano. The foyer was crowded with people waiting
+      to get out. The word passed that it was raining heavily. I wondered how I
+      should find my cab. I felt very lonely and unknown; I was overcome with
+      sadness&mdash;with a sense of the futility and frustration of my life.
+      Such is the logic of the soul, and such the force of reaction. Gradually
+      the foyer emptied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ‘You think I am happy,&rsquo; said Diaz, gazing at me with a smile
+      suddenly grave; &lsquo;but I am not. I seek something which I cannot find.
+      And my playing is only a relief from the fruitless search; only that. I am
+      forlorn.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You!&rsquo; I exclaimed, and my eyes rested on his, long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, we had met. Perhaps it had been inevitable since the beginning of
+      time that we should meet; but it was none the less amazing. Perhaps I had
+      inwardly known that we should meet; but, none the less, I was astounded
+      when a coated and muffled figure came up swiftly to me in the emptying
+      foyer, and said: &lsquo;Ah! you are here! I cannot leave without thanking
+      you for your sympathy. I have never before felt such sympathy while
+      playing.&rsquo; It was a golden voice, pitched low, and the words were
+      uttered with a very slight foreign accent, which gave them piquancy. I
+      could not reply; something rose in my throat, and the caressing voice
+      continued: &lsquo;You are pale. Do you feel ill? What can I do? Come with
+      me to the artists&rsquo; room; my secretary is there.&rsquo; I put out a
+      hand gropingly, for I could not see clearly, and I thought I should reel
+      and fall. It touched his shoulder. He took my arm, and we went; no one had
+      noticed us, and I had not spoken a word. In the room to which he guided
+      me, through a long and sombre corridor, there was no sign of a secretary.
+      I drank some water. &lsquo;There, you are better!&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;Thank
+      you,&rsquo; I said, but scarcely whispering. ‘How fortunate I ventured to
+      come to you just at that moment! You might have fallen&rsquo;; and he
+      smiled again. I shook my head. I said: &lsquo;It was your coming&mdash;that&mdash;that&mdash;made
+      me dizzy!&rsquo; &lsquo;I profoundly regret&mdash;&rsquo; he began. ‘No,
+      no,&rsquo; I interrupted him; and in that instant I knew I was about to
+      say something which society would, justifiably, deem unpardonable in a
+      girl situated as I was. &lsquo;I am so glad you came&rsquo;; and I smiled,
+      courageous and encouraging. For once in my life&mdash;for the first time
+      in my adult life&mdash;I determined to be my honest self to another.
+      &lsquo;Your voice is exquisitely beautiful,&rsquo; he murmured. I
+      thrilled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of what use to chronicle the steps, now halting, now only too hasty, by
+      which our intimacy progressed in that gaunt and echoing room? He asked me
+      no questions as to my identity. He just said that he would like to play to
+      me in private if that would give me pleasure, and that possibly I could
+      spare an hour and would go with him.... Afterwards his brougham would be
+      at my disposal. His tone was the perfection of deferential courtesy. Once
+      the secretary came in&mdash;a young man rather like himself&mdash;and they
+      talked together in a foreign language that was not French nor German; then
+      the secretary bowed and retired.... We were alone.... There can be no sort
+      of doubt that unless I was prepared to flout the wisdom of the ages, I
+      ought to have refused his suggestion. But is not the wisdom of the ages a
+      medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I was prepared to flout it, as in
+      our highest and our lowest moments we often are. Moreover, how many women
+      in my place, confronted by that divine creature, wooed by that wondrous
+      personality, intoxicated by that smile and that voice, allured by the
+      appeal of those marvellous hands, would have found the strength to resist?
+      I did not resist, I yielded; I accepted. I was already in disgrace with
+      Aunt Constance&mdash;as well be drowned in twelve feet of water as in six!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we drove rapidly away in the brougham, through the miry,
+      light-reflecting streets of Hanbridge in the direction of Knype. And the
+      raindrops ran down the windows of the brougham, and in the cushioned
+      interior we could see each other darkly. He did his best to be at ease,
+      and he almost succeeded. My feeling towards him, as regards the external
+      management, the social guidance, of the affair, was as though we were at
+      sea in a dangerous storm, and he was on the bridge and I was a mere
+      passenger, and could take no responsibility. Who knew through what
+      difficult channels we might not have to steer, and from what lee-shores we
+      might not have to beat away? I saw that he perceived this. When I offered
+      him some awkward compliment about his good English, he seized the chance
+      of a narrative, and told me about his parentage: how his mother was
+      Scotch, and his father Danish, and how, after his father&rsquo;s death,
+      his mother had married Emilio Diaz, a Spanish teacher of music in
+      Edinburgh, and how he had taken, by force of early habit, the name of his
+      stepfather. The whole world was familiar with these facts, and I was
+      familiar with them; but their recital served our turn in the brougham,
+      and, of course, Diaz could add touches which had escaped the <i>Staffordshire
+      Recorder</i>, and perhaps all other papers. He was explaining to me that
+      his secretary was his stepfather&rsquo;s son by another wife, when we
+      arrived at the Five Towns Hotel, opposite Knype Railway Station. I might
+      have foreseen that that would be our destination. I hooded myself as well
+      as I could, and followed him quickly to the first-floor. I sank down into
+      a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my cloak, and
+      then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table were some
+      glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that the
+      secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly departed.
+      My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its full
+      enormity. &lsquo;Oh,&rsquo; I sighed, &lsquo;if I were a man like you!&rsquo;
+      Then it was that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was
+      not happy, that he was forlorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; &lsquo;I am
+      profoundly dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year
+      it is a homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You
+      do not know how I hate a strange piano. That one&rsquo;&mdash;he pointed
+      to a huge instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially
+      for him&mdash;&lsquo;is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only
+      yesterday, and after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across
+      the world, and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a
+      museum, and bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But have you no friends?&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who can tell?&rsquo; he replied. &lsquo;If I have, I scarcely ever see
+      them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And no home?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I loathe
+      it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you loathe it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! For what it has witnessed&mdash;for what it has witnessed.&rsquo; He
+      sighed. ‘Suppose we discuss something else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in
+      social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know
+      that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath
+      that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious, dazzling
+      haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new being,
+      excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for
+      love of you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let me guess at your history,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You have lived much
+      alone with your thoughts, and you have read a great deal of the finest
+      romantic poetry, and you have been silent, especially with men. You have
+      seen little of men.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I understand them,&rsquo; I answered boldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I believe you do,&rsquo; he admitted; and he laughed. &lsquo;So I needn&rsquo;t
+      explain to you that a thousand women dying of love for one man will not
+      help that man to happiness, unless he is dying of love for the thousand
+      and first.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And have you never loved?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words came of themselves out of my mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have deceived myself&mdash;in my quest of sympathy,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you be sure that, in your quest of sympathy, you are not deceiving
+      yourself tonight?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he cried quickly, &lsquo;I can.&rsquo; And he sprang up and
+      almost ran to the piano. &lsquo;You remember the D flat Prelude?&rsquo; he
+      said, breaking into the latter part of the air, and looking at me the
+      while. &lsquo;When I came to that note and caught your gaze&rsquo;&mdash;he
+      struck the B flat and held it&mdash;&lsquo;I knew that I had found
+      sympathy. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Do you remember?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Remember what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The way we looked at each other.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I breathed, &lsquo;I remember.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How can I thank you? How can I thank you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed to be meditating. His simplicity, his humility, his kindliness
+      were more than I could bear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Please do not speak like that,&rsquo; I entreated him, pained. &lsquo;You
+      are the greatest artist in the world, and I am nobody&mdash;nobody at all.
+      I do not know why I am here. I cannot imagine what you have seen in me.
+      Everything is a mystery. All I feel is that I am in your presence, and
+      that I am not worthy to be. No matter how long I live, I shall never
+      experience again the joy that I have now. But if you talk about thanking
+      me, I must run away, because I cannot stand it&mdash;and&mdash;and&mdash;you
+      haven&rsquo;t played for me, and you said you would.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He approached me, and bent his head towards mine, and I glanced up through
+      a mist and saw his eyes and the short, curly auburn locks on his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most
+      lasting things,&rsquo; he said softly, &lsquo;are often mysterious and
+      inexplicable and sudden. And let me tell you that you do not know how
+      lovely you are. You do not know the magic of your voice, nor the grace of
+      your gestures. But time and man will teach you. What shall I play?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was very close to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Bach,&rsquo; I ejaculated, pointing impatiently to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancied that Bach would spread peace abroad in my soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He resumed his place at the piano, and touched the keys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Another thing that makes me more sure that I am not deceiving myself
+      to-night,&rsquo; he said, taking his fingers off the keys, but staring at
+      the keyboard, &lsquo;is that you have not regretted coming here. You have
+      not called yourself a wicked woman. You have not even accused me of taking
+      advantage of your innocence.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And ere I could say a word he had begun the Chromatic Fantasia, smiling
+      faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I had hoped for peace from Bach! I had often suspected that deep
+      passion was concealed almost everywhere within the restraint and the
+      apparent calm of Bach&rsquo;s music, but the full force of it had not been
+      shown to me till this glorious night. Diaz&rsquo; playing was tenfold more
+      impressive, more effective, more revealing in the hotel parlour than in
+      the great hall. The Chromatic Fantasia seemed as full of the magnificence
+      of life as that other Fantasia which he had given an hour or so earlier.
+      Instead of peace I had the whirlwind; instead of tranquillity a riot;
+      instead of the poppy an alarming potion. The rendering was masterly to the
+      extreme of masterliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had finished I rose and passed to the fireplace in silence; he did
+      not stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you always play like that?&rsquo; I asked at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;only when you are there. I have never played
+      the Chopin Fantasia as I played it to-night. The Chopin was all right; but
+      do not be under any illusion: what you have just heard is Bach played by a
+      Chopin player.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he left the piano and went to the small table where the glasses were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You must be in need of refreshment,&rsquo; he whispered gaily. &lsquo;Nothing
+      is more exhausting than listening to the finest music.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is you who ought to be tired,&rsquo; I replied; &lsquo;after that long
+      concert, to be playing now.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have the physique of a camel,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I am never tired
+      so long as I am sure of my listeners. I would play for you till breakfast
+      to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The decanter contained a fluid of a pleasant green tint. He poured very
+      carefully this fluid to the depth of half an inch in one glass and
+      three-quarters of an inch in another glass. Then he filled both glasses to
+      the brim with water, accomplishing the feat with infinite pains and
+      enjoyment, as though it had been part of a ritual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; he said, offering me in his steady hand the glass which had
+      received the smaller quantity of the green fluid. &lsquo;Taste.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what is it?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Taste,&rsquo; he repeated, and he himself tasted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I obeyed. At the first mouthful I thought the liquid was somewhat sinister
+      and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my opinion, and
+      found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet not strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you like it?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and drank again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is wonderful,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;What do you call it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Men call it absinthe,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t be frightened,&rsquo; he soothed me. &lsquo;I know what you
+      were going to say. You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of
+      all poisons, that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most
+      terrible of all drunkards. So it is; so it does. But not as we are
+      drinking it; not as I invariably drink it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; I said, proudly confident in him. &lsquo;You would not
+      have offered it to me otherwise.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course I should not,&rsquo; he agreed. &lsquo;I give you my word that
+      a few drops of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and
+      the least harmful stimulant in the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am sure of it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But drink slowly,&rsquo; he advised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I refused the sandwiches. I had no need of them. I felt sufficient unto
+      myself. I no longer had any apprehension. My body, my brain, and my soul
+      seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency. The fear of being
+      maladroit departed from me. Ideas&mdash;delicate and subtle ideas&mdash;welled
+      up in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them. I began
+      to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric
+      interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still stood
+      by the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, he said, &lsquo;that is very interesting.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What does the Fantasia mean to you?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense.
+      You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
+      forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
+      emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it
+      can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the greatest
+      of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas. Literature
+      can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its
+      language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the
+      soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the Fantasia is that
+      it moves me profoundly. I <i>know how</i> it moves me, but I cannot tell
+      you; I cannot even tell myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, do go on,&rsquo; I entreated him. &lsquo;Tell me more about music. Do
+      you not think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do,
+      since you always play him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art.
+      When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes
+      impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No
+      one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The
+      whole last act of <i>The Twilight of the Gods</i> is not greater than a
+      little song of Grieg&rsquo;s.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I see,&rsquo; I murmured humbly. &lsquo;<i>The Twilight of the Gods</i>&mdash;that
+      is Wagner, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Don&rsquo;t you know your Wagner?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No. I&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t know <i>Tristan</i>?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He jumped up, excited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How could I know it?&rsquo; I expostulated. &lsquo;I have never seen any
+      opera. I know the marches from <i>Tannhäuser</i> and <i>Lohengrin</i>, and
+      &ldquo;O Star of Eve!&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is impossible that you don&rsquo;t know <i>Tristan</i>!&rsquo; he
+      exclaimed. &lsquo;The second act of <i>Tristan</i> is the greatest piece
+      of love-music&mdash;No, it isn&rsquo;t.&rsquo; He laughed. &lsquo;I must
+      not contradict myself. But it is marvellous&mdash;marvellous! You know the
+      story?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Play me some of it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will play the Prelude,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gulped down the remaining drops in my glass and crossed the room to a
+      chair where I could see his face. And he played the Prelude to the most
+      passionately voluptuous opera ever written. It was my first real
+      introduction to Wagner, my first glimpse of that enchanted field. I was
+      ravished, rapt away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wagner was a great artist in spite of himself,&rsquo; said Diaz, when he
+      had finished. &lsquo;He assigned definite and precise ideas to all those
+      melodies. Nothing could be more futile. I shall not label them for you.
+      But perhaps you can guess the love-motive for yourself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I can,&rsquo; I said positively. &lsquo;It is this.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried to hum the theme, but my voice refused obedience. So I came to the
+      piano, and played the theme high up in the treble, while Diaz was still
+      sitting on the piano-stool. I trembled even to touch the piano in his
+      presence; but I did it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have guessed right,&rsquo; he said; and then he asked me in a casual
+      tone: ‘Do you ever play pianoforte duets?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Often,&rsquo; I replied unsuspectingly, &lsquo;with my aunt. We play the
+      symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and overtures, and so
+      on.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Awfully good fun, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo; he smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Splendid!&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve got <i>Tristan</i> here arranged for pianoforte duet,&rsquo;
+      he said. ‘Tony, my secretary, enjoys playing it. You shall play part of
+      the second act with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Me! With you!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Certainly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Impossible! I should never dare! How do you know I can play at all?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have just proved it to me,&rsquo; said he. &lsquo;Come; you will not
+      refuse me this!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to leave the vicinity of the piano. I felt that, once out of the
+      immediate circle of his tremendous physical influence, I might manage to
+      escape the ordeal which he had suggested. But I could not go away. The
+      silken nets of his personality had been cast, and I was enmeshed. And if I
+      was happy, it was with a dreadful happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, really, I can&rsquo;t play with you,&rsquo; I said weakly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His response was merely to look up at me over his shoulder. His beautiful
+      face was so close to mine, and it expressed such a naïve and strong
+      yearning for my active and intimate sympathy, and such divine frankness,
+      and such perfect kindliness, that I had no more will to resist. I knew I
+      should suffer horribly in spoiling by my coarse amateurishness the
+      miraculous finesse of his performance, but I resigned myself to suffering.
+      I felt towards him as I had felt during the concert: that he must have his
+      way at no matter what cost, that he had already earned the infinite
+      gratitude of the entire world&mdash;in short, I raised him in my soul to a
+      god&rsquo;s throne; and I accepted humbly the great, the incredible honour
+      he did me. And I was right&mdash;a thousand times right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the same moment he was like a charming child to me: such is always
+      in some wise the relation between the creature born to enjoy and the
+      creature born to suffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll try,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;but it will be appalling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I laughed and shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We shall see how appalling it will be,&rsquo; he murmured, as he got the
+      volume of music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fetched a chair for me, and we sat down side by side, he on the stool
+      and I on the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m afraid my chair is too low,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I&rsquo;m sure this stool is too high,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Suppose
+      we exchange.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we both rose to change the positions of the chair and the stool, and
+      our garments touched and almost our faces, and at that very moment there
+      was a loud rap at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I darted away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s that?&rsquo; I cried, low in a fit of terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who&rsquo;s there?&rsquo; he called quietly; but he did not stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We gazed at each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who&rsquo;s there?&rsquo; Diaz demanded again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to the door,&rsquo; I whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor. Diaz
+      went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the corridor,
+      and looked into the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Curious!&rsquo; he commented tranquilly. &lsquo;I see no one.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby to
+      shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of our
+      own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on the
+      small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a
+      half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other room;
+      one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ball, which
+      caught the light of the candle on the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were startled,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You must have a little more of
+      our cordial&mdash;just a spoonful.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He poured out for me an infinitesimal quantity, and the same for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling
+      incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and
+      that did not leave me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat down a second time to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You understand,&rsquo; he explained, staring absently at the double page
+      of music, &lsquo;this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is
+      dark in the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king,
+      her husband, has just gone off hunting&mdash;you will hear the horns dying
+      in the distance&mdash;and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch
+      is burning in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the
+      signal by extinguishing it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment
+      when they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that
+      you will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers.
+      Are you ready?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous. I
+      was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes. The
+      notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was the big
+      black letters at the top, &lsquo;Zweiter Aufzug.&rsquo; And furthermore,
+      on that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the bass
+      of the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and
+      closed my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can&rsquo;t,&rsquo; I whispered, &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t. I would if I
+      could.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gently took my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear companion,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;tell me your name.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason,
+      flashed through my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magdalen,&rsquo; I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and
+      sincere that he believed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see that he was taken aback.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is a holy name and a good name,&rsquo; he said, after a pause. &lsquo;Magda,
+      you are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read
+      it, won&rsquo;t you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me,
+      and play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The
+      influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had
+      resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and
+      lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and
+      dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in
+      conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing
+      out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had
+      ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I
+      abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not
+      disgrace myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Unless it was Chopin,&rsquo; whispered Diaz. &lsquo;No one could ever see
+      two things at once as well as Wagner.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the
+      page, and then the hunters&rsquo; horns were heard departing from the
+      garden of love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a
+      scarce-heard drone, out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the
+      horns died away, so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the
+      future. I surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty
+      which we were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once
+      feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of
+      modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of
+      heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I
+      might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and
+      complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam about
+      our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a
+      background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they
+      were the emotions of love&mdash;the sense of the splendour of love, the
+      headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the
+      finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the
+      universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: &lsquo;Where love is,
+      there is God also.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be
+      approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy, but
+      I held on, and the climax arrived&mdash;a climax which touched the limits
+      of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in coming
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tristan has come into the garden,&rsquo; I muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We plunged forward into the love-scene itself&mdash;the scene in which the
+      miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all
+      miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then
+      occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces,
+      what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what
+      sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what
+      dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous
+      hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common
+      lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more fully than
+      I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a supreme
+      experience, and that another such could not be contained in my life....
+      And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on the
+      music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the left
+      hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar, and
+      becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air
+      fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of
+      the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The
+      whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought gently
+      and persistently against the rhythm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hear the beating of their hearts,&rsquo; Diaz&rsquo; whisper floated over
+      the chords.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the
+      vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands
+      fell from the keyboard. He looked at me&mdash;and with what a glance!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can bear no more,&rsquo; I cried wildly. &lsquo;It is too beautiful,
+      too beautiful!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my
+      face in my hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to me, and bent over me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he whispered, &lsquo;show me your face.&rsquo; With his
+      hands he delicately persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to
+      look on him. &lsquo;How dark and splendid you are, Magda!&rsquo; he said,
+      still holding my hands. &lsquo;How humid and flashing your eyes! And those
+      eyelashes, and that hair&mdash;dark, dark! And that bosom, with its rise
+      and fall! And that low, rich voice, that is like dark wine! And that dress&mdash;dark,
+      and full of mysterious shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known
+      each other in a previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this
+      moment is the fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You
+      were to be mine. You are mine, Magda!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny
+      to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief
+      instant, to this noble and glorious creature, on whom the gods had
+      showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not
+      already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of
+      society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the resistless
+      tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable, and
+      everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we were
+      together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in contact. He
+      held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at once that
+      those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was proud and
+      glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that point I
+      ceased to have volition....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I woke up, perplexed at first, but gradually remembering where I was,
+      and what had occurred to me, the realistic and uncompromising light of
+      dawn had commenced its pitiless inquiry, and it fell on the brass knob,
+      which I had noticed a few hours before, from the other room, and on
+      another brass knob a few feet away. My eyes smarted; I had disconcerting
+      sensations at the back of my head; my hair was brittle, and as though
+      charged with a dull electricity; I was conscious of actual pain, and an
+      incubus, crushing but intangible, lay heavily, like a physical weight, on
+      my heart. After the crest of the wave the trough&mdash;it must be so; but
+      how profound the instinct which complains! I listened. I could hear his
+      faint, regular breathing. I raised myself carefully on one elbow and
+      looked at him. He was as beautiful in sleep as in consciousness; his lips
+      were slightly parted, his cheek exquisitely flushed, and nothing could
+      disarrange that short, curly hair. He slept with the calmness of the
+      natural innocent man, to whom the assuaging of desires brings only
+      content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt that I must go, and hastily, frantically. I could not face him when
+      he woke; I should not have known what to say; I should have been abashed,
+      timid, clumsy, unequal to myself. And, moreover, I had the egoist&rsquo;s
+      deep need to be alone, to examine my soul, to understand it intimately and
+      utterly. And, lastly, I wanted to pay the bill of pleasure at once. I
+      could never tolerate credit; I was like my aunt in that. Therefore, I must
+      go home and settle the account in some way. I knew not how; I knew only
+      that the thing must be done. Diaz had nothing to do with that; it was not
+      his affair, and I should have resented his interference. Ah! when I was in
+      the bill-paying mood, how hard I could be, how stony, how blind! And that
+      morning I was like a Malay running amok.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Think not that when I was ready to depart I stopped and stooped to give
+      him a final tender kiss. I did not even scribble a word of adieu or of
+      explanation. I stole away on tiptoe, without looking at him. This sounds
+      brutal, but it is a truth of my life, and I am writing my life&mdash;at
+      least, I am writing those brief hours of my existence during which I
+      lived. I had always a sort of fierce courage; and as I had proved the
+      courage of my passion in the night, so I proved the courage of my&mdash;not
+      my remorse, not my compunction, not my regret&mdash;but of my intellectual
+      honesty in the morning. Proud and vain words, perhaps. Who can tell? No
+      matter what sympathies I alienate, I am bound to say plainly that, though
+      I am passionate, I am not sentimental. I came to him out of the void, and
+      I went from him into the void. He found me, and he lost me. Between the
+      autumn sunset and the autumn sunrise he had learnt to know me well, but he
+      did not know my name nor my history; he had no clue, no cord to pull me
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I passed into the sitting-room, dimly lighted through the drawn curtains,
+      and there was the score of <i>Tristan</i> open on the piano. Yes; and if I
+      were the ordinary woman I would add that there also were the ashes in the
+      cold grate, and so symbolize the bitterness of memory and bring about a
+      pang. But I have never regretted what is past. The cinders of that fire
+      were to me cinders of a fire and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the doorway I halted. To go into the corridor was like braving the
+      blast of the world, and I hesitated. Possibly I hesitated for a very
+      little thing. Only the women among you will guess it. My dress was dark
+      and severe. I had a simple, dark cloak. But I had no hat. I had no hat,
+      and the most important fact in the universe for me then was that I had no
+      hat. My whole life was changed; my heart and mind were in the throes of a
+      revolution. I dared not imagine what would happen between my aunt and me;
+      but this deficiency in my attire distressed me more than all else. At the
+      other end of the obscure corridor was a chambermaid kneeling down and
+      washing the linoleum. Ah, maid! Would I not have exchanged fates with you,
+      then! I walked boldly up to her. She seemed to be surprised, but she
+      continued to wring out a cloth in her pail as she looked at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it, please?&rsquo; I asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Better than half-past six, ma&rsquo;am,&rsquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was young and emaciated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you got a hat you can lend me? Or I&rsquo;ll buy it from you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘A hat, ma&rsquo;am?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, a hat,&rsquo; I repeated impatiently. And I flushed. &lsquo;I must
+      go out at once, and I&rsquo;ve&mdash;I&rsquo;ve no hat And I can&rsquo;t&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is extraordinary how in a crisis one&rsquo;s organism surprises one. I
+      had thought I was calm and full of self-control, but I had almost no
+      command over my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve got a boat-shaped straw, ma&rsquo;am, if that&rsquo;s any use
+      to you,&rsquo; said the girl kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What she surmised or what she knew I could not say. But I have found out
+      since in my travels, that hotel chambermaids lose their illusions early.
+      At any rate her tone was kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Get it me, there&rsquo;s a good girl,&rsquo; I entreated her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when she brought it, I drew out the imitation pearl pins and put them
+      between my teeth, and jammed the hat on my head and skewered it savagely
+      with the pins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Is that right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It suits you better than it does me, ma&rsquo;am, I do declare,&rsquo;
+      she said. ‘Oh, ma&rsquo;am, this is too much&mdash;I really couldn&rsquo;t!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had given her five shillings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nonsense! I am very much obliged to you,&rsquo; I whispered hurriedly,
+      and ran off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a good girl. I hope she has never suffered. And yet I would not
+      like to think she had died of consumption before she knew what life meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hastened from the hotel. A man in a blue waistcoat with shining black
+      sleeves was moving a large cocoa-nut mat in the hall, and the pattern of
+      the mat was shown in dust on the tiles where the mat had been. He glanced
+      at me absently as I flitted past; I encountered no other person. The
+      square between the hotel and the station was bathed in pure sunshine&mdash;such
+      sunshine as reaches the Five Towns only after a rain-storm has washed the
+      soot out of the air. I felt, for a moment, obscene in that sunshine; but I
+      had another and a stronger feeling. Although there was not a soul in the
+      square, I felt as if I was regarding the world and mankind with different
+      eyes from those of yesterday. Then I knew nothing; to-day I knew
+      everything&mdash;so it seemed to me. It seemed to me that I understood all
+      sorts of vague, subtle things that I had not understood before; that I had
+      been blind and now saw; that I had become kinder, more sympathetic, more
+      human. What these things were that I understood, or thought I understood,
+      I could not have explained. All I felt was that a radical change of
+      attitude had occurred in me. &lsquo;Poor world!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor humanity! My heart melts for you!&rsquo; Thus spoke my soul, pouring
+      itself out. The very stone facings of the station and the hotel seemed
+      somehow to be humanized and to need my compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked with eyes downcast into the station. I had determined to take the
+      train from Knype to Shawport, a distance of three miles, and then to walk
+      up the hill from Shawport through Oldcastle Street to Bursley. I hoped
+      that by such a route at such an hour, I should be unlikely to meet
+      acquaintances, of whom, in any case, I had few. My hopes appeared to be
+      well founded, for the large booking-hall at the station was thronged with
+      a multitude entirely strange to me&mdash;workmen and workwomen and
+      workgirls crowded the place. The first-class and second-class
+      booking-windows were shut, and a long tail of muscular men, pale men,
+      stout women, and thin women pushed to take tickets at the other window. I
+      was obliged to join them, and to wait my turn amid the odour of corduroy
+      and shawl, and the strong odour of humanity; my nostrils were peculiarly
+      sensitive that morning. Some of the men had herculean arms and necks, and
+      it was these who wore pieces of string tied round their trousers below the
+      knee, disclosing the lines of their formidable calves. The women were
+      mostly pallid and quiet. All carried cans, or satchels, or baskets; here
+      and there a man swung lightly on his shoulder a huge bag of tools, which I
+      could scarcely have raised from the ground. Everybody was natural, direct,
+      and eager; and no one attempted to be genteel or refined; no one pretended
+      that he did not toil with his hands for dear life. I anticipated that I
+      should excite curiosity, but I did not. The people had a preoccupied,
+      hurried air. Only at the window itself, when the ticket-clerk, having made
+      me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of his lair to get my ticket,
+      did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and inimical interest in this
+      drone who caused delay to busy people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same
+      on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I
+      could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full
+      tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they
+      employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains
+      generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at
+      one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of
+      <i>our</i> wealth and luxury!&rsquo; I thought; for I was just beginning,
+      at that period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social
+      organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on
+      paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep
+      of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable directness.
+      They frightened me with their vivid humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a
+      compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls
+      were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her
+      dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.
+      From the young man&rsquo;s soiled white jacket under his black coat, I
+      gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and
+      left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession of
+      compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people. None of
+      my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance. It was
+      uncanny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained
+      prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn,
+      musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life.
+      ‘Ah,&rsquo; I thought, &lsquo;you little know what I know! I may appear a
+      butterfly, but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence. I am above
+      you, beyond you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by
+      the turmoil in my heart!&rsquo; And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that
+      they probably knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten
+      more than I had ever learnt. I remembered an absorbing correspondence
+      about the manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the <i>Staffordshire
+      Recorder</i>&mdash;a correspondence which had driven Aunt Constance to
+      conceal the paper after the second week. I guessed that they might smile
+      at the simplicity of my heart could they see it. Meaning of existence!
+      Why, they were reared in it! The naturalness of natural people and of
+      natural acts struck me like a blow, and I withdrew, whipped, into myself.
+      My adventure grew smaller. But I recalled its ecstasies. I dwelt on the
+      romantic perfection of Diaz. It seemed to me amazing, incredible, that
+      Diaz, the glorious and incomparable Diaz, had loved me&mdash;<i>me</i>!
+      out of all the ardent, worshipping women that the world contained. I
+      wondered if he had wakened up, and I felt sorry for him. So far, I had not
+      decided how soon, if at all, I should communicate with him. My mind was
+      incapable of reaching past the next few hours&mdash;the next hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We stopped at a station surrounded by the evidences of that tireless,
+      unceasing, and tremendous manufacturing industry which distinguishes the
+      Five Towns, and I was left alone in the compartment. The train rumbled on
+      through a landscape of fiery furnaces, and burning slag-heaps, and foul
+      canals reflecting great smoking chimneys, all steeped in the mild
+      sunshine. Could the toil-worn agents of this never-ending and gigantic
+      productiveness find time for love? Perhaps they loved quickly and forgot,
+      like animals. Thoughts such as these lurked sinister and carnal, strange
+      beasts in the jungle of my poor brain. Then the train arrived at Shawport,
+      and I was obliged to get out. I say &lsquo;obliged,&rsquo; because I
+      violently wished not to get out. I wished to travel on in that train to
+      some impossible place, where things were arranged differently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The station clock showed only five minutes to seven. I was astounded. It
+      seemed to me that all the real world had been astir and busy for hours.
+      And this extraordinary activity went on every morning while Aunt Constance
+      and I lay in our beds and thought well of ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shivered, and walked quickly up the street. I had positively not noticed
+      that I was cold. I had scarcely left the station before Fred Ryley
+      appeared in front of me. I saw that his face was swollen. My heart
+      stopped. Of course, he would tell Ethel.... He passed me sheepishly
+      without stopping, merely raising his hat, and murmuring the singular
+      words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We&rsquo;re both very, very sorry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What in the name of Heaven could they possibly know, he and Ethel? And
+      what right had he to ...? Did he smile furtively? Fred Ryley had sometimes
+      a strange smile. I reddened, angry and frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The distance between the station and our house proved horribly short. And
+      when I arrived in front of the green gates, and put my hand on the latch,
+      I knew that I had formed no plan whatever. I opened the right-hand gate
+      and entered the garden. The blinds were still down, and the house looked
+      so decorous and innocent in its age. My poor aunt! What a night she must
+      have been through! It was inconceivable that I should tell her what had
+      happened to me. Indeed, under the windows of that house it seemed
+      inconceivable that the thing had happened which had happened.
+      Inconceivable! Grotesque! Monstrous!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But could I lie? Could I rise to the height of some sufficient and kindly
+      lie?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hand drew slightly aside the blind of the window over the porch. I
+      sighed, and went wearily, in my boat-shaped straw, up the gravelled path
+      to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rebecca met me at the door. It was so early that she had not yet put on an
+      apron. She looked tired, as if she had not slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come in, miss,&rsquo; she said weakly, holding open the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me that I did not need this invitation from a servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose you&rsquo;ve all been fearfully upset, wondering where I was,&rsquo;
+      I began, entering the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My adventure appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this
+      buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything one
+      hundredth part so dreadful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, miss; I wasn&rsquo;t upset on account of you. You&rsquo;re always so
+      sensible like. You always know what to do. I knew as you must have stopped
+      the night with friends in Hanbridge on account of the heavy rain, and
+      perhaps that there silly cabman not turning up, and them tramcars all
+      crowded; and, of course, you couldn&rsquo;t telegraph.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This view that I was specially sagacious and equal to emergencies rather
+      surprised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But auntie?&rsquo; I demanded, trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, miss!&rsquo; cried Rebecca, glancing timidly over her shoulder,
+      &lsquo;I want you to come with me into the dining-room before you go
+      upstairs.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She snuffled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the dining-room I went at once to the window to draw up the blinds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not that, not that!&rsquo; Rebecca appealed, weeping. &lsquo;For pity&rsquo;s
+      sake!&rsquo; And she caught my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I then noticed that Lucy was standing in the doorway, also weeping.
+      Rebecca noticed this too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lucy, you go to your kitchen this minute,&rsquo; she said sharply, and
+      then turned to me and began to cry again. &lsquo;Miss Peel&mdash;how can I
+      tell you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you call me Miss Peel?&rsquo; I asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I knew why. The thing flashed over me instantly. My dear aunt was
+      dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve got no aunt,&rsquo; said Rebecca. &lsquo;My poor dear! And
+      you at the concert!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dropped my head and my bosom on the bare mahogany table and cried. Never
+      before, and never since, have I spilt such tears&mdash;hot, painful drops,
+      distilled plenteously from a heart too crushed and torn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There, there!&rsquo; muttered Rebecca. &lsquo;I wish I could have told
+      you different&mdash;less cruel; but it wasn&rsquo;t in me to do it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And she&rsquo;s lying upstairs this very moment all cold and stiff,&rsquo;
+      a wailing voice broke in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Lucy, who could not keep herself away from us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Will you go to your kitchen, my girl!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rebecca drove her off. &lsquo;And the poor thing&rsquo;s not stiff either.
+      Her poor body&rsquo;s as soft as if she was only asleep, and doctor says
+      it will be for a day or two. It&rsquo;s like that when they&rsquo;re took
+      off like that, he says. Oh, Miss Carlotta&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell me all about it before I go upstairs,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had recovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Your poor aunt went to bed just as soon as you were gone, miss,&rsquo;
+      said Rebecca. &lsquo;She would have it she was quite well, only tired. I
+      took her up a cup of cocoa at ten o&rsquo;clock, and she seemed all right,
+      and then I sends Lucy to bed, and I sits up in the kitchen to wait for
+      you. Not a sound from your poor aunt. I must have dropped asleep, miss, in
+      my chair, and I woke up with a start like, and the kitchen clock was near
+      on one. Thinks I, perhaps Miss Carlotta&rsquo;s been knocking and ringing
+      all this time and me not heard, and I rushes to the front door. But of
+      course you weren&rsquo;t there. The porch was nothing but a pool o&rsquo;
+      water. I says to myself she&rsquo;s stopping somewhere, I says. And I felt
+      it was my duty to go and tell your aunt, whether she was asleep or whether
+      she wasn&rsquo;t asleep.... Well, and there she was, miss, with her eyes
+      closed, and as soft as a child. I spoke to her, loud, more than once.
+      &ldquo;Miss Carlotta a&rsquo;n&rsquo;t come,&rdquo; I says. &ldquo;Miss
+      Carlotta a&rsquo;n&rsquo;t come, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; I says. She never
+      stirred. Thinks I, this is queer this is. And I goes up to her and touches
+      her. Chilly! Then I takes the liberty of pushing back your poor aunt&rsquo;s
+      eyelids, and I could but see the whites of her eyes; the eyeballs was gone
+      up, and a bit outwards. Yes; and her poor dear chin was dropped. Thinks I,
+      here&rsquo;s trouble, and Miss Carlotta at the concert. I runs to our
+      bedroom, and I tells Lucy to put a cloak on and fetch Dr. Roycroft.
+      &ldquo;Who for?&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;Never you mind who for!&rdquo; I
+      says, says I. &ldquo;You up and quick. But you can tell the doctor it&rsquo;s
+      missis as is took.&rdquo; And in ten minutes he was here, miss. But it&rsquo;s
+      only across the garden, like. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;she&rsquo;s
+      been dead an hour or more. Failure of the heart&rsquo;s action,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;She died in her sleep,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Thank God she
+      died in her sleep if she was to die, the pure angel!&rdquo; I says. I told
+      the doctor as you were away for the night, miss. And I laid her out, miss,
+      and your poor auntie wasn&rsquo;t my first, either. I&rsquo;ve seen
+      trouble&mdash;I&rsquo;ve&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Rebecca&rsquo;s tears overcame her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll go upstairs with you, miss,&rsquo; she struggled out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thought that flew across my mind was that Doctor Roycroft was very
+      intimate with the Ryleys, and had doubtless somehow informed them of my
+      aunt&rsquo;s death. This explained Fred Ryley&rsquo;s strange words and
+      attitude to me on the way from the station. The young man had been too
+      timid to stop me. The matter was a trifle, but another idea that struck me
+      was not a trifle, though I strove to make it so. My aunt had died about
+      midnight, and it was at midnight that Diaz and I had heard the mysterious
+      knock on his sitting-room door. At the time I had remarked how it
+      resembled my aunt&rsquo;s knock. Occasionally, when the servants overslept
+      themselves, Aunt Constance would go to their rooms in her pale-blue
+      dressing-gown and knock on their door exactly like that. Could it be that
+      this was one of those psychical manifestations of which I had read? Had my
+      aunt, in passing from this existence to the next, paused a moment to warn
+      me of my terrible danger? My intellect replied that a disembodied soul
+      could not knock, and that the phenomenon had been due simply to some guest
+      or servant of the hotel who had mistaken the room, and discovered his
+      error in time. Nevertheless, the instinctive part of me&mdash;that part of
+      us which refuses to fraternize with reason, and which we call the
+      superstitious because we cannot explain it&mdash;would not let go the
+      spiritualistic theory, and during all my life has never quite surrendered
+      it to the attacks of my brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I will go upstairs alone;&rsquo; and I went,
+      leaving my cloak and hat with Rebecca.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already, to my hypersensitive nostrils, there was a slight odour in the
+      darkened bedroom. What lay on the bed, straight and long and thin,
+      resembled almost exactly my aunt as she lived. I forced myself to look on
+      it. Except that the face was paler than usual, and had a curious
+      transparent, waxy appearance, and that the cheeks were a little hollowed,
+      and the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth somewhat deepened,
+      there had been no outward change.... And <i>this</i> once was she! I
+      thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved
+      me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling,
+      sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The shaft
+      of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the same hour,
+      and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled and quailed.
+      I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul also was
+      solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not a moral
+      coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at that calm
+      and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much I had lost.
+      At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt Constance at
+      over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among men for interminable
+      years, and never <i>known</i>! It seemed impossible, shockingly against
+      Nature, that my aunt&rsquo;s existence should have been so! I pitied her
+      profoundly. I felt that essentially she was girlish compared to me. And
+      yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;that which she had kept and which I had given away
+      was precious, too&mdash;indefinably and wonderfully precious! The price of
+      knowledge and of ecstasy seemed heavy to me then. The girl that had gone
+      with Diaz into that hotel apartment had come out no more. She had expired
+      there, and her extinction was the price, Oh, innocence! Oh, divine
+      ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered
+      you! And herein is the woman&rsquo;s tragedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There in that mausoleum I decided that I must never see Diaz again. He was
+      fast in my heart, a flashing, glorious treasure, but I must never see him
+      again. I must devote myself to memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the dressing-table lay a brown-paper parcel which seemed out of place
+      there. I opened it, and it contained a magnificently-bound copy of <i>The
+      Imitation of Christ</i>. Upon the flyleaf was written: &lsquo;To dearest
+      Carlotta on attaining her majority. With fondest love. C.P.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too much; it was overwhelming. I wept again. Soul so kind and pure!
+      The sense of my loss, the sense of the simple, proud rectitude of her
+      life, laid me low.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the
+      conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or
+      flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains
+      loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy, wandering
+      about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of existence;
+      trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the air of your
+      own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night with your
+      yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave the night
+      behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that carry bread
+      and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of fresh water;
+      trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through the landscapes
+      and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting, formidable, and
+      yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your arrogance and your
+      pathos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That little journey from Knype to Shawport had implanted itself painfully
+      in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of
+      life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months had
+      elapsed&mdash;three months of growing misery and despair; three months of
+      tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the
+      exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange
+      fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs of
+      wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy, and no
+      interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there by my
+      secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of the
+      Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been so
+      minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would not.
+      Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been able
+      to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the house; I
+      sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca and the
+      clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as though I had
+      sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week, I cut myself
+      to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a sort of terrible
+      languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony, and yet tortured by
+      my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that no philosophy could
+      stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more than the strapping and
+      the labelling of my trunks that morning after I had slept, dreamfully, in
+      the bed that I should never use again&mdash;the bed that, indeed, was even
+      then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I wept at all, I should have
+      wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks: ‘Miss Peel, passenger to
+      Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,&rsquo; with two thick lines
+      drawn under the &lsquo;Euston.&rsquo; That writing of labels was the
+      climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and all
+      bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some day,
+      when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has been
+      fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved passionately
+      the disfigured hills and valleys of the Five Towns. And as I think of
+      Oldcastle Street, dropping away sleepily and respectably from the Town
+      Hall of Bursley, with the gold angel holding a gold crown on its spire, I
+      vibrate with an inexplicable emotion. What is there in Oldcastle Street to
+      disturb the dust of the soul?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must tell you here that Diaz had gone to South America on a triumphal
+      tour of concerts, lest I forget! I read it in the paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I arrived in London on a February day, about one o&rsquo;clock. And the
+      hall-porter at the Golden Cross Hotel, and the two pale girls in the
+      bureau of the hotel, were sympathetic and sweet to me, because I was young
+      and alone, and in mourning, and because I had great rings round my eyes.
+      It was a fine day, blue and mild. At half-past three I had nothing in the
+      world to do. I had come to London without a plan, without a purpose, with
+      scarcely an introduction; I wished simply to plunge myself into its
+      solitude, and to be alone with my secret fear. I walked out into the
+      street, slowly, like one whom ennui has taught to lose no chance of
+      dissipating time. I neither liked nor disliked London. I had no feelings
+      towards it save one of perplexity. I thought it noisy, dirty, and hurried.
+      Its great name roused no thrill in my bosom. On the morrow, I said, I
+      would seek a lodging, and perhaps write to Ethel Ryley. Meanwhile I
+      strolled up into Trafalgar Square, and so into Charing Cross Road. And in
+      Charing Cross Road&mdash;it was the curst accident of fate&mdash;I saw the
+      signboard of the celebrated old firm of publishers, Oakley and Dalbiac. It
+      is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in this
+      history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt&rsquo;s
+      death I had already written my first novel, <i>The Jest</i>, and sent it
+      to precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful
+      extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew
+      nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had
+      kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely
+      formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance of
+      success, and that they would be prepared to publish it on certain terms,
+      but that I must not expect, etc. By that time I had lost my original
+      sublime faith in the exceeding excellence of my story, and I replied that
+      I preferred to withdraw the book. To this letter I had received no answer.
+      When I saw the famous sign over a doorway the impulse seized me to enter
+      and get the manuscript, with the object of rewriting it. Soon, I
+      reflected, I might not be able to enter; the portals of mankind might be
+      barred to me for a space.... I saw in a flash of insight that my salvation
+      lay in work, and in nothing else. I entered, resolutely. A brougham was
+      waiting at the doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After passing along counters furnished with ledgers and clerks, through a
+      long, lofty room lined with great pigeon-holes containing thousands of
+      books each wrapped separately in white paper, I was shown into what the
+      clerk who acted as chamberlain called the office of the principal. This
+      room, too, was spacious, but so sombre that the electric light was already
+      burning. The first thing I noticed was that the window gave on a wall of
+      white tiles. In the middle of the somewhat dingy apartment was a vast,
+      square table, and at this table sat a pale, tall man, whose youth
+      astonished me&mdash;for the firm of Oakley and Dalbiac was historic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not look up exactly at the instant of my entering, but when he did
+      look up, when he saw me, he stared for an instant, and then sprang from
+      his chair as though magically startled into activity. His age was about
+      thirty, and he had large, dark eyes, and a slight, dark moustache, and his
+      face generally was interesting; he wore a dark gray suit. I was nervous,
+      but he was even more nervous; yet in the moment of looking up he had not
+      seemed nervous. He could not do enough, apparently, to make me feel at
+      ease, and to show his appreciation of me and my work. He spoke
+      enthusiastically of <i>The Jest</i>, begging me neither to suppress it nor
+      to alter it. And, without the least suggestion from me, he offered me a
+      considerable sum of money in advance of royalties. At that time I scarcely
+      knew what royalties were. But although my ignorance of business was
+      complete, I guessed that this man was behaving in a manner highly unusual
+      among publishers. He was also patently contradicting the tenor of his firm&rsquo;s
+      letter to me. I thanked him, and said I should like, at any rate, to
+      glance through the manuscript.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t alter it, Miss Peel, I beg,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;It is
+      &ldquo;young,&rdquo; I know; but it ought to be. I remember my wife said&mdash;my
+      wife reads many of our manuscripts&mdash;by the way&mdash;&rsquo; He went
+      to a door, opened it, and called out, &lsquo;Mary!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A tall and slim woman, extremely elegant, appeared in reply to this
+      appeal. Her hair was gray above the ears, and I judged that she was four
+      or five years older than the man. She had a kind, thin face, with shining
+      gray eyes, and she was wearing a hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary, this is Miss Peel, the author of <i>The Jest</i>&mdash;you
+      remember. Miss Peel, my wife.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman welcomed me with quick, sincere gestures. Her smile was very
+      pleasant, and yet a sad smile. The husband also had an air of quiet,
+      restrained, cheerful sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My wife is frequently here in the afternoon like this,&rsquo; said the
+      principal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; she laughed; &lsquo;it&rsquo;s quite a family affair, and I&rsquo;m
+      almost on the staff. I distinctly remember your manuscript, Miss Peel, and
+      how very clever and amusing it was.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her praise was spontaneous and cordial, but it was a different thing from
+      the praise of her husband. He obviously noticed the difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was just saying to Miss Peel&mdash;&rsquo; he began, with increased
+      nervousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pardon me,&rsquo; I interrupted. &lsquo;But am I speaking to Mr. Oakley
+      or Mr. Dalbiac?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To neither,&rsquo; said he. &lsquo;My name is Ispenlove, and I am the
+      nephew of the late Mr. Dalbiac. Mr. Oakley died thirty years ago. I have
+      no partner.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You expected to see a very old gentleman, no doubt,&rsquo; Mrs. Ispenlove
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘People often do. And Frank is so very young. You live in London?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I have just come up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To stay?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To stay.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Alone?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. My aunt died a few months ago. I am all that is left of my family.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Ispenlove&rsquo;s eyes filled with tears, and she fingered a gold
+      chain that hung from her neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But have you got rooms&mdash;a house?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am at a hotel for the moment.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you have friends?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head. Mr. Ispenlove was glancing rapidly from one to the other
+      of us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear young lady!&rsquo; exclaimed his wife. Then she hesitated, and
+      said: ‘Excuse my abruptness, but do let me beg you to come and have tea
+      with us this afternoon. We live quite near&mdash;in Bloomsbury Square. The
+      carriage is waiting. Frank, you can come?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can come for an hour,&rsquo; said Mr. Ispenlove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted very much to decline, but I could not. I could not disappoint
+      that honest and generous kindliness, with its touch of melancholy. I could
+      not refuse those shining gray eyes. I saw that my situation and my youth
+      had lacerated Mrs. Ispenlove&rsquo;s sensitive heart, and that she wished
+      to give it balm by being humane to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We seemed, so rapid was our passage, to be whisked on an Arabian carpet to
+      a spacious drawing-room, richly furnished, with thick rugs and ample
+      cushions and countless knicknacks and photographs and delicately-tinted
+      lampshades. There was a grand piano by Steinway, and on it Mendelssohn&rsquo;s
+      ‘Songs without Words.&rsquo; The fire slumbered in a curious grate that
+      projected several feet into the room&mdash;such a contrivance I had never
+      seen before. Near it sat Mrs. Ispenlove, entrenched behind a vast copper
+      disc on a low wicker stand, pouring out tea. Mr. Ispenlove hovered about.
+      He and his wife called each other &lsquo;dearest.&rsquo; &lsquo;Ring the
+      bell for me, dearest.&rsquo; &lsquo;Yes, dearest.&rsquo; I felt sure that
+      they had no children. They were very intimate, very kind, and always
+      gently sad. The atmosphere was charmingly domestic, even cosy, despite the
+      size of the room&mdash;a most pleasing contrast to the offices which we
+      had just left. Mrs. Ispenlove told her husband to look after me well, and
+      he devoted himself to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you know,&rsquo; said Mrs. Ispenlove, &lsquo;I am gradually recalling
+      the details of your book, and you are not at all the sort of person that I
+      should have expected to see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But that poor little book isn&rsquo;t <i>me</i>,&rsquo; I answered.
+      &lsquo;I shall never write another like it. I only&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shall you not?&rsquo; Mr. Ispenlove interjected. &lsquo;I hope you will,
+      though.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I only did it to see what I could do. I am going to begin something quite
+      different.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It appears to me,&rsquo; said Mrs. Ispenlove&mdash;&lsquo;and I must
+      again ask you to excuse my freedom, but I feel as if I had known you a
+      long time&mdash;it appears to me that what you want immediately is a
+      complete rest.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you say that?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not look well. You look exhausted and worn out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I blushed as she gazed at me. Could she&mdash;? No. Those simple gray eyes
+      could not imagine evil. Nevertheless, I saw too plainly how foolish I had
+      been. I, with my secret fear, that was becoming less a fear than a
+      dreadful certainty, to permit myself to venture into that house! I might
+      have to fly ignominiously before long, to practise elaborate falsehood, to
+      disappear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Perhaps you are right,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation grew fragmentary, and less and less formal. Mrs.
+      Ispenlove was the chief talker. I remember she said that she was always
+      being thrown among clever people, people who could do things, and that her
+      own inability to do anything at all was getting to be an obsession with
+      her; and that people like me could have no idea of the tortures of
+      self-depreciation which she suffered. Her voice was strangely wistful
+      during this confession. She also spoke&mdash;once only, and quite shortly,
+      but with what naïve enthusiasm!&mdash;of the high mission and influence of
+      the novelist who wrote purely and conscientiously. After this, though my
+      liking for her was undiminished, I had summed her up. Mr. Ispenlove
+      offered no commentary on his wife&rsquo;s sentiments. He struck me as
+      being a reserved man, whose inner life was intense and sufficient to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; I reflected, as Mrs. Ispenlove, with an almost motherly
+      accent, urged me to have another cup of tea, &lsquo;if you knew me, if you
+      knew me, what would you say to me? Would your charity be strong enough to
+      overcome your instincts?&rsquo; And as I had felt older than my aunt, so I
+      felt older than Mrs. Ispenlove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I left, but I had to promise to come again on the morrow, after I had seen
+      Mr. Ispenlove on business. The publisher took me down to my hotel in the
+      brougham (and I thought of the drive with Diaz, but the water was not
+      streaming down the windows), and then he returned to his office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without troubling to turn on the light in my bedroom, I sank sighing on to
+      the bed. The events of the afternoon had roused me from my terrible
+      lethargy, but now it overcame me again. I tried to think clearly about the
+      Ispenloves and what the new acquaintance meant for me; but I could not
+      think clearly. I had not been able to think clearly for two months. I
+      wished only to die. For a moment I meditated vaguely on suicide, but
+      suicide seemed to involve an amount of complicated enterprise far beyond
+      my capacity. It amazed me how I had managed to reach London. I must have
+      come mechanically, in a heavy dream; for I had no hope, no energy, no
+      vivacity, no interest. For many weeks my mind had revolved round an awful
+      possibility, as if hypnotized by it, and that monotonous revolution seemed
+      alone to constitute my real life. Moreover, I was subject to recurring
+      nausea, and to disconcerting bodily pains and another symptom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This must end!&rsquo; I said, struggling to my feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I summoned the courage of an absolute disgust. I felt that the power which
+      had triumphed over my dejection and my irresolution and brought me to
+      London might carry me a little further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving the hotel, I crossed the Strand. Innumerable omnibuses were
+      crawling past. I jumped into one at hazard, and the conductor put his arm
+      behind my back to support me. He was shouting, &lsquo;Putney, Putney,
+      Putney!&rsquo; in an absent-minded manner: he had assisted me to mount
+      without even looking at me. I climbed to the top of the omnibus and sat
+      down, and the omnibus moved off. I knew not where I was going; Putney was
+      nothing but a name to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where to, lady?&rsquo; snapped the conductor, coming upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Putney,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little bell rang and he gave me a ticket. The omnibus was soon full. A
+      woman with a young child shared my seat. But the population of the roof
+      was always changing. I alone remained&mdash;so it appeared to me. And we
+      moved interminably forward through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under
+      the mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an
+      arc-lamp, I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they
+      were nothing but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were
+      changed. A score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he
+      never looked at me again. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve done with you,&rsquo; his back
+      seemed to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly
+      succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark;
+      and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary
+      window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the tragic
+      romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to be
+      almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London.
+      Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction
+      with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations,
+      elbowing each other&mdash;No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I
+      felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth, my
+      inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the very
+      things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in that
+      despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of life,
+      the beauty of life&rsquo;s exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like a
+      red-hot iron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We crossed a great river by a great bridge&mdash;a mysterious and mighty
+      stream; and then the streets closed in on us again. And at last, after
+      hours and hours, the omnibus swerved into a dark road and stopped&mdash;stopped
+      finally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Putney!&rsquo; cried the conductor, like fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I descended. Far off, at the end of the vista of the dark road, I saw a
+      red lamp. I knew that in large cities a red lamp indicated a doctor: it
+      was the one useful thing that I did know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I approached the red lamp, cautiously, on the other side of the street.
+      Then some power forced me to cross the street and open a wicket. And in
+      the red glow of the lamp I saw an ivory button which I pushed. I could
+      plainly hear the result; it made me tremble. I had a narrow escape of
+      running away. The door was flung wide, and a middle-aged woman appeared in
+      the bright light of the interior of the house. She had a kind face. It is
+      astounding, the number of kind faces one meets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Is the doctor in?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would have given a year of my life to hear her say &lsquo;No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, miss,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Will you step in?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Events seemed to be moving all too rapidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I passed into a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the
+      surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano&mdash;scales,
+      played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters
+      of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano
+      ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall man
+      in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into the surgery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-evening, madam,&rsquo; he said gruffly. &lsquo;Won&rsquo;t you sit
+      down?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&mdash;I&mdash;I want to ask you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put a chair for me, and I dropped into it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; he said, after a moment. &lsquo;You felt as if you might
+      faint, didn&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. The tears came into my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I thought so,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll just give you a draught,
+      if you don&rsquo;t mind.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He busied himself behind me, and presently I was drinking something out of
+      a conical-shaped glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My heart beat furiously, but I felt strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to tell me, doctor,&rsquo; I spoke firmly, &lsquo;whether I am
+      about to become a mother.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah?&rsquo; he answered interrogatively, and then he hummed a fragment of
+      an air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have lost my husband,&rsquo; I was about to add; but suddenly I scorned
+      such a weakness and shut my lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Since when&mdash;&rsquo; the doctor began.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I heard him saying. &lsquo;You have been quite mistaken. But I
+      am not surprised. Such mistakes are frequently made&mdash;a kind of
+      auto-suggestion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mistaken!&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not prevent the room running round me as I reclined on the sofa;
+      and I fainted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the night, safely in my room again at the hotel, I wondered whether
+      that secret fear, now exorcised, had not also been a hope. I wondered....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART II &mdash; THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And now I was twenty-six.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the
+      lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of
+      avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary
+      narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as
+      for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire,
+      and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder
+      magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star; it
+      held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so that if
+      my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night in my
+      drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy world.
+      This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have loved I
+      have loved much....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama of
+      my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I had
+      achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had gradually
+      passed away, and a new creature had replaced her&mdash;a creature rapidly
+      developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of an
+      extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my face
+      had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given me
+      fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the
+      woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have
+      prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no
+      merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the
+      accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy,
+      and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage is
+      reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a
+      caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in
+      the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone
+      lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants
+      to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once
+      aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of
+      another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her
+      from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is a
+      form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which
+      will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule which I
+      made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I lost
+      much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And since
+      elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a
+      convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I surrounded
+      myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is the business
+      of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some persons after
+      knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others after reading
+      my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these persons lacked
+      perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself, I had naturally
+      sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest thinking, kindness of
+      heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search had not been
+      unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes
+      and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which Vicary,
+      the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were perhaps a
+      dozen guests assembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent
+      visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the
+      usual quaint Vicary details&mdash;such as the solemn warning whisper of an
+      equerry in Vicary&rsquo;s ear as he walked backwards, &lsquo;<i>Mind the
+      edge of the carpet&rsquo;;</i> and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a
+      little hysterically&mdash;all save Vicary, whose foible was never to
+      laugh. But immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those
+      disconcerting, involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a
+      chill hint of autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was
+      over in an instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended
+      that everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the
+      beginning of the downfall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be
+      interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from
+      a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality
+      in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since. I
+      joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and her
+      daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance. The
+      rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis Alcar,
+      who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano. Here was
+      another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what negligence had I
+      allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across to him, penitent,
+      and glad to leave the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are only two fundamental differences in the world&mdash;the
+      difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age.
+      Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before
+      mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of
+      my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy,
+      men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are
+      like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling
+      and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They
+      gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their
+      folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties enfeebled
+      but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of all luxuries&mdash;pretty
+      women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare man, quietly proud of
+      his age, his ability to go out in the evening unattended, his amorous
+      past, and his contributions to the history of English printing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows
+      on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me. And his
+      eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out. He
+      opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of
+      rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and
+      what they say becomes accordingly oracular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pallor suits you,&rsquo; he piped gallantly, and then added: &lsquo;But
+      do not carry it to extremes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Am I so pale, then?&rsquo; I faltered, trying to smile naturally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined
+      it like a connoisseur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said at length. &lsquo;What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naïve question with a
+      strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living
+      as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, &lsquo;Does she
+      really live without love? What does she conceal?&rsquo; I have read this
+      interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis,
+      would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so
+      mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that
+      he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted
+      to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor&rsquo;s freedom. Moreover,
+      we had an affectionate regard for each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Love is the matter!&rsquo; I might have passionately cried out to him,
+      had we been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I
+      thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile,
+      but thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was my sixth novel in five years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With you,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;work is simply a drug.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I expostulated, &lsquo;how do you know that?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,&rsquo;
+      he proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. &lsquo;Some women take to
+      morphia, others take to work.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘On the contrary,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;I have quite determined to do no
+      more work for twelve months.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Seriously?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Seriously.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then you mean to give yourself time to love?&rsquo; he murmured, as it
+      were with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow
+      features was intensified by an enigmatic smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo; I laughed encouragingly. &lsquo;Why not? What do you
+      advise?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I advise it,&rsquo; he said positively. &lsquo;I advise it. You have
+      already wasted the best years.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The best?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You have
+      nothing to learn about love!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated
+      their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the ordeal;
+      I tried to clutch my clothes about me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing
+      critically at his chandeliers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does love bring happiness?&rsquo; I asked Lord Francis, carefully
+      ignoring his remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For forty years,&rsquo; he quavered, &lsquo;I made love to every pretty
+      woman I met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent.
+      return on my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I
+      certainly did not get even that in happiness. I got it in&mdash;other
+      ways.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And if you had to begin afresh?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his
+      bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I would do the same again,&rsquo; he whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Would you?&rsquo; I said, looking up at him. &lsquo;Truly?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely
+      hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through
+      this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one
+      involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last
+      spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted
+      confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive
+      meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the
+      eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with
+      admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is the title of the new book?&rsquo; he demanded casually, sinking
+      into a chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Burning Sappho</i>,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;But the title is very
+      misleading.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Bright star!&rsquo; he exclaimed, taking my hand. &lsquo;With such a
+      title you will surely beat the record of the Good Dame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hsh!&rsquo; I enjoined him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal&mdash;or
+      to display&mdash;his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs.
+      Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that
+      impeccable <i>doyenne</i> of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had
+      captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound
+      problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of
+      them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her
+      dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen
+      thousand pounds a year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother&rsquo;s world, and she had
+      apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she
+      was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply
+      sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in
+      her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so
+      anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just
+      be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how
+      much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I remember,&rsquo; Lord Francis was saying. &lsquo;It was at St.
+      Malo. And what did you think of the Breton peasant?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh,&rsquo; said Jocelyn, &lsquo;mamma has not yet allowed us to study the
+      condition of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new
+      Settlement.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It must be very exhausting, my dear child,&rsquo; said Lord Francis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I came to ask you to play something,&rsquo; the child appealed to me.
+      &lsquo;I have never heard you play, and everyone says&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Jocelyn, my pet,&rsquo; the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis
+      floated across the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What, mamma?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal to
+      playing.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I
+      resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I
+      was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became violently
+      active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt murderous
+      towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I said, with
+      sugar in my voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the
+      mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening
+      phrase of Chopin&rsquo;s first Ballade, that composition so laden with
+      formidable memories&mdash;begun it without thinking and without
+      apprehension&mdash;showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the
+      silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands
+      filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I
+      saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one
+      of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind
+      and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed
+      unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and
+      vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess. And
+      then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in a
+      truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience, my
+      trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were
+      stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love, to
+      whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman expecting
+      her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous; a woman
+      with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who was at
+      once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I called my
+      dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and say that he,
+      too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the instrument of the god?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and
+      smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my
+      gaze suddenly to the keyboard. &lsquo;You too!&rsquo; I thought sadly,
+      &lsquo;You too!... One day! One day even you will know what life is, and
+      the look in those innocent eyes will never be innocent again!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of
+      the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and stopped.
+      It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my longing
+      for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My fingers
+      stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey me; my
+      pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting. And then I
+      became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed and anxious
+      faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my hands. It was
+      useless to fight further; the battle was lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will not play any more,&rsquo; I said quickly. &lsquo;I ought not to
+      have tried to play from memory. Excuse me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I
+      could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and
+      the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Poor thing!&rsquo; murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. &lsquo;Do sit
+      down, dear.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Won&rsquo;t you have something to drink?&rsquo; said Vicary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am perfectly all right,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m only sorry that
+      my memory is not what it used to be.&rsquo; And I persisted in standing
+      for a few moments by the mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of
+      a face as white as milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano,
+      frightened by she knew not what, like a young child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,&rsquo; said Lord Francis
+      shakily. He had followed me. &lsquo;She has wisely decided to take a long
+      holiday. Good-bye, my dear.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We
+      shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had
+      ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even
+      Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not come!
+      My secret was my own&mdash;and his. And no one should surprise it unless
+      we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as they
+      filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the right to
+      be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently woman of the
+      world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some
+      lustre ware in the further drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,&rsquo; I said,
+      approaching her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,&rsquo; replied Mrs. Sardis. &lsquo;The
+      carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk
+      with you. Do you permit?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be delighted,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are sure you are well enough?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There is nothing whatever the matter with me,&rsquo; I answered slowly
+      and distinctly. &lsquo;Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I
+      told Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared,
+      that she might retire to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis,
+      naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still
+      furtively wandered to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear co-worker,&rsquo; she began, and hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I encouraged her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her matron&rsquo;s lips together:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its
+      honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists
+      have in the work of regenerating the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing
+      to be said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I wonder,&rsquo; Mrs. Sardis continued, &lsquo;if you have ever realized
+      what a power <i>you</i> are in England and America to-day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Power!&rsquo; I echoed. &lsquo;I have done nothing but try to write as
+      honestly and as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,&rsquo; Mrs. Sardis said.
+      &lsquo;And I needn&rsquo;t tell you that I am a warm admirer of your
+      talent, and that I rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Surely,&rsquo; I interrupted her coldly, &lsquo;you are not taking the
+      trouble to tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous
+      Anglo-Saxon public!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,&rsquo; she protested.
+      &lsquo;I personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though
+      their originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but
+      there exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly
+      objects to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion,
+      ignorant opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to
+      employ the word &ldquo;immoral.&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What, then?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a
+      motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of
+      the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal
+      life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find in
+      it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mrs. Sardis!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;What do you mean?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this
+      incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth;
+      and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had
+      received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and
+      detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the
+      conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive
+      that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then, as
+      suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the painful
+      earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I&mdash;what were we but two
+      groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one mystery
+      into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our characters? Mrs.
+      Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a natural force, as I
+      was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat of the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What do you mean?&rsquo; I repeated quietly. &lsquo;Tell me exactly what
+      you mean.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the
+      freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles
+      were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours,
+      I should find myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To put it in as few words as possible,&rsquo; said she, &lsquo;I mean
+      your relations with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We
+      had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself
+      a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque of
+      existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a
+      moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked
+      steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t affect not to understand?&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I assented with a motion of the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Many persons say there is a&mdash;a liaison between you,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And do you think that?&rsquo; I asked quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,&rsquo;
+      she said solemnly. &lsquo;No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and
+      I brought Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only
+      heard the gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne
+      in upon me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not
+      everyone would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content
+      to talk among themselves.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About me? Oh!&rsquo; It was the expression of an almost physical pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What can you expect them to do?&rsquo; asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘True,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship
+      with her&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let me tell you&rsquo;&mdash;I stopped her&mdash;&lsquo;that not a single
+      word has ever passed between me and&mdash;and the man you mean, that
+      everybody might not hear. Not a single word!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dearest girl,&rsquo; she exclaimed; &lsquo;how glad I am! How glad I am!
+      Now I can take measures to&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo; I resumed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like
+      Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her own
+      code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply to every
+      conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast stolid
+      London that hemmed me in&mdash;of attempting to explain to such an
+      excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would not
+      answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a church
+      steeple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; I said, rising, &lsquo;except that I thank you. Be sure
+      that I am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very
+      unpleasant to you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, virtuously happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You made it easy,&rsquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I
+      hated kissing women!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No more need be said,&rsquo; she almost whispered, as I put my hand on
+      the knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair
+      fame of our calling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and
+      I opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove,
+      haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief
+      stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified silence
+      down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,&rsquo; I reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of
+      sensations caused by Ispenlove&rsquo;s presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Without a word, we passed together into the drawing-room, and I closed the
+      door. Ispenlove stood leaning against the piano, as though intensely
+      fatigued; he crushed his gibus with an almost savage movement, and then
+      bent his large, lustrous black eyes absently on the flat top of it. His
+      thin face was whiter even than usual, and his black hair, beard, and
+      moustache all dishevelled; the collar of his overcoat was twisted, and his
+      dinner-jacket rose an inch above it at the back of the neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to greet him, but I could not trust my lips. And I saw that he,
+      too, was trying in vain to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length I said, with that banality which too often surprises us in
+      supreme moments:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it? Do you know that your tie is under your ear?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as I uttered these words, my voice, breaking of itself and in defiance
+      of me, descended into a tone which sounded harsh and inimical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; he murmured, lifting his eyes to mine, &lsquo;if you turn
+      against me to-night, I shall&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Turn against you!&rsquo; I cried, shocked. &lsquo;Let me help you with
+      your overcoat!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went near him, meaning to take his overcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s finished between Mary and me,&rsquo; he said, holding me with
+      his gaze. ‘It&rsquo;s finished. I&rsquo;ve no one but you now; and I&rsquo;ve
+      come&mdash;I&rsquo;ve come&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped. We read one another&rsquo;s eyes at arm&rsquo;s length, and
+      all the sorrow and pity and love that were in each of us rose to our eyes
+      and shone there. I shivered with pleasure when I saw his arms move, and
+      then he clutched and dragged me to him, and I hid my glowing face on his
+      shoulder, in the dear folds of his overcoat, and I felt his lips on my
+      neck. And then, since neither of us was a coward, we lifted our heads, and
+      our mouths met honestly and fairly, and, so united, we shut our eyes for
+      an eternal moment, and the world was not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the avowal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave up my soul to him in that long kiss; all that was me, all that was
+      most secret and precious in me, ascended and poured itself out through my
+      tense lips, and was received by him. I kissed him with myself, with the
+      entire passionate energy of my being&mdash;not merely with my mouth. And
+      if I sighed, it was because I tried to give him more&mdash;more than I had&mdash;and
+      failed. Ah! The sensation of his nearness, the warmth of his face, the
+      titillation of his hair, the slow, luxurious intake of our breaths, the
+      sweet cruelty of his desperate clutch on my shoulders, the glimpses of his
+      skin through my eyelashes when I raised ever so little my eyelids! Pain
+      and joy of life, you were mingled then!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remembered that I was a woman, and disengaged myself and withdrew from
+      him. I hated to do it; but I did it. We became self-conscious. The
+      brilliant and empty drawing-room scanned us unfavourably with all its
+      globes and mirrors. How difficult it is to be natural in a great crisis!
+      Our spirits clamoured for expression, beating vainly against a thousand
+      barred doors of speech. There was so much to say, to explain, to define,
+      and everything was so confused and dizzily revolving, that we knew not
+      which door to open first. And then I think we both felt, but I more than
+      he, that explanations and statements were futile, that even if all the
+      doors were thrown open together, they would be inadequate. The
+      deliciousness of silence, of wonder, of timidity, of things guessed at and
+      hidden....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It makes me afraid,&rsquo; he murmured at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To be loved like that.... Your kiss ... you don&rsquo;t know.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled almost sadly. As if I did not know what my kiss had done! As if I
+      did not know that my kiss had created between us the happiness which
+      brings ruin!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You <i>do</i> love me?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Say it, say it!&rsquo; he pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘More than I can ever show you,&rsquo; I said proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Honestly,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t imagine what you have been
+      able to see in me. I&rsquo;m nothing&mdash;I&rsquo;m nobody&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Foolish boy!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;You are you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The profound significance of that age-worn phrase struck me for the first
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rushed to me at the word &lsquo;boy,&rsquo; and, standing over me, took
+      my hand in his hot hand. I let it lie, inert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you haven&rsquo;t always loved me. I have always loved <i>you</i>,
+      from the moment when I drove with you, that first day, from the office to
+      your hotel. But you haven&rsquo;t always loved me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then when did you&mdash;? Tell me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was dull at first&mdash;I could not see. But when you told me that the
+      end of <i>Fate and Friendship</i> was not as good as I could make it&mdash;do
+      you remember, that afternoon in the office?&mdash;and how reluctant you
+      were to tell me, how afraid you were to tell me?&mdash;your throat went
+      dry, and you stroked your forehead as you always do when you are nervous&mdash;There!
+      you are doing it now, foolish boy!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I seized his left arm, and gently pulled it down from his face. Oh,
+      exquisite moment!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was brave of you to tell me&mdash;very brave! I loved you for telling
+      me. You were quite wrong about the end of that book. You didn&rsquo;t see
+      the fine point of it, and you never would have seen it&mdash;and I liked
+      you, somehow, for not seeing it, because it was so feminine&mdash;but I
+      altered the book to please you, and when I had altered it, against my
+      conscience, I loved you more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s incredible! incredible!&rsquo; he muttered, half to himself.
+      &lsquo;I never hoped till lately that you would care for me. I never dared
+      to think of such a thing. I knew you oughtn&rsquo;t to! It passes
+      comprehension.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is just what love does,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no,&rsquo; he went on quickly; &lsquo;you don&rsquo;t understand; you
+      can&rsquo;t understand my feelings when I began to suspect, about two
+      months ago, that, after all, the incredible had happened. I&rsquo;m
+      nothing but your publisher. I can&rsquo;t talk. I can&rsquo;t write. I can&rsquo;t
+      play. I can&rsquo;t do anything. And look at the men you have here! I&rsquo;ve
+      sometimes wondered how often you&rsquo;ve been besieged&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘None of them was like you,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Perhaps that is why I
+      have always kept them off.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I raised my eyes and lips, and he stooped and kissed me. He wanted to take
+      me in his arms again, but I would not yield myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Be reasonable,&rsquo; I urged him. &lsquo;Ought we not to think of our
+      situation?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He loosed me, stammering apologies, abasing himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I ought to leave you, I ought never to see you again.&rsquo; He spoke
+      roughly. ‘What am I doing to you? You who are so innocent and pure!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I entreat you not to talk like that,&rsquo; I gasped, reddening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I must talk like that,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;I must talk like
+      that. You had everything that a woman can desire, and I come into your
+      life and offer you&mdash;what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I <i>have</i> everything a woman can desire,&rsquo; I corrected him
+      softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he breathed. &lsquo;If I bring you disaster, you will
+      forgive me, won&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My happiness will only cease with your love,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Happiness!&rsquo; he repeated. &lsquo;I have never been so happy as I am
+      now; but such happiness is terrible. It seems to me impossible that such
+      happiness can last.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Faint heart!&rsquo; I chided him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is for you I tremble,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;If&mdash;if&mdash;&rsquo;
+      He stopped. &lsquo;My darling, forgive me!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How I pitied him! How I enveloped him in an effluent sympathy that rushed
+      warm from my heart! He accused himself of having disturbed my existence.
+      Whereas, was it not I who had disturbed his? He had fought against me, I
+      knew well, but fate had ordained his defeat. He had been swept away; he
+      had been captured; he had been caught in a snare of the high gods. And he
+      was begging forgiveness, he who alone had made my life worth living! I
+      wanted to kneel before him, to worship him, to dry his tears with my hair.
+      I swear that my feelings were as much those of a mother as of a lover. He
+      was ten years older than me, and yet he seemed boyish, and I an aged woman
+      full of experience, as he sat there opposite to me with his wide,
+      melancholy eyes and restless mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wonderful, is it not,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that we should be talking
+      like this to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wonderful!&rsquo; I responded. &lsquo;But yesterday we talked with our
+      eyes, and our eyes did not say Mr. or Miss. Our eyes said&mdash;Ah, what
+      they said can never be translated into words!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable
+      curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun. Could it be true that
+      Heaven had made that fine creature&mdash;noble and modest, nervous and
+      full of courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things,
+      fine and delicate&mdash;could it be true that Heaven had made him and then
+      given him to me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves
+      constituted perfection? Oh, wonder, wonder! Oh, miraculous bounty which I
+      had not deserved! This thing had happened to me, of all women! How it
+      showed, by comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my
+      worldly splendour! I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled
+      interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had
+      almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water
+      and the palm. And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade.
+      Wonderful!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why were you so late to-night?&rsquo; I asked abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Late?&rsquo; he replied absently. &lsquo;Is it late?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both looked at the clock. It was yet half an hour from midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course it isn&rsquo;t&mdash;not <i>very</i>,&rsquo; I said. I was
+      forgetting that. Everybody left so early.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why was that?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by
+      reason of his failure to appear. He glanced at me with tender amaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I am fortunate to-day,&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;Was it not lucky
+      they left when they did? Suppose you had arrived, in that state, dearest
+      man, and burst into a room full of people? What would they have thought?
+      Where should I have looked?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m so sorry. I forgot it was your
+      evening. I must have forgotten. I forgot everything, except that I was
+      bound to see you at once, instantly, with all speed.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor boy! He was like a bird fluttering in my hand. Millions of women must
+      have so pictured to themselves the men who loved them, and whom they
+      loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But still, you <i>were</i> rather late, you know,&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not ask me why,&rsquo; he begged, with an expression of deep pain on
+      his face. &lsquo;I have had a scene with Mary. It would humiliate me to
+      tell you&mdash;to tell even you&mdash;what passed between us. But it is
+      over. Our relations in the future can never, in any case, be more than
+      formal.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A spasm of fierce jealousy shot through me&mdash;jealousy of Mary, my
+      friend Mary, who knew him with such profound intimacy that they could go
+      through a scene together which was &lsquo;humiliating.&rsquo; I saw that
+      my own intimacy with him was still crude with the crudity of newness, and
+      that only years could mellow it. Mary, the good, sentimental Mary, had
+      wasted the years of their marriage&mdash;had never understood the value of
+      the treasure in her keeping. Why had they always been sad in their house?
+      What was the origin of that resigned and even cheerful gloom which had
+      pervaded their domestic life, and which I had remarked on my first visit
+      to Bloomsbury Square? Were these, too, mysteries that I must not ask my
+      lover to reveal? Resentment filled me. I came near to hating Mary, not
+      because she had made him unhappy&mdash;oh no!&mdash;but because she had
+      had the priority in his regard, and because there was nothing about him,
+      however secret and recondite, that I could be absolutely sure of the sole
+      knowledge of. She had been in the depths with him. I desired fervently
+      that I also might descend with him, and even deeper. Oh, that I might have
+      the joy and privilege of humiliation with him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall ask you nothing, dearest,&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had risen from my seat and gone to him, and was lightly touching his
+      hair with my fingers. He did not move, but sat staring into the fire.
+      Somehow, I adored him because he made no response to the fondling of my
+      hand. His strange acceptance of the caress as a matter of course gave me
+      the illusion that I was his wife, and that the years had mellowed our
+      intimacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke my name slowly and distinctly, savouring it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I answered softly and obediently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta! Listen! Our two lives are in our hands at this moment&mdash;this
+      moment while we talk here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His rapt eyes had not stirred from the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I feel it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What are we to do? What shall we decide to do?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He slowly turned towards me. I lowered my glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, you do, Carlotta,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;You do know.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice trembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary and I are such good friends,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;That is what
+      makes it so&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no, no!&rsquo; he objected loudly. His nervousness had suddenly
+      increased. ‘Don&rsquo;t, for God&rsquo;s sake, begin to argue in that way!
+      You are above feminine logic. Mary is your friend. Good. You respect her;
+      she respects you. Good. Is that any reason why our lives should be ruined?
+      Will that benefit Mary? Do I not tell you that everything has ceased
+      between us?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The idea of being false to Mary&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There&rsquo;s no question of being false. And if there was, would you be
+      false to love rather than to friendship? Between you and me there is love;
+      between Mary and me there is not love. It isn&rsquo;t her fault, nor mine,
+      least of all yours. It is the fault of the secret essence of existence.
+      Have you not yourself written that the only sacred thing is instinct? Are
+      we, or are we not, to be true to ourselves?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You see,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;your wife is so sentimental. She would be
+      incapable of looking at the affair as&mdash;as we do; as I should in her
+      place.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that my protests were insincere, and that all my heart and brain
+      were with him, but I could not admit this frankly. Ah! And I knew also
+      that the sole avenue to peace and serenity, not to happiness, was the path
+      of renunciation and of obedience to the conventions of society, and that
+      this was precisely the path which we should never take. And on the horizon
+      of our joy I saw a dark cloud. It had always been there, but I had refused
+      to see it. I looked at it now steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; he groaned, &lsquo;if we are to be governed by Mary&rsquo;s
+      sentimentality&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear love,&rsquo; I whispered, &lsquo;what do you want me to do?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The only possible, honest, just thing. I want you to go away with me, so
+      that Mary can get a divorce.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke sternly, as it were relentlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does she guess&mdash;about me?&rsquo; I asked, biting my lip, and looking
+      away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not yet. Hasn&rsquo;t the slightest notion, I&rsquo;m sure. But I&rsquo;ll
+      tell her, straight and fair.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dearest friend,&rsquo; I said, after a silence. &lsquo;Perhaps I know
+      more of the world than you think. Perhaps I&rsquo;m a girl only in years
+      and situation. Forgive me if I speak plainly. Mary may prove
+      unfaithfulness, but she cannot get a decree unless she can prove other
+      things as well.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stroked his forehead. As for me, I shuddered with agitation. He walked
+      across the room and back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he said, putting his white face close to mine like an
+      actor. &lsquo;I will prove whether your love for me is great enough. I
+      have struck her. I struck her to-night in the presence of a servant. And I
+      did it purposely, in cold blood, so that she might be able to prove
+      cruelty. Ah! Have I not thought it all out? Have I not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sob, painfully escaping, shook my whole frame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And this was before you had&mdash;had spoken to me!&rsquo; I said
+      bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not myself, but some strange and frigid force within me uttered those
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is what love will do. That is the sort of thing love drives one to,&rsquo;
+      he cried despairingly. &lsquo;Oh! I was not sure of you&mdash;I was not
+      sure of you. I struck her, on the off chance.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sank on the sofa and wept passionately, unashamed, like a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not bear it. My heart would have broken if I had watched, without
+      assuaging, my boy&rsquo;s grief an instant longer than I did. I sprang to
+      him. I took him to my breast. I kissed his eyes until the tears ceased to
+      flow. Whatever it was or might be, I must share his dishonour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor girl!&rsquo; he said at length. &lsquo;If you had refused me, if
+      you had even judged me, I intended to warn you plainly that it meant my
+      death; and if that failed, I should have gone to the office and shot
+      myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not say such things,&rsquo; I entreated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is true. The revolver is in my pocket. Ah! I have made you cry!
+      You&rsquo;re frightened! But I&rsquo;m not a brute; I&rsquo;m only a
+      little beside myself. Pardon me, angel!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour. He did not understand
+      me. He did not suspect the risk he had run. If I had hesitated to
+      surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should
+      never have surrendered. I knew myself well enough to know that. I had a
+      conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have
+      parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man! But I forgave him.
+      Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;we shall leave everything. You grasp it?&mdash;everything.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I replied. &lsquo;Of all the things we have now, we shall
+      have nothing but ourselves.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see you
+      again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He meant
+      what he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is no sacrifice for me,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;The sacrifice would
+      be not to give up all in exchange for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We shall be exiles,&rsquo; he went on, &lsquo;until the divorce business
+      is over. And then perhaps we shall creep back&mdash;shall we?&mdash;and
+      try to find out how many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;We shall come back. They all do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What do you mean?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thousands have done what we are going to do,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And
+      all of them have thought that their own case was different from the other
+      cases.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And a few have been happy. A few have not regretted the price. A few have
+      retained the illusion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Illusion? Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see that my heart&rsquo;s treasure was ruffled. He clasped my hand
+      tenaciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen,&rsquo; I
+      answered quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous passion.
+      &lsquo;In me there are two beings&mdash;myself and the observer of myself.
+      It is the novelist&rsquo;s disease, this duplication of personality. When
+      I said illusion, I meant the supreme illusion of love. Is it not an
+      illusion? I have seen it in others, and in exactly the same way I see it
+      in myself and I see it in you. Will it last?&mdash;who knows? None can
+      tell.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he expostulated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No one can foresee the end of love,&rsquo; I said, with an exquisite
+      gentle sorrow. &lsquo;But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as
+      yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible
+      years of disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night
+      alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and his
+      disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely round my
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Call it illusion if you like,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Words are nothing. I
+      only know that for me it will be eternal. I only know that my one desire
+      is to be with you always, never to leave you, not to miss a moment of you;
+      to have you for mine, openly, securely. Carlotta, where shall we go?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We must travel, mustn&rsquo;t we?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Travel?&rsquo; he repeated, with an air of discontent. &lsquo;Yes. But
+      where to?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Travel,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;See things. See the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I had thought we might find some quiet little place,&rsquo; he said
+      wistfully, and as if apologetically, where we could be alone, undisturbed,
+      some spot where we could have ourselves wholly to ourselves, and go walks
+      into mountains and return for dinner; and then the long, calm evenings!
+      Dearest, our honeymoon!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our honeymoon! I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human
+      nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I not
+      talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and killed by
+      a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence! Inexperienced as I
+      was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the experience of my
+      impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very thought of
+      calculation would have been abhorrent. But I saw, I felt, I lived through
+      in a few seconds the interminable and monotonous length of those calm
+      days, and especially those calm evenings succeeding each other with a
+      formidable sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And I knew
+      that our love&mdash;miraculously sweet as it was&mdash;probably was not
+      greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive the
+      cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the
+      survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman
+      must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she
+      might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme,
+      devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely
+      and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion, for her, is a
+      campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart,
+      and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the
+      beautiful plant must not be exposed to hazard. Suppose it sickened, such a
+      love as ours&mdash;what then? The misery of hell, the torture of the
+      damned! Only its rich and ample continuance could justify us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear,&rsquo; I said submissively, &lsquo;I shall leave everything to
+      you. The idea of travelling occurred to me; that was all. I have never
+      travelled further than Cannes. Still, we have all our lives before us.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We will travel,&rsquo; he said unselfishly. &lsquo;We&rsquo;ll go round
+      the world&mdash;slowly. I&rsquo;ll get the tickets at Cook&rsquo;s
+      to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, dearest, if you would rather&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no! In any case we shall always have our evenings.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course we shall. Dearest, how good you are!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I wish I was,&rsquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was glad, then, that I had never allowed my portrait to appear in a
+      periodical. We could not prevent the appearance in American newspapers of
+      heralding paragraphs, but the likelihood of our being recognised was
+      sensibly lessened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you start soon?&rsquo; he asked. &lsquo;Can you be ready?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Any time. The sooner the better, now that it is decided.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not regret? We have decided so quickly. Ah! you are the merest
+      girl, and I have taken advantage&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put my hand over his mouth. He seized it, and kept it there and kissed
+      it, and his ardent breath ran through my fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What about your business?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall confide it to old Tate&mdash;tell him some story&mdash;he knows
+      quite as much about it as I do. To-morrow I will see to all that. The day
+      after, shall we start? No; to-morrow night. To-morrow night, eh? I&rsquo;ll
+      run in to-morrow and tell you what I&rsquo;ve arranged. I must see you
+      to-morrow, early.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Do not come before lunch.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not before lunch! Why?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was surprised. But I had been my own mistress for five years, with my
+      own habits, rules, privacies. I had never seen anyone before lunch. And
+      to-morrow, of all days, I should have so much to do and to arrange. Was
+      this man to come like an invader and disturb my morning? So felt the
+      celibate in me, instinctively, thoughtlessly. That deep-seated objection
+      to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common, I
+      think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a rich
+      dress, and donning the <i>peignoir</i> of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a
+      way which is an eternal enigma to men.... Then I saw, in a sudden flash,
+      that I had renounced my individual existence, that I had forfeited my
+      habits and rules, and privacies, that I was a man&rsquo;s woman. And the
+      passionate lover in me gloried in this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come as soon as you like, dearest friend,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nobody except Mary will know anything till we are actually gone,&rsquo;
+      he remarked. &lsquo;And I shall not tell her till the last thing.
+      Afterwards, won&rsquo;t they chatter! God! Let &rsquo;em.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘They are already chattering,&rsquo; I said. And I told him about Mrs.
+      Sardis. ‘When she met you on the landing,&rsquo; I added, &lsquo;she drew
+      her own conclusions, my poor, poor boy!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was furious. I could see he wanted to take me in his arms and protect
+      me masculinely from the rising storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All that is nothing,&rsquo; I soothed him. &lsquo;Nothing. Against it, we
+      have our self-respect. We can scorn all that.&rsquo; And I gave a short,
+      contemptuous laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Darling!&rsquo; he murmured. &lsquo;You are more than a woman.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I hope not.&rsquo; And I laughed again, but unnaturally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had risen; I leaned back in a large cushioned chair; we looked at each
+      other in silence&mdash;a silence that throbbed with the heavy pulse of an
+      unutterable and complex emotion&mdash;pleasure, pain, apprehension, even
+      terror. What had I done? Why had I, with a word&mdash;nay, without a word,
+      with merely a gesture and a glance&mdash;thrown my whole life into the
+      crucible of passion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act,
+      like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as an
+      infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may shatter?
+      Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when I gazed into those
+      eyes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose I must go,&rsquo; he said disconsolately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and the next instant the clock struck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he urged himself, &lsquo;I must go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent down, put his hands on the arms of the chair, and kissed me
+      violently, twice. The fire that consumes the world ran scorchingly through
+      me. Every muscle was suddenly strained into tension, and then fell slack.
+      My face flushed; I let my head slip sideways, so that my left cheek was
+      against the back of the chair. Through my drooping eyelashes I could see
+      the snake-like glitter of his eyes as he stood over me. I shuddered and
+      sighed. I was like someone fighting in vain against the sweet seduction of
+      an overwhelming and fatal drug. I wanted to entreat him to go away, to rid
+      me of the exquisite and sinister enchantment. But I could not speak. I
+      shut my eyes. This was love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment I heard the soft sound of his feet on the carpet. I opened
+      my eyes. He had stepped back. When our glances met he averted his face,
+      and went briskly for his overcoat, which lay on the floor by the piano. I
+      rose freed, re-established in my self-control. I arranged his collar,
+      straightened his necktie with a few touches, picked up his hat, pushed
+      back the crown, which flew up with a noise like a small explosion, and
+      gave it into his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;To-morrow morning, eh? I shall get to
+      know everything necessary before I come. And then we will fix things up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can let myself out,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made a vague gesture, intended to signify that I could not think of
+      permitting him to let himself out. We left the drawing-room, and passed,
+      with precautions of silence, to the front-door, which I gently opened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-night, then,&rsquo; he whispered formally, almost coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Too late for the lift,&rsquo; I murmured out there with him in the vast,
+      glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above
+      us and below us into the mysterious unseen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted steps,
+      firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the baluster.
+      When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below me, he
+      stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he resolutely
+      dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I had glimpses
+      of parts of his figure as he passed story after story. Then I heard his
+      tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the distant clatter of
+      double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was love, at last&mdash;the reality of love! He would have killed
+      himself had he failed to win me&mdash;killed himself! With the novelist&rsquo;s
+      habit, I ran off into a series of imagined scenes&mdash;the dead body,
+      with the hole in the temples and the awkward attitude of death; the
+      discovery, the rush for the police, the search for a motive, the inquest,
+      the rapid-speaking coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself,
+      cold and impassive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said....
+      But he lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his
+      spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was
+      inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my
+      mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous,
+      bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and
+      injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense
+      fact that he was mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How calm I am!&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized
+      the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give the
+      brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind
+      factitiously active. And I began at once to anticipate Frank&rsquo;s
+      coming, and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had
+      determined that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and
+      it occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which had,
+      in fact, wakened me. Save on special occasions, I was never wakened, and
+      Emmeline and my maid had injunctions not to come to me until I rang. My
+      thoughts ran instantly to Frank. He had arrived thus early, merely because
+      he could not keep away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How extremely indiscreet of him!&rsquo; I thought. &lsquo;What detestable
+      prevarications with Emmeline this will lead to! I cannot possibly be ready
+      in time if he is to be in and out all day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing him quickly, and the idea of his
+      splendid impatience, drenched me with joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; I called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emmeline entered in that terrible mauve dressing-gown which I had been
+      powerless to persuade her to discard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So sorry to disturb you,&rsquo; said Emmeline, feeling her loose golden
+      hair with one hand, &lsquo;but Mrs. Ispenlove has called, and wants to see
+      you at once. I&rsquo;m afraid something has happened.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Mrs</i>. Ispenlove?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My voice shook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Yvonne came to my room and told me that Mrs. Ispenlove was here, and
+      was either mad or very unwell, and would I go to her? So I got up at once.
+      What shall I do? Perhaps it&rsquo;s something very serious. Not half-past
+      eight, and calling like this!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let her come in here immediately,&rsquo; I said, turning my head on the
+      pillow, so that Emmeline should not see the blush which had spread over my
+      face and my neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was inevitable that a terrible and desolating scene must pass between
+      Mary Ispenlove and myself. I could not foresee how I should emerge from
+      it, but I desperately resolved that I would suffer the worst without a
+      moment&rsquo;s delay, and that no conceivable appeal should induce me to
+      abandon Frank. I was, as I waited for Mrs. Ispenlove to appear, nothing
+      but an embodied and fierce instinct to guard what I had won. No
+      consideration of mercy could have touched me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She entered with a strange, hysterical cry:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had asked her long ago to use my Christian name&mdash;long before I ever
+      imagined what would come to pass between her husband and me; but I always
+      called her Mrs. Ispenlove. The difference in our ages justified me. And
+      that morning the difference seemed to be increased. I realized, with a
+      cruel justice of perception quite new in my estimate of her, that she was
+      old&mdash;an old woman. She had never been beautiful, but she was tall and
+      graceful, and her face had been attractive by the sweetness of the mouth
+      and the gray beneficence of the eyes; and now that sweetness and that
+      beneficence appeared suddenly to have been swallowed up in the fatal
+      despair of a woman who discovers that she has lived too long. Gray hair,
+      wrinkles, crow&rsquo;s-feet, tired eyes, drawn mouth, and the terrible
+      tell-tale hollow under the chin&mdash;these were what I saw in Mary
+      Ispenlove. She had learnt that the only thing worth having in life is
+      youth. I possessed everything that she lacked. Surely the struggle was
+      unequal. Fate might have chosen a less piteous victim. I felt profoundly
+      sorry for Mary Ispenlove, and this sorrow was stronger in me even than the
+      uneasiness, the false shame (for it was not a real shame) which I
+      experienced in her presence. I put out my hands towards her, as it were,
+      involuntarily. She sprang to me, took them, and kissed me as I lay in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How beautiful you look&mdash;like that!&rsquo; she exclaimed wildly, and
+      with a hopeless and acute envy in her tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why&mdash;&rsquo; I began to protest, astounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will you think of me, disturbing you like this? What will you think?&rsquo;
+      she moaned. And then her voice rose: &lsquo;I could not help it; I couldn&rsquo;t,
+      really. Oh, Carlotta! you are my friend, aren&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing grew swiftly clear to me: that she was as yet perfectly unaware
+      of the relations between Frank and myself. My brain searched hurriedly for
+      an explanation of the visit. I was conscious of an extraordinary relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are my friend, aren&rsquo;t you?&rsquo; she repeated insistently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her
+      friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in
+      the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an
+      understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart
+      bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness
+      that I could not bring myself to reply directly, &lsquo;Yes, I am your
+      friend.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We have known each other a long time,&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There was no one else I could come to,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pass my
+      dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What are you going to do?&rsquo; she demanded fearfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and
+      then we will talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You&rsquo;ll be more
+      yourself after a cup of tea.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How young I was then! I remember my naïve satisfaction in this exhibition
+      of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be&mdash;hard in spite
+      of the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for
+      her. And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I
+      regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will
+      read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she
+      did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one
+      is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one,
+      defenceless as a rabbit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are very kind to me,&rsquo; she said, putting her cup on the
+      mantelpiece with a nervous rattle; &lsquo;and I need it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell me,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;Tell me&mdash;what I can do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace. A distance between us
+      seemed necessary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can&rsquo;t do anything, my dear,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Only I was
+      obliged to talk to someone, after all the night. It&rsquo;s about Frank.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mr. Ispenlove!&rsquo; I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not
+      very well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. He has left me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why? What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates
+      me. But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation. Still, could I
+      have behaved differently?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t understand unless I begin a long time ago,&rsquo; said
+      Mary Ispenlove. &lsquo;Carlotta, my married life has been awful&mdash;awful&mdash;a
+      tragedy. It has been a tragedy both for him and for me. But no one has
+      suspected it; we have hidden it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. I, however, had suspected it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just twenty years&mdash;yes, twenty&mdash;since I fell in
+      love,&rsquo; she proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With&mdash;Frank,&rsquo; I assumed. I lay back in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;With another man. That was in Brixton, when I
+      was a girl living with my father; my mother was dead. He was a barrister&mdash;I
+      mean the man I was in love with. He had only just been called to the Bar.
+      I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him. Certainly he
+      did; he could not help seeing it. I could not conceal it. Of course I can
+      understand now that it flattered him. Naturally it did. Any man is
+      flattered when a woman falls in love with him. And my father was rich, and
+      so on, and so on. We saw each other a lot. I hoped, and I kept on hoping.
+      Some people even said it was a match, and that I was throwing myself away.
+      Fancy&mdash;throwing myself away&mdash;me!&mdash;who have never been good
+      for anything! My father did not care much for the man; said he was selfish
+      and grasping. Possibly he was; but I was in love with him all the same.
+      Then I met Frank, and Frank fell in love with me. You know how obstinate
+      Frank is when he has once set his mind on a thing. Frank determined to
+      have me; and my father was on his side. I would not listen. I didn&rsquo;t
+      give him so much as a chance to propose to me. And this state of things
+      lasted for quite a long time. It wasn&rsquo;t my fault; it wasn&rsquo;t
+      anybody&rsquo;s fault.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just so,&rsquo; I agreed, raising my head on one elbow, and listening
+      intently. It was the first sincere word I had spoken, and I was glad to
+      utter it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The man I had fallen in love with came nearer. He was decidedly tempted.
+      I began to feel sure of him. All I wanted was to marry him, whether he
+      loved me a great deal or only a little tiny bit. I was in that state. Then
+      he drew away. He scarcely ever came to the house, and I seemed never to be
+      able to meet him. And then one day my father showed me something in the <i>Morning
+      Post</i>. It was a paragraph saying that the man I was in love with was
+      going to marry a woman of title, a widow and the daughter of a peer. I
+      soon found out she was nearly twice his age. He had done it to get on. He
+      was getting on very well by himself, but I suppose that wasn&rsquo;t fast
+      enough for him. Carlotta, it nearly killed me. And I felt so sorry for
+      him. You can&rsquo;t guess how sorry I felt for him. I felt that he didn&rsquo;t
+      know what he had missed. Oh, how happy I should have made him! I should
+      have lived for him. I should have done everything for him. I should have
+      ... You don&rsquo;t mind me telling you all this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made an imploring gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a shame!&rsquo; I burst out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, my dear!&rsquo; she said, &lsquo;he didn&rsquo;t love me. One can&rsquo;t
+      blame him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And then?&rsquo; I questioned, with an eagerness that I tried to
+      overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Frank was so persevering. And&mdash;and&mdash;I <i>did</i> admire his
+      character. A woman couldn&rsquo;t help admiring his character, could she?
+      And, besides, I honestly thought I had got over the other affair, and that
+      I was in love with him. I refused him once, and then I married him. He was
+      as mad for me as I had been for the other one. Yes, I married him, and we
+      both imagined we were going to be happy.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And why haven&rsquo;t you been?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This is my shame,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;I could not forget the other
+      one. We soon found that out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Did you <i>talk</i> about it, you&mdash;and Frank?&rsquo; I put in,
+      amazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh <i>no</i>!&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;It was never mentioned&mdash;never
+      once during fifteen years. But he knew; and I knew that he knew. The other
+      one was always between us&mdash;always, always, always! The other one was
+      always in my heart. We did our best, both of us; but it was useless. The
+      passion of my life was&mdash;it was invincible. I <i>tried</i> to love
+      Frank. I could only like him. Fancy his position! And we were helpless.
+      Because, you know, Frank and I are not the sort of people that go and make
+      a scandal&mdash;at least, that was what I thought,&rsquo; she sighed.
+      &lsquo;I know different now. Well, he died the day before yesterday.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Crettell. He had just been made a judge. He was the youngest judge on the
+      bench&mdash;only forty-six.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Was <i>that</i> the man?&rsquo; I exclaimed; for Crettell&rsquo;s
+      character was well known in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That was the man. Frank came in yesterday afternoon, and after he had
+      glanced at the paper, he said: &ldquo;By the way, Crettell&rsquo;s dead.&rdquo;
+      I did not grasp it at first. He repeated: &ldquo;Crettell&mdash;he&rsquo;s
+      dead.&rdquo; I burst into tears. I couldn&rsquo;t help it. And, besides, I
+      forgot. Frank asked me very roughly what I was crying for. You know, Frank
+      has much changed these last few months. He is not as nice as he used to
+      be. Excuse me talking like this, my dear. Something must be worrying him.
+      Well, I said as well as I could while I was crying that the news was a
+      shock to me. I tried to stop crying, but I couldn&rsquo;t. I sobbed. Frank
+      threw down the paper and stamped on it, and he swore. He said: &ldquo;I
+      know you&rsquo;ve always been in love with the brute, but you needn&rsquo;t
+      make such a damn fuss about it.&rdquo; Oh, my dear, how can I tell you
+      these things? That angered me. This was the first time in our married life
+      that Crettell had been even referred to, and it seemed to me that Frank
+      put all the hatred of fifteen years into that single sentence. Why was I
+      angry? I didn&rsquo;t know. We had a scene. Frank lost his temper, for the
+      first time that I remember, and then he recovered it. He said quietly he
+      couldn&rsquo;t stand living with me any more; and that he had long since
+      wanted to leave me. He said he would never see me again. And then one of
+      the servants came in, and&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing. I sent her out. And&mdash;and&mdash;Fran didn&rsquo;t come home
+      last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence. I could find nothing to say, and Mary had hidden her
+      face. I utterly forgot myself and my own state in this extraordinary
+      hazard of matrimony. I could only think of Mary&rsquo;s grief&mdash;a
+      grief which, nevertheless, I did not too well comprehend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then you love him now?&rsquo; I ventured at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You love him&mdash;is that so?&rsquo; I pursued. &lsquo;Tell me honestly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I spoke as gently as it was in me to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Honestly!&rsquo; she cried, looking up. &lsquo;Honestly! No! If I loved
+      him, could I have been so upset about Crettell? But we have been together
+      so long. We are husband and wife, Carlotta. We are so used to each other.
+      And generally he is so good. We&rsquo;ve got on very well, considering.
+      And now he&rsquo;s left me. Think of the scandal! It will be terrible!
+      terrible! A separation at my age! Carlotta, it&rsquo;s unthinkable! He&rsquo;s
+      mad&mdash;that&rsquo;s the only explanation. Haven&rsquo;t I tried to be a
+      good wife to him? He&rsquo;s never found fault with me&mdash;never! And I&rsquo;m
+      sure, as regards him, I&rsquo;ve had nothing to complain of.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He will come back,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;He&rsquo;ll think things over
+      and see reason.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was just as though I heard some other person saying these words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But he didn&rsquo;t come <i>home</i> last night,&rsquo; Mary insisted.
+      &lsquo;What the servants are thinking I shouldn&rsquo;t like to guess.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What does it matter what the servants think?&rsquo; I said brusquely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it <i>does</i> matter. He didn&rsquo;t come <i>home</i>. He must have
+      slept at a hotel. Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for
+      him! Oh, Carlotta, you&rsquo;re too young to understand what I feel! You&rsquo;re
+      very clever, and you&rsquo;re very sympathetic; but you can&rsquo;t see
+      things as I see them. Wait till you&rsquo;ve been married fifteen years.
+      The scandal! The shame! And me only too anxious to be a good wife, and to
+      keep our home as it should be, and to help him as much as I can with my
+      stupid brains in his business!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can understand perfectly,&rsquo; I asserted. &lsquo;I can understand
+      perfectly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I could. The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her
+      ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her,
+      was only too plainly apparent. She was&mdash;and naturally, sincerely,
+      instinctively&mdash;the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the
+      conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her
+      quiet resentment. But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief
+      and her resentment. Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her
+      resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified.
+      I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must
+      always be inferior to emotion. I am intensely proud of my ability to see,
+      then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary
+      Ispenlove&rsquo;s attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural,
+      exactly as free from artificiality, as my own. Can you go outside Nature?
+      Is not the polity of Londoners in London as much a part of Nature as the
+      polity of bees in a hive?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not a word for fifteen years, and then an explosion like that!&rsquo; she
+      murmured, incessantly recurring to the core of her grievance. &lsquo;I did
+      wrong to marry him, I know. But I <i>did</i> marry him&mdash;I <i>did</i>
+      marry him! We are husband and wife. And he goes off and sleeps at a hotel!
+      Carlotta, I wish I had never been born! What will people say? I shall
+      never be able to look anyone in the face again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He will come back,&rsquo; I said again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you think so?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time she caught at the straw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And you will settle down gradually; and
+      everything will be forgotten.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said that because it was the one thing I could say. I repeat that I had
+      ceased to think of myself. I had become a spectator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It can never be the same between us again,&rsquo; Mary breathed sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment Emmeline Palmer plunged, rather than came, into my bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Miss Peel&mdash;&rsquo; she began, and then stopped, seeing Mrs.
+      Ispenlove by the fireplace, though she knew that Mrs. Ispenlove was with
+      me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Anything wrong?&rsquo; I asked, affecting a complete calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that the good creature had lost her head, as she sometimes
+      did, when I gave her too much to copy, or when the unusual occurred in no
+      matter what form. The excellent Emmeline was one of my mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mr. Ispenlove is here,&rsquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None of us spoke for a few seconds. Mary Ispenlove stared at me, but
+      whether in terror or astonishment, I could not guess. This was one of the
+      most dramatic moments of my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell Mr. Ispenlove that I can see nobody,&rsquo; I said, glancing at the
+      wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And, Emmeline,&rsquo; I stopped her. &lsquo;Do not tell him anything
+      else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surely the fact that Frank had called to see me before nine o&rsquo;clock
+      in the morning, surely my uneasy demeanour, must at length arouse
+      suspicion even in the simple, trusting mind of his wife!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How does he know that I am here?&rsquo; Mary asked, lowering her voice,
+      when Emmeline had shut the door; &lsquo;I said nothing to the servants.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was saved. Her own swift explanation of his coming was, of course, the
+      most natural in the world. I seized on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Never mind how,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;Perhaps he was watching outside
+      your house, and followed you. The important thing is that he has come. It
+      proves,&rsquo; I went on, inventing rapidly, &lsquo;that he has changed
+      his mind and recognises his mistake. Had you not better go back home as
+      quickly as you can? It would have been rather awkward for you to see him
+      here, wouldn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, yes,&rsquo; she said, her eyes softening and gleaming with joy.
+      &lsquo;I will go. Oh, Carlotta! how can I thank you? You are my best
+      friend.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have done nothing,&rsquo; I protested. But I had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are a dear!&rsquo; she exclaimed, coming impulsively to the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat up. She kissed me fervently. I rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Has Mr. Ispenlove gone?&rsquo; I asked Emmeline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; said Emmeline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In another minute his wife, too, had departed, timorously optimistic,
+      already denying in her heart that it could never be the same between them
+      again. She assuredly would not find Frank at home. But that was nothing. I
+      had escaped! I had escaped!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Will you mind getting dressed at once?&rsquo; I said to Emmeline. &lsquo;I
+      should like you to go out with a letter and a manuscript as soon as
+      possible.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I got a notebook and began to write to Frank. I told him all that had
+      happened, in full detail, writing hurriedly, in gusts, and abandoning that
+      regard for literary form which the professional author is apt to preserve
+      even in his least formal correspondence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘After this,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;we must give up what we decided last
+      night. I have no good reason to offer you. The situation itself has not
+      been changed by what I have learnt from your wife. I have not even
+      discovered that she loves you, though in spite of what she says, which I
+      have faithfully told you, I fancy she does&mdash;at any rate, I think she
+      is beginning to. My ideas about the rights of love are not changed. My
+      feelings towards you are not changed. Nothing is changed. But she and I
+      have been through that interview, and so, after all, everything is
+      changed; we must give it all up. You will say I am illogical. I am&mdash;perhaps.
+      It was a mere chance that your wife came to me. I don&rsquo;t know why she
+      did. If she had not come, I should have given myself to you. Supposing she
+      had written&mdash;I should still have given myself to you. But I have been
+      in her presence. I have been with her. And then the thought that you
+      struck her, for my sake! She said nothing about that. That was the one
+      thing she concealed. I could have cried when she passed it over. After
+      all, I don&rsquo;t know whether it is sympathy for your wife that makes me
+      change, or my self-respect&mdash;say my self-pride; I&rsquo;m a proud
+      woman. I lied to her through all that interview.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, if I had only had the courage to begin by telling her outright and
+      bluntly that you and I had settled that I should take her place! That
+      would have stopped her. But I hadn&rsquo;t. And, besides, how could I
+      foresee what she would say to me and how she would affect me? No; I lied
+      to her at every point. My whole attitude was a lie. Supposing you and I
+      had gone off together before I had seen her, and then I had met her
+      afterwards, I could have looked her in the face&mdash;sorrowfully, with a
+      heart bleeding&mdash;but I could have looked her in the face. But after
+      this interview&mdash;no; it would be impossible for me to face her with
+      you at my side! Don&rsquo;t I put things crudely, horribly! I know
+      everything that you will say. You could not bring a single argument that I
+      have not thought of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘However, arguments are nothing. It is how I feel. Fate is against us.
+      Possibly I have ruined your life and mine without having done anything to
+      improve hers; and possibly I have saved us all three from terrible misery.
+      Possibly fate is with us. No one can say. I don&rsquo;t know what will
+      happen in the immediate future; I won&rsquo;t think about it. If you do as
+      I wish, if you have any desire to show me that I have any influence over
+      you, you will go back to live with your wife. Where did you sleep last
+      night? Or did you walk the streets? You must not answer this letter at
+      present. Write to me later. Do not try to see me. I won&rsquo;t see you.
+      We <i>mustn&rsquo;t</i> meet. I am going away at once. I don&rsquo;t think
+      I could stand another scene with your wife, and she would be sure to come
+      again to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Try to resume your old existence. You can do it if you try. Remember that
+      your wife is no more to blame than you are, or than I am. Remember that
+      you loved her once. And remember that I act as I am acting because there
+      is no other way for me. <i>C&rsquo;est plus fort que moi,</i> I am going
+      to Torquay. I let you know this&mdash;I hate concealment; and anyway you
+      would find out. But I shall trust you not to follow me. I shall trust you.
+      You are saying that this is a very different woman from last night. It is.
+      I haven&rsquo;t yet realized what my feelings are. I expect I shall
+      realize them in a few days. I send with this a manuscript. It is nothing.
+      I send it merely to put Emmeline off the scent, so that she shall think
+      that it is purely business. Now I shall <i>trust</i> you.&mdash;C. P.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I commenced the letter without even a &lsquo;Dear Frank,&rsquo; and I
+      ended it without an affectionate word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should like you to take these down to Mr. Ispenlove&rsquo;s office,&rsquo;
+      I said to Emmeline. &lsquo;Ask for him and give them to him yourself.
+      There&rsquo;s no answer. He&rsquo;s pretty sure to be in. But if he isn&rsquo;t,
+      bring them back. I&rsquo;m going to Torquay by that eleven-thirty express&mdash;isn&rsquo;t
+      it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Eleven-thirty-five,&rsquo; Emmeline corrected me coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she returned, she said she had seen Mr. Ispenlove and given him the
+      letter and the parcel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had acquaintances in Torquay, but I soon discovered that the place was
+      impossible for me. Torquay is the chosen home of the proprieties, the
+      respectabilities, and all the conventions. Nothing could dislodge them
+      from its beautiful hills; the very sea, as it beats primly, or with a
+      violence that never forgets to be discreet, on the indented shore,
+      acknowledges their sway. Aphrodite never visits there; the human race is
+      not continued there. People who have always lived within the conventions
+      go there to die within the conventions. The young do not flourish there;
+      they escape from the soft enervation. Since everybody is rich, there are
+      no poor. There are only the rich, and the servitors, who get rich. These
+      two classes never mix&mdash;even in the most modest villas they live on
+      opposite sides of the house. The life of the town is a vast conspiracy on
+      the part of the servitors to guard against any danger of the rich taking
+      all their riches to heaven. You can, if you are keen enough, detect
+      portions of this conspiracy in every shop. On the hills each abode stands
+      in its own undulating grounds, is approached by a winding drive of at
+      least ten yards, is wrapped about by the silence of elms, is flanked by
+      greenhouses, and exudes an immaculate propriety from all its windows. In
+      the morning the rich descend, the servitors ascend; the bosky and
+      perfectly-kept streets on the hills are trodden with apologetic celerity
+      by the emissaries of the servitors. The one interminable thoroughfare of
+      the town is graciously invaded by the rich, who, if they have not walked
+      down for the sake of exercise, step cautiously from their carriages,
+      enunciate a string of orders ending with the name of a house, and
+      cautiously regain their carriages. Each house has a name, and the pride of
+      the true servitor is his ability to deduce instantly from the name of the
+      house the name of its owner and the name of its street. In the afternoon a
+      vast and complicated game of visiting cards is played. One does not begin
+      to be serious till the evening; one eats then, solemnly and fully, to the
+      faint accompaniment of appropriate conversation. And there is no relief,
+      no surcease from utmost conventionality. It goes on night and day; it
+      hushes one to sleep, and wakes one up. On all but the strongest minds it
+      casts a narcotizing spell, so that thought is arrested, and originality,
+      vivacity, individuality become a crime&mdash;a shame that must be hidden.
+      Into this strange organism I took my wounded heart, imagining that an
+      atmosphere of coma might help to heal it. But no! Within a week my state
+      had become such that I could have cried out in mid Union Street at noon:
+      &lsquo;Look at me with your dead eyes, you dead who have omitted to get
+      buried, I am among you, and I am an adulteress in spirit! And my body has
+      sinned the sin! And I am alive as only grief can be alive. I suffer the
+      torture of vultures, but I would not exchange my lot with yours!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And one morning, after a fortnight, I thought of Monte Carlo. And the
+      vision of that place, which I had never seen, too voluptuously lovely to
+      be really beautiful, where there are no commandments, where
+      unconventionality and conventionality fight it out on even terms, where
+      the adulteress swarms, and the sin is for ever sinned, and wounded hearts
+      go about gaily, where it is impossible to distinguish between virtue and
+      vice, and where Toleration in fine clothes is the supreme social goddess&mdash;the
+      vision of Monte Carlo, as a place of refuge from the exacerbating and
+      moribund and yet eternal demureness of Torquay, appealed to me so
+      persuasively that I was on my way to the Riviera in two hours. In that
+      crisis of my life my moods were excessively capricious. Let me say that I
+      had not reached Exeter before I began to think kindly of Torquay. What was
+      Torquay but an almost sublime example of what the human soul can
+      accomplish in its unending quest of an ideal?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I left England on a calm, slate-coloured sea&mdash;sea that more than any
+      other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes wonderful
+      the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me the
+      mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters of
+      the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical
+      curiosity concerning each other, and then, mutually forgotten, took wing,
+      and spread out into the unknown. I think that as I stood near the hot
+      funnel, breasting the wind, and vacantly staring at the smooth expanse
+      that continually slipped from under us, I understood myself better than I
+      had done before. My soul was at peace&mdash;the peace of ruin after a
+      conflagration, but peace. Sometimes a little flame would dart out&mdash;flame
+      of regret, revolt, desire&mdash;and I would ruthlessly extinguish it. I
+      felt that I had nothing to live for, that no energy remained to me, no
+      interest, no hope. I saw the forty years of probable existence in front of
+      me flat and sterile as the sea itself. I was coldly glad that I had
+      finished my novel, well knowing that it would be my last. And the immense
+      disaster had been caused by a chance! Why had I been born with a vein of
+      overweening honesty in me? Why should I have sacrificed everything to the
+      pride of my conscience, seeing that consciences were the product of
+      education merely? Useless to try to answer the unanswerable! What is, is.
+      And circumstances are always at the mercy of character. I might have been
+      wrong, I might have been right; no ethical argument could have bent my
+      instinct. I did not sympathize with myself&mdash;I was too proud and stern&mdash;but
+      I sympathized with Frank. I wished ardently that he might be consoled&mdash;that
+      his agony might not be too terrible. I wondered where he was, what he was
+      doing. I had received no letter from him, but then I had instructed that
+      letters should not be forwarded to me. My compassion went out after him,
+      followed him into the dark, found him (as I hoped), and surrounded him
+      like an alleviating influence. I thought pityingly of the ravage that had
+      been occasioned by our love. His home was wrecked. Our lives were equally
+      wrecked. Our friends were grieved; they would think sadly of my closed
+      flat. Even the serio-comic figure of Emmeline touched me; I had paid her
+      three months&rsquo; wages and dismissed her. Where would she go with her
+      mauve <i>peignoir</i>? She was over thirty, and would not easily fall into
+      another such situation. Imagine Emmeline struck down by a splinter from
+      our passionate explosion! Only Yvonne was content at the prospect of
+      revisiting France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Ah! Qu&rsquo;on est bien ici, madame</i>!&rsquo; she said, when we had
+      fixed ourselves in the long and glittering <i>train de grand luxe</i> that
+      awaited us at Calais. Once I had enjoyed luxury, but now the futility of
+      all this luxurious cushioned arrogance, which at its best only
+      corresponded with a railway director&rsquo;s dreams of paradise, seemed to
+      me pathetic. Could it detain youth, which is for ever flying? Could it
+      keep out sorrow? Could it breed hope? As the passengers, so correct in
+      their travelling costumes, passed to and fro in the corridors with the
+      subdued murmurs always adopted by English people when they wish to prove
+      that they are not excited, I thought: &lsquo;Does it matter how you and I
+      go southwards? The pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs,
+      what can it help us that this should be sated? We cannot leave our souls
+      behind.&rsquo; The history of many of these men and women was written on
+      their faces. I wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the
+      mirrors which were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had
+      always seen. Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response.
+      Was I not part of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life
+      is good? On every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh
+      flowers that had been torn from the South, and would return there dead,
+      having ministered to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is
+      good. I hated that. I could almost have wished that I was travelling
+      southwards in a slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate
+      does not wear a mask. Great grief is democratic, levelling&mdash;not
+      downwards but upwards. It strips away the inessential, and makes brothers.
+      It is impatient with all the unavailing inventions which obscure the
+      brotherhood of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I descended from the train restlessly&mdash;there were ten minutes to
+      elapse before the departure&mdash;and walked along the platform, glimpsing
+      the faces in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and
+      napery in the two restaurant-cars: wistful all alike, I thought&mdash;flowers
+      and faces! How fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was! Opposite the door of
+      the first car stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery
+      of the International Sleeping Car Company. He wore white gloves, like all
+      the servants on the train: it was to foster the illusion; it was part of
+      what we paid for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘When is luncheon served?&rsquo; I asked him idly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs. He
+      contemplated me for an instant. He seemed to add me up, antipathetically,
+      as a product of Western civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Soon as the train starts, madam,&rsquo; he replied suavely, in good
+      American, and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the
+      platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you!&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the
+      African bush. I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression that
+      had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it was.
+      &lsquo;And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like
+      me,&rsquo; I mused. A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker
+      were busy with coal and grease. &lsquo;Five minutes hence, and our lives,
+      and our correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,&rsquo;
+      I said to myself. Strange world, the world of the <i>train de grand luxe</i>!
+      But a world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as
+      the inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and
+      varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all
+      that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself up
+      and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray
+      landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a
+      long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon;
+      and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway
+      director had received their most luscious expression&mdash;and had then
+      been modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern
+      flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes
+      as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was
+      finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car
+      towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How do you do, Miss Kate?&rsquo; I accosted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the younger of Vicary&rsquo;s two maiden sisters. I guessed that
+      the other could not be far away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had
+      done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?&rsquo; she said distantly, with a nervous
+      simper; and she passed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world of
+      my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from Miss
+      Kate&rsquo;s attitude that something must have occurred, or something must
+      have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a
+      time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly.
+      What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I
+      left without delay and went back to my coupé; it would have been a pity to
+      derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet it
+      might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for. I
+      read a little in the <i>Imitation of Christ</i> which Aunt Constance had
+      meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even
+      Christianity itself. &lsquo;Think not that thou hast made any progress,&rsquo;
+      I read, &lsquo;unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far
+      off thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be
+      angry or indignant, with any except one&rsquo;s self.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its
+      invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations,
+      dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through
+      placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save
+      their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In
+      traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs
+      of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair
+      dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in the abandoned attitudes
+      of fatigue&mdash;here and there a compartment with blinds discreetly
+      drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and here and there a
+      group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves nothing could
+      affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train and every
+      steamer a few such are to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we
+      thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their façades
+      occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under
+      streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to
+      see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to
+      a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared
+      haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to
+      carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial
+      quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations
+      we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we
+      trailed slowly our disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris would
+      fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony
+      magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we
+      were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the
+      splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by
+      the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a <i>train de grand luxe</i>,
+      while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms,
+      guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at
+      which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses
+      Vicary had brought several pairs of white gloves in order to have me
+      dismissed from the society of the train. A hand touched me. It was Yvonne&rsquo;s.
+      I awoke to a renewal of the maddening vibration. We had quitted Paris long
+      since. It was after seven o&rsquo;clock. &lsquo;<i>On dit que le diner est
+      servi, madame</i> said Yvonne. I told her to go, and I collected my wits
+      to follow her. As I was emerging into the corridor, Miss Kate went by. I
+      smiled faintly, perhaps timidly. She cut me completely. Then I went out
+      into the corridor. A man was standing at the other end twirling his
+      moustaches. He turned round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came towards me, uncertainly swaying with the movement of the swaying
+      train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good God!&rsquo; he muttered, and stopped within a yard of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I clung convulsively to the framework of the doorway. Our lives paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why have you followed me, Frank?&rsquo; I asked gloomily, in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had meant to be severe, offended. I had not meant to put his name at the
+      end of my question, much less to utter it tenderly, like an endearment.
+      But I had little control over myself. I was almost breathless with a fatal
+      surprise, shaken with terrible emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve not followed you,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I joined the train at
+      Paris. I&rsquo;d no idea you were on the train till I saw you in the
+      corner asleep, through the window of the compartment. I&rsquo;ve been
+      waiting here till you came out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you seen the Vicarys?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! You&rsquo;ve been away from London all this time?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I couldn&rsquo;t stay. I couldn&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;ve been in Belgium and
+      Holland. Then I went to Paris. And now&mdash;you see me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m going to Mentone,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I had thought of Monte
+      Carlo first, but I changed my mind. Where are you going to?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mentone,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked in hard, strained tones, avoiding each other&rsquo;s eyes. A
+      string of people passed along the car on their way to dinner. I withdrew
+      into my compartment, and Frank flattened himself against a window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come in here a minute,&rsquo; I said, when they were gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He entered the compartment and sat down opposite to me and lifted his
+      hand, perhaps unconsciously, to pull the door to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;don&rsquo;t shut it. Leave it like that.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was dressed in a gray tourist suit. Never before had I seen him in any
+      but the formal attire of London. I thought he looked singularly graceful
+      and distinguished, even romantic, in that loose, soft clothing. But no
+      matter what he wore, Frank satisfied the eye. We were both extremely
+      nervous and excited and timid, fearing speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta,&rsquo; he said at last&mdash;I had perceived that he was
+      struggling to a resolution&mdash;&lsquo;this is the best thing that could
+      have happened. Whatever we do, everybody will believe that we are running
+      off together.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think they have been believing that ever since we left London,&rsquo; I
+      said; and I told him about Miss Kate&rsquo;s treatment of me at lunch.
+      &lsquo;But how can that affect us?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary will believe it&mdash;does believe, I&rsquo;m sure. Long before
+      this, people will have enlightened her. And now the Vicarys have seen us,
+      it&rsquo;s all over. Our hand is forced, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Frank,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;didn&rsquo;t you think my letter was right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I obeyed it,&rsquo; he replied heavily. &lsquo;I haven&rsquo;t even
+      written to you. I meant to when I got to Mentone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But didn&rsquo;t you think I was right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know. Yes&mdash;I suppose it was.&rsquo; His lower lip
+      fell. &lsquo;Of course I don&rsquo;t want you to do anything that you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dinner, please,&rsquo; said my negro, putting his head between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both informed the man that we should not dine, and I asked him to tell
+      Yvonne not to wait for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There&rsquo;s your maid, too,&rsquo; said Frank. &lsquo;How are we going
+      to get out of it? The thing&rsquo;s settled for us.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear, dear boy!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;Are we to outrage our
+      consciences simply because people think we have outraged them?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It isn&rsquo;t my conscience&mdash;it&rsquo;s yours,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, then&mdash;mine.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I drew down my veil; I could scarcely keep dry eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why are you so hard, Carlotta?&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t
+      understand you. I never could. But you&rsquo;ll kill me&mdash;that&rsquo;s
+      what you&rsquo;ll do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Impulsively I leaned forward; and he seized my hand. Our antagonism melted
+      in tears. Oh the cruel joy of that moment! Who will dare to say that the
+      spirit cannot burn with pleasure while drowning in grief? Or that tragedy
+      may not be the highest bliss? That instant of renunciation was our true
+      marriage. I realize it now&mdash;a union that nothing can soil nor impair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I love you; you are fast and fast in my heart,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;But
+      you must go back to Mary. There is nothing else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I withdrew my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve no right, my dearest, to tell me to go back to Mary. I
+      cannot.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Forgive me,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I have only the right to ask you to
+      leave me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then there is no hope?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His lips trembled. Ah! those lips!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made a sign that there was no hope. And we sat in silence, overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A servant came to arrange the compartment for sleeping, and we were
+      obliged to assume nonchalance and go into the corridor. All the windows of
+      the corridor were covered with frost traceries. The train with its
+      enclosed heat and its gleaming lamps was plunging through an ice-gripped
+      night. I thought of the engine-driver, perched on his shaking, snorting,
+      monstrous machine, facing the weather, with our lives and our loves in his
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We&rsquo;ll leave each other now, Frank,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;before the
+      people begin to come back from dinner. Go and eat something.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be all right. Yvonne will get me some fruit. I shall stay in our
+      compartment till we arrive.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. And when we do arrive&mdash;what then? What are your wishes? You
+      see, I can&rsquo;t leave the train before we get to Mentone because of my
+      registered luggage.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke appealingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dear thing, with his transparent pretexts!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can ignore us at the station, and then leave Mentone again during the
+      day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you wish,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-night!&rsquo; I whispered. &lsquo;Good-bye!&rsquo; And I turned to
+      my compartment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo; he cried despairingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I shut the door and drew the blinds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yvonne was discretion itself when she returned. She had surely seen Frank.
+      No doubt she anticipated piquant developments at Mentone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All night I lay on my narrow bed, with Yvonne faintly snoring above me,
+      and the harsh, metallic rattle of the swinging train beneath. I could
+      catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow. The lamp burnt
+      delicately within its green shade. I lay almost moveless, almost dead,
+      shifting only at long intervals from side to side. Sometimes my brain
+      would arouse itself, and I would live again through each scene of my
+      relationship with Frank and Mary. I often thought of the engine-driver,
+      outside, watching over us and unflinchingly dragging us on. I hoped that
+      his existence had compensations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Early on the second morning after that interview in the train I sat on my
+      balcony in the Hôtel d'Écosse, full in the tremendous sun that had
+      ascended over the Mediterranean. The shore road wound along beneath me by
+      the blue water that never receded nor advanced, lopping always the same
+      stones. A vivid yellow electric tram, like a toy, crept forward on my left
+      from the direction of Vintimille and Italy, as it were swimming
+      noiselessly on the smooth surface of the road among the palms of an
+      intense green, against the bright blue background of the sea; and another
+      tram advanced, a spot of orange, to meet it out of the variegated tangle
+      of tinted houses composing the Old Town. High upon the summit of the Old
+      Town rose the slim, rose-coloured cupola of the church in a sapphire sky.
+      The regular smiting sound of a cracked bell, viciously rung, came from it.
+      The eastern prospect was shut in by the last olive-clad spurs of the Alps,
+      that tread violently and gigantically into the sea. The pathways of the
+      hotel garden were being gently swept by a child of the sun, who could not
+      have sacrificed his graceful dignity to haste; and many peaceful morning
+      activities proceeded on the road, on the shore, and on the jetty. A
+      procession of tawny fishing-boats passed from the harbour one after
+      another straight into the eye of the sun, and were lost there. Smoke
+      climbed up softly into the soft air from the houses and hotels on the
+      level of the road. The trams met and parted, silently widening the
+      distance between them which previously they had narrowed. And the sun rose
+      and rose, bathing the blue sea and the rich verdure and the glaring white
+      architecture in the very fluid of essential life. The whole azure coast
+      basked in it like an immense cat, commencing the day with a voluptuous
+      savouring of the fact that it was alive. The sun is the treacherous and
+      tyrannical god of the South, and when he withdraws himself, arbitrary and
+      cruel, the land and the people shiver and prepare to die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was such a morning as renders sharp and unmistakable the division
+      between body and soul&mdash;if the soul suffers. The body exults; the body
+      cries out that nothing on earth matters except climate. Nothing can damp
+      the glorious ecstasy of the body baptized in that air, caressed by that
+      incomparable sun. It laughs, and it laughs at the sorrow of the soul. It
+      imperiously bids the soul to choose the path of pleasure; it shouts aloud
+      that sacrifice is vain and honour an empty word, full of inconveniences,
+      and that to exist amply and vehemently, to listen to the blood as it beats
+      strongly through the veins, is the end of the eternal purpose. Ah! how
+      easy it is to martyrize one&rsquo;s self by some fatal decision made
+      grandly in the exultation of a supreme moment! And how difficult to endure
+      the martyrdom without regret! I regretted my renunciation. My body
+      rebelled against it, and even my soul rebelled. I scorned myself for a
+      fool, for a sentimental weakling&mdash;yes, and for a moral coward. Every
+      argument that presented itself damaged the justice of my decision. After
+      all, we loved, and in my secret dreams had I not always put love first, as
+      the most sacred? The reality was that I had been afraid of what Mary would
+      think. True, my attitude had lied to her, but I could not have avoided
+      that. Decency would have forbidden me to use any other attitude; and more
+      than decency&mdash;kindness. Ought the course of lives to be changed at
+      the bidding of mere hazard? It was a mere chance that Mary had called on
+      me. I bled for her grief, but nothing that I could do would assuage it. I
+      felt sure that, in the impossible case of me being able to state my
+      position to her and argue in its defence, I could force her to see that in
+      giving myself to Frank I was not being false to my own ideals. What else
+      could count? What other consideration should guide the soul on its
+      mysterious instinctive way? Frank and I had a right to possess each other.
+      We had a right to be happy if we could. And the one thing that had robbed
+      us of that right was my lack of courage, caused partly by my feminine
+      mentality (do we not realize sometimes how ignobly feminine we are?), and
+      partly by the painful spectacle of Mary&rsquo;s grief.... And her grief,
+      her most intimate grief, sprang not from thwarted love, but from a base
+      and narrow conventionality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus I declaimed to myself in my heart, under the influence of the
+      seductive temptations of that intoxicating atmosphere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; said a voice firmly and quietly underneath me in the
+      orange-trees of the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I started violently. It was Frank&rsquo;s voice. He was standing in the
+      garden, his legs apart, and a broad, flat straw hat, which I did not
+      admire, on his head. His pale face was puckered round about the eyes as he
+      looked up at me, like the face of a person trying to look directly at the
+      sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I exclaimed foolishly, glancing down over the edge of the
+      balcony, and shutting my white parasol with a nervous, hurried movement,
+      ‘have&mdash;have you come here?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had disobeyed my wish. He had not left Mentone at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; he repeated persuasively, and yet commandingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could feel my heart beating against the marble parapet of the balcony. I
+      seemed to be caught, to be trapped. I could not argue with him in that
+      position. I could not leave him shouting in the garden. So I nodded to
+      pacify him, and disappeared quickly from the balcony, almost scurrying
+      away. And in the comparative twilight of my room I stopped and gave a
+      glance in the mirror, and patted my hair, and fearfully examined the woman
+      that I saw in the glass, as if to discern what sort of woman she truly
+      was, and what was the root of her character. I hesitated and snatched up
+      my gloves. I wanted to collect my thoughts, and I could not. It was
+      impossible to think clearly. I moved in the room, dazed. I stood by the
+      tumbled bed, fingering the mosquito curtains. They might have been a veil
+      behind which was obscured the magic word of enlightenment I needed. I
+      opened the door, shut it suddenly, and held the knob tight, defying an
+      imagined enemy outside. &lsquo;Oh!&rsquo; I muttered at last, angry with
+      myself, &lsquo;what is the use of all this? You know you must go down to
+      him. He&rsquo;s waiting for you. Show a little common-sense and go without
+      so much fuss.&rsquo; And so I descended the stairs swiftly and guiltily,
+      relieved that no one happened to see me. In any case, I decided, nothing
+      could induce me to yield to him after my letter and after what had passed
+      in the train. The affair was beyond argument. I felt that I could not
+      yield, and that though it meant the ruin of happiness by obstinacy, I
+      could not yield. I shrank from yielding in that moment as men shrink from
+      public repentance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not moved from his post in the garden. We shook hands. A band of
+      Italian musicians wandered into the garden and began to sing Verdi to a
+      vigorous thrumming of guitars. They sang as only Italians can sing&mdash;as
+      naturally as they breathed, and with a rich and overflowing innocent joy
+      in the art which Nature had taught them. They sang loudly, swingingly,
+      glancing full of naive hope up at the windows of the vast, unresponsive
+      hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you are still in Mentone,&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Come for a walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come for a walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Very well,&rsquo; I consented. &lsquo;As I am?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you are. I saw you all in white on the balcony, and I was determined
+      to fetch you out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But could you see who it was from the road?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course I could. I knew in an instant.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We descended, he a couple of paces in front of me, the narrow zigzag path
+      leading down between two other hotels to the shore road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will happen now?&rsquo; I asked myself wildly. My head swam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that nothing would happen. We turned eastwards, walking slowly,
+      and I began to resume my self-control. Only the simple and the humble were
+      abroad at that early hour: purveyors of food, in cheerfully rattling
+      carts, or hauling barrows with the help of grave and formidable dogs;
+      washers and cleaners at the doors of highly-decorated villas, amiably
+      performing their tasks while the mighty slept; fishermen and fat
+      fisher-girls, industriously repairing endless brown nets on the other side
+      of the parapet of the road; a postman and a little policeman; a porcelain
+      mender, who practised his trade under the shadow of the wall; a few
+      loafers; some stable-boys exercising horses; and children with adorable
+      dirty faces, shouting in their high treble as they played at hopscotch. I
+      felt very closely akin to these meek ones as we walked along. They were so
+      human, so wistful. They had the wonderful simplicity of animals,
+      uncomplicated by the disease of self-consciousness; they were the vital
+      stuff without the embroidery. They preserved the customs of their
+      ancestors, rising with the sun, frankly and splendidly enjoying the sun,
+      looking up to it as the most important thing in the world. They never
+      attempted to understand what was beyond them; they troubled not with
+      progress, ideals, righteousness, the claims of society. They accepted
+      humbly and uninquiringly what they found. They lived the life of their
+      instincts, sometimes violent, often kindly, and always natural. Why should
+      I have felt so near to them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A calm and gentle pleasure filled me, far from intense, but yet
+      satisfying. I determined to enjoy the moment, or, perhaps, without
+      determination, I gave myself up, gradually, to the moment. I forgot care
+      and sorrow. I was well; I was with Frank; I was in the midst of enchanting
+      natural beauty; the day was fair and fresh and virgin. I knew not where I
+      was going. Shorewards a snowy mountain ridge rose above the long, wide
+      slopes of olives, dotted with white dwellings. A single sail stood up
+      seawards on the immense sheet of blue. The white sail appeared and
+      disappeared in the green palm-trees as we passed eastwards. Presently we
+      left the sea, and we lost the hills, and came into a street of poor little
+      shops for simple folk, that naïvely exposed their cheap and tawdry goods
+      to no matter what mightiness should saunter that way. And then we came to
+      the end of the tram-line, and it was like the end of the world. And we saw
+      in the distance abodes of famous persons, fabulously rich, defying the sea
+      and the hills, and condescending from afar off to the humble. We crossed
+      the railway, and a woman ran out from a cabin with a spoon in one hand and
+      a soiled flag in the other, and waved the flag at a towering black engine
+      that breathed stertorously in a cutting. Already we were climbing, and the
+      road grew steeper, and then we came to custom-houses&mdash;unsightly,
+      squalid, irregular, and mean&mdash;in front of which officials laughed and
+      lounged and smoked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked scarcely at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were up early this morning,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; I could not sleep.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was the same with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We recovered the sea; but now it was far below us, and the footprints of
+      the wind were marked on it, and it was not one blue, but a thousand blues,
+      and it faded imperceptibly into the sky. The sail, making Mentone, was
+      much nearer, and had developed into a two-masted ship. It seemed to be
+      pushed, rather than blown, along by the wind. It seemed to have rigidity
+      in all its parts, and to be sliding unwillingly over a vast slate. The
+      road lay through craggy rocks, shelving away unseen on one hand, and
+      rising steeply against the burning sky on the other. We mounted steadily
+      and slowly. I did not look much at Frank, but my eye was conscious of his
+      figure, striding leisurely along. Now and then, when I turned to glance
+      behind, I saw our shadows there diagonally on the road, and again I did
+      not care for his hat. I had not seen him in a straw hat till that morning.
+      We arrived at a second set of French custom-houses, deserted, and then we
+      saw that the gigantic side of the mountain was cleft by a fissure from
+      base to summit. And across the gorge had been thrown a tiny stone bridge
+      to carry the road. At this point, by the bridge, the face of the rock had
+      been carved smooth, and a great black triangle painted on it. And on the
+      road was a common milestone, with ‘France&rsquo; on one side and &lsquo;Italia&rsquo;
+      on the other. And a very old man was harmlessly spreading a stock of
+      picture postcards on the parapet of the bridge. My heart went out to that
+      poor old man, whose white curls glinted in the sunlight. It seemed to me
+      so pathetic that he should be just there, at that natural spot which the
+      passions and the blood of men long dead had made artificial, tediously
+      selling postcards in order to keep his worn and creaking body out of the
+      grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do give him something,&rsquo; I entreated Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while Frank went to him I leaned over the other parapet and listened
+      for the delicate murmur of the stream far below. The split flank of the
+      hill was covered with a large red blossom, and at the base, on the edge of
+      the sea, were dolls&rsquo; houses, each raising a slanted pencil of pale
+      smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then we were in Italy, and still climbing. We saw a row of narrow,
+      slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched
+      to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a
+      rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged about
+      four years and eight years, dirty, unkempt, delicious, shrill, their
+      movements full of the ravishing grace of infancy. They attacked the laced
+      soldier, chattering furiously, grumbling at him, intimidating him with the
+      charming gestures of spoilt and pouting children. And he bent down stiffly
+      in his superb uniform, and managed his long, heavy gun, and talked to them
+      in a deep, vibrating voice. He reasoned with them till we could hear him
+      no more. It was so touching, so exquisitely human!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reached the top of the hill, having passed the Italian customs, equally
+      vile with the French. The terraced grounds of an immense deserted castle
+      came down to the roadside; and over the wall, escaped from the garden,
+      there bloomed extravagantly a tangle of luscious yellow roses, just out of
+      our reach. The road was still and deserted. We could see nothing but the
+      road and the sea and the hills, all steeped, bewitched, and glorious under
+      the sun. The ship had nearly slid to Mentone. The curving coastline of
+      Italy wavered away into the shimmering horizon. And there were those huge
+      roses, insolently blooming in the middle of winter, the symbol of the
+      terrific forces of nature which slept quiescent under the universal calm.
+      Perched as it were in a niche of the hills, we were part of that
+      tremendous and ennobling scene. Long since the awkward self-consciousness
+      caused by our plight had left us. We did not use speech, but we knew that
+      we thought alike, and were suffering the same transcendent emotion. Was it
+      joy or sadness? Rather than either, it was an admixture of both,
+      originating in a poignant sense of the grandeur of life and of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Frank,&rsquo; I murmured, my spirit bursting, &lsquo;how beautiful it
+      is!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our eyes met. He took me and kissed me impetuously, as though my utterance
+      had broken a spell which enchained him. And as I kissed him I wept,
+      blissfully. Nature had triumphed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We departed from Mentone that same day after lunch. I could not remove to
+      his hotel; he could not remove to mine, for this was Mentone. We went to
+      Monte Carlo by road, our luggage following. We chose Monte Carlo partly
+      because it was the nearest place, and partly because it has some of the
+      qualities&mdash;incurious, tolerant, unprovincial&mdash;of a capital city.
+      If we encountered friends there, so much the better, in the end. The great
+      adventure, the solemn and perilous enterprise had begun. I sent Yvonne for
+      a holiday to her home in Laroche. Why? Ah, why? Perhaps for the simple
+      reason that I had not the full courage of my convictions. We seldom have&mdash;<i>nous
+      autres</i>. I felt that, if she had remained, Yvonne would have been too
+      near me in the enterprise. I could not at first have been my natural self
+      with her. I told the astonished and dissatisfied Yvonne that I would write
+      to her as soon as I wanted her. Yet in other ways I had courage, and I
+      found a delicious pleasure in my courage. When I was finally leaving the
+      hotel I had Frank by my side. I behaved to him as to a husband. I publicly
+      called him &lsquo;dear.&rsquo; I asked his advice in trifles. He paid my
+      bill. He even provided the money necessary for Yvonne. My joy in the
+      possession of this male creature, whose part it now was to do for me a
+      thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was
+      almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man&rsquo;s woman. I
+      had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of
+      that word&mdash;I had a protector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank was able to get three rooms at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. I
+      had only to approve them. We met in our sitting-room at half-past three,
+      ready to go out for a walk. It would be inexact to say that we were not
+      nervous. But we were happy. He had not abandoned his straw hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t wear that any more,&rsquo; I said to him, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why? It&rsquo;s quite new.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It doesn&rsquo;t suit you,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, that doesn&rsquo;t matter,&rsquo; he laughed, and he put it on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I don&rsquo;t like to see you in it,&rsquo; I persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, you&rsquo;ll stand it this afternoon, my angel, and I&rsquo;ll get
+      another to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Haven&rsquo;t you got another one here?&rsquo; I asked, with discontent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; and he laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, dear&mdash;&rsquo; I pouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed suddenly to realize that as a fact I did not like the hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come here,&rsquo; he said, charmingly grave; and he led me by the hand
+      into his bedroom, which was littered with clothes, small parcels, boots,
+      and brushes. One chair was overturned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Heavens!&rsquo; I muttered, pretending to be shocked at the disorder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew, me to a leather box of medium size.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can open it,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I opened it. The thing was rather a good contrivance, for a man. It held a
+      silk hat, an opera hat, a bowler hat, some caps, and a soft Panama straw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And you said you had no others!&rsquo; I grumbled at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, which is it to be?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This, of course,&rsquo; I said, taking the bowler. I reached up, removed
+      the straw hat from his head, and put the bowler in its place. &lsquo;There!&rsquo;
+      I exclaimed, satisfied, giving the bowler a pat&mdash;there!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed, immensely content, enraptured, foolishly blissful. We were
+      indeed happy. Before opening the door leading to the corridor we stopped
+      and kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the seaward terrace of the vast, pale, floriated Casino, so impressive
+      in its glittering vulgarity, like the bride-cake of a stockbroker&rsquo;s
+      wedding, we strolled about among a multifarious crowd, immersed in
+      ourselves. We shared a contempt for the architecture, the glaring
+      flower-beds, and the false distinction of the crowd, and an enthusiasm for
+      the sunshine and the hills and the sea, and whatever else had escaped the
+      hands of the Casino administration. We talked lightly and freely. Care
+      seemed to be leaving us; we had no preoccupations save those which were
+      connected with our passion. Then I saw, standing in an attitude of
+      attention, the famous body-servant of Lord Francis Alcar, and I knew that
+      Lord Francis could not be far away. We spoke to the valet; he pointed out
+      his master, seated at the front of the terrace, and told us, in a
+      discreet, pained, respectful voice, that our venerable friend had been
+      mysteriously unwell at Monte Carlo, and was now taking the air for the
+      first time in ten days. I determined that we should go boldly and speak to
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I said gently, after we had stood some seconds by
+      his chair, unremarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was staring fixedly at the distance of the sea. He looked amazingly
+      older than when I had last talked with him. His figure was shrunken, and
+      his face rose thin and white out of a heavy fur overcoat and a large blue
+      muffler. In his eyes there was such a sadness, such an infinite regret,
+      such a profound weariness as can only be seen in the eyes of the senile.
+      He was utterly changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I repeated, &lsquo;don&rsquo;t you know me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He started slightly and looked at me, and a faint gleam appeared in his
+      eyes. Then he nodded, and took a thin, fragile alabaster hand out of the
+      pocket of his overcoat. I shook it. It was like shaking hands with a dead,
+      starved child. He carefully moved the skin and bone back into his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you pretty well?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded. Then the faint gleam faded out of his eyes; his head fell a
+      little, and he resumed his tragic contemplation of the sea. The fact of my
+      presence had dropped like a pebble into the strange depths of that aged
+      mind, and the waters of the ferocious egotism of senility had closed over
+      it, and it was forgotten. His rapt and yet meaningless gaze frightened me.
+      It was as if there was more desolation and disillusion in that gaze than I
+      had previously imagined the whole earth to contain. Useless for Frank to
+      rouse him for the second time. Useless to explain ourselves. What was love
+      to him, or the trivial conventions of a world which he was already
+      quitting?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked away. From the edge of the terrace I could see a number of boats
+      pulling to and fro in the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s the pigeon-shooting,&rsquo; Frank explained. &lsquo;Come to
+      the railings and you&rsquo;ll be able to see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had already heard the sharp popping of rifles. I went to the railings,
+      and saw a number of boxes arranged in a semicircle on a green, which was,
+      as it were, suspended between the height of the terrace and the sea.
+      Suddenly one of the boxes collapsed with a rattle, and a bird flew out of
+      the ruin of it. There were two reports of a gun; the bird, its curving
+      flight cut short, fell fluttering to the grass; a dog trotted out from the
+      direction of the gun unseen beneath us, and disappeared again with the
+      mass of ruffled feathers in its mouth. Then two men showed themselves, ran
+      to the collapsed box, restored it, and put in it a fresh victim, and
+      disappeared after the dog. I was horrified, but I could not remove my eyes
+      from the green. Another box fell flat, and another bird flew out; a gun
+      sounded; the bird soared far away, wavered, and sank on to the surface of
+      the sea, and the boats converged towards it in furious haste. So the game
+      proceeded. I saw a dozen deaths on the green; a few birds fell into the
+      sea, and one escaped, settling ultimately on the roof of the Casino.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So that is pigeon-shooting,&rsquo; I said coldly, turning to Frank.
+      &lsquo;I suppose it goes on all day?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just as cruel as plenty of other sports, and no more,&rsquo;
+      he said, as if apologizing for the entire male sex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I presume so,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;But do you know, dear, if the
+      idea once gets into my head that that is going on all day, I shan&rsquo;t
+      be able to stop here. Let us have tea somewhere.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not until dinner did I recover from the obsession of that continual
+      slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the
+      Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the
+      mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot out
+      all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now do I
+      completely perceive how violent, how capricious and contradictory were my
+      emotions in those unique and unforgettable hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We dined late, because I had deprived myself of Yvonne. Already I was
+      almost in a mind to send for her. The restaurant of the hotel was full,
+      but we recognised no one as we walked through the room to our table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There is one advantage in travelling about with you,&rsquo; said Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No matter where one is, one can always be sure of being with the most
+      beautiful woman in the place.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was content. I repaid him by being more than ever a man&rsquo;s woman. I
+      knew that I was made for that. I understood why great sopranos have of
+      their own accord given up even the stage on marriage. The career of
+      literature seemed to me tedious and sordid in comparison with that of
+      being a man&rsquo;s woman. In my rich black dress and my rings and
+      bracelets I felt like an Eastern Empress; I felt that I could adequately
+      reward homage with smiles, and love with fervid love. And I felt like a
+      cat&mdash;idle, indolently graceful, voluptuously seeking warmth and
+      caresses. I enveloped Frank with soft glances, I dazed him with glances.
+      He ordered a wine which he said was fit for gods, and the waiter brought
+      it reverently and filled our glasses, with a ritual of precautions. Later
+      during the dinner Frank asked me if I would prefer champagne. I said,
+      &lsquo;No, of course not.&rsquo; But he said, &lsquo;I think you would,&rsquo;
+      and ordered some. &lsquo;Admit,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that you prefer
+      champagne.&rsquo; &lsquo;Well, of course,&rsquo; I replied. But I drank
+      very little champagne, lest I should be too happy. Frank&rsquo;s wonderful
+      face grew delicately flushed. The room resounded with discreet chatter,
+      and the tinkle of glass and silver and porcelain. The upper part of it
+      remained in shadow, but every table was a centre of rosy light,
+      illuminating faces and jewels and napery. And in my sweet illusion I
+      thought that every face had found the secret of joy, and that even the old
+      had preserved it. Pleasure reigned. Pleasure was the sole goddess. And how
+      satisfying then was the worship of her! Life had no inconveniences, no
+      dark spots, no pitfalls. The gratification of the senses, the appeasing of
+      appetites that instantly renewed themselves&mdash;this was the business of
+      the soul. And as the wine sank lower in the bottles, and we cooled our
+      tongues with ices, and the room began to empty, expectation gleamed and
+      glittered in our eyes. At last, except a group of men smoking and talking
+      in a corner, we were the only diners left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shall we go?&rsquo; Frank said, putting a veil of cigarette smoke between
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I trembled. I was once more the young and timid girl. I could not speak. I
+      nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the hall was Vicary, talking to the head-porter. He saw us and started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What! Vicary!&rsquo; I murmured, suddenly cooled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want to speak to you,&rsquo; said Vicary. &lsquo;Where can we go?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This way,&rsquo; Frank replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went to our sitting-room, silent and apprehensive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Sit down,&rsquo; said Vicary, shutting the door and standing against it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was wearing a tourist suit, with a gray overcoat, and his grizzled hair
+      was tumbling over his hard, white face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s the matter?&rsquo; Frank asked. &lsquo;Anything wrong?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Look here, you two,&rsquo; said Vicary, &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t want to
+      discuss your position, and I&rsquo;m the last person in this world to cast
+      the first stone; but it falls to me to do it. I was coming down to Nice to
+      stay with my sisters, and I&rsquo;ve come a little further. My sisters
+      wired me they had seen you. I&rsquo;ve been to Mentone, and driven here
+      from there. I hoped I should get here earlier than the newspapers, and I
+      have done, it seems.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Earlier than the newspapers?&rsquo; Frank repeated, standing up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Try to keep calm,&rsquo; Vicary continued. &lsquo;Your wife&rsquo;s body
+      was found in the Thames at seven o&rsquo;clock last night. The doctors say
+      it had been in the water for forty-eight hours. Your servants thought she
+      had gone to you. But doubtless some thoughtful person had told her that
+      you two were wandering about Europe together.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>My wife</i>&rsquo; cried Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the strange and terrible emphasis he put on the word &lsquo;wife&rsquo;
+      proved to me in the fraction of a second that in his heart I was not his
+      wife. A fearful tragedy had swept away the structure of argument in favour
+      of the rights of love which he had built over the original conventionality
+      of his mind. Poor fellow!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fell back into his chair and covered his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I thank God my mother didn&rsquo;t live to see this!&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he rushed to his bedroom and banged the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor girl!&rsquo; said Vicary, approaching me. &lsquo;What can I&mdash;I&rsquo;m
+      awfully&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I waved him away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s that?&rsquo; he exclaimed, in a different voice, listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran to the bedroom, and saw Frank lifting a revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve brought me to this, Carlotta!&rsquo; he shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang towards him, but it was too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART III &mdash; THE VICTORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I came out of the house, hurried and angrily flushing, I perceived
+      clearly that my reluctance to break a habit and my desire for physical
+      comfort, if not my attachment to the girl, had led me too far. I was
+      conscious of humiliation. I despised myself. The fact was that I had
+      quarrelled with Yvonne&mdash;Yvonne, who had been with me for eight years,
+      Yvonne who had remained sturdily faithful during my long exile. Now the
+      woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with
+      a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or
+      both. Possibly I was both. I had permitted Yvonne too much liberty. I had
+      spoilt her. She was fidelity itself, goodness itself; but her character
+      had not borne the strain of realizing that she had acquired power over me,
+      and that she had become necessary to me. So that morning we had differed
+      violently; we had quarrelled as equals. The worst side of her had appeared
+      suddenly, shockingly. And she had left me, demonstrating even as she
+      banged the door that she was at least my mistress in altercation. All day
+      I fought against the temptation to eat my pride, and ask her to return. It
+      was a horrible, a deplorable, temptation. And towards evening, after seven
+      hours of solitude in the hotel in the Avenue de Kleber, I yielded to it. I
+      knew the address to which she had gone, and I took a cab and drove there,
+      hating myself. I was received with excessive rudeness by a dirty and
+      hag-like concierge, who, after refusing all information for some minutes,
+      informed me at length that the young lady in question had quitted Paris in
+      company with a gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The insolence of the concierge, my weakness and my failure, the bitter
+      sense of lost dignity, the fact that Yvonne had not hesitated even a few
+      hours before finally abandoning me&mdash;all these things wounded me. But
+      the sharpest stab of all was that during our stay in Paris Yvonne must
+      have had secret relations with a man. I had hidden nothing from her; she,
+      however, had not reciprocated my candour. I had imagined that she lived
+      only for me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, the truth cannot be concealed that the years of wandering which had
+      succeeded the fatal night at Monte Carlo had done little to improve me.
+      What would you have? For months and months my ears rang with Frank&rsquo;s
+      despairing shout: &lsquo;<i>You&rsquo;ve</i> brought me to this, Carlotta!&rsquo;
+      And the profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of
+      my immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my
+      inmost soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem
+      inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what
+      it means to be broken&mdash;to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming
+      calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the
+      afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert
+      me; I deserted them. For the second time in my career I tore myself up by
+      the roots. I lived the nomad&rsquo;s life, in the usual European haunts of
+      the nomad. And in five years I did not make a single new friend, scarcely
+      an acquaintance. I lived in myself and on myself, nursing grief, nursing a
+      rancour against fate, nursing an involuntary shame.... You know, the
+      scandal of which I had been the centre was appalling; it touched the
+      extreme. It must have nearly killed the excellent Mrs. Sardis. I did not
+      dare to produce another novel. But after a year or so I turned to poetry,
+      and I must admit that my poetry was accepted. But it was not enough to
+      prevent me from withering&mdash;from shrivelling. I lost ground, and I was
+      still losing it. I was becoming sinister, warped, peculiar, capricious,
+      unaccountable. I guessed it then; I see it clearly now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house of the odious concierge was in a small, shabby street off the
+      Boulevard du Montparnasse. I looked in vain for a cab. Even on the wide,
+      straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had
+      been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great,
+      glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession,
+      but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither they
+      went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car. Without a cab I was as
+      helpless and as timid as a young girl, I who was thirty-one, and had
+      travelled and lived and suffered! Never had I been alone in the streets of
+      a large city at night. And the September night was sultry and forbidding.
+      I was afraid&mdash;I was afraid of the men who passed me, staring at me.
+      One man spoke to me, and I literally shook with fear as I hastened on.
+      What would I have given to have had the once faithful Yvonne by my side!
+      Presently I came to the crossing of the Boulevard Raspail, and this
+      boulevard, equally long, uncharitable, and mournful with the other,
+      endless, stretching to infinity, filled me with horror. Yes, with the
+      horror of solitude in a vast city. Oh, you solitary, you who have felt
+      that horror descending upon you, desolating, clutching, and chilling the
+      heart, you will comprehend me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the corner, of the two boulevards was a glowing cafe, the Café du Dome,
+      with a row of chairs and little tables in front of its windows. And at one
+      of these little tables sat a man, gazing absently at a green glass in a
+      white saucer. I had almost gone past him when some instinct prompted me to
+      the bravery of looking at him again. He was a stoutish man, apparently
+      aged about forty-five, very fair, with a puffed face and melancholy eyes.
+      And then it was as though someone had shot me in the breast. It was as if
+      I must fall down and die&mdash;as if the sensations which I experienced
+      were too acute&mdash;too elemental for me to support. I have never borne a
+      child, but I imagine that the woman who becomes a mother may feel as I
+      felt then, staggered at hitherto unsuspected possibilities of sensation. I
+      stopped. I clung to the nearest table. There was ice on my shuddering
+      spine, and a dew on my forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda!&rsquo; breathed the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had raised his eyes to mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Diaz, after ten years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first I had not recognised him. Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years
+      older. I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the returned
+      traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered landmarks.
+      Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him. The magic of
+      his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth reappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is I,&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, and in doing so shook the table, and his glass was overturned,
+      and scattered itself in fragments on the asphalte. At the noise a waiter
+      ran out of the cafe, and Diaz, blushing and obviously making a great
+      effort at self-control, gave him an order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should have known you anywhere,&rsquo; said Diaz to me, taking my hand,
+      as the waiter went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ineptitude of the speech was such that I felt keenly sorry for him. I
+      was not in the least hurt. My sympathy enveloped him. The position was so
+      difficult, and he had seemed so pathetic, sitting there alone on the
+      pavement of the vast nocturnal boulevard, so weighed down by sadness, that
+      I wanted to comfort him and soothe him, and to restore him to all the
+      brilliancy of his first period. It appeared to me unjust and cruel that
+      the wheels of life should have crushed him too. And so I said, smiling as
+      well as I could:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Won&rsquo;t you sit down here?&rsquo; he suggested, avoiding my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus I found myself seated outside a cafe, at night, conspicuous for
+      all Montparnasse to see. We never know what may lie in store for us at the
+      next turning of existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then I am not much changed, you think?&rsquo; he ventured, in an anxious
+      tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I lied. &lsquo;You are perhaps a little stouter. That&rsquo;s
+      all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How hard it was to talk! How lamentably self-conscious we were! How
+      unequal to the situation! We did not know what to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are far more beautiful than ever you were,&rsquo; he said, looking at
+      me for an instant. &lsquo;You are a woman; you were a girl&mdash;then.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The waiter brought another glass and saucer, and a second waiter followed
+      him with a bottle, from which he poured a greenish-yellow liquid into the
+      glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will you have?&rsquo; Diaz asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thank you,&rsquo; I said quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To sit outside the cafe was already much. It would have been impossible
+      for me to drink there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! as you please, as you please,&rsquo; Diaz snapped. &lsquo;I beg your
+      pardon.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Poor fellow!&rsquo; I reflected. &lsquo;He must be suffering from nervous
+      irritability.&rsquo; And aloud, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m not thirsty, thank you,&rsquo;
+      as nicely as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled beautifully; the irritability had passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s awfully kind of you to sit down here with me,&rsquo; he said,
+      in a lower voice. &lsquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ve heard about me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drank half the contents of the glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I read in the papers some years ago that you were suffering from
+      neurasthenia and nervous breakdown,&rsquo; I replied. &lsquo;I was very
+      sorry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;nervous breakdown&mdash;nervous breakdown.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You haven&rsquo;t been playing lately, have you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is more than two years since I played. And if you had heard me that
+      time! My God!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you have tried some cure?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Cure!&rsquo; he repeated after me. &lsquo;There&rsquo;s no cure. Here I
+      am! Me!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His glass was empty. He tapped on the window behind us, and the procession
+      of waiters occurred again, and Diaz received a third glass, which now
+      stood on three saucers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ll excuse me,&rsquo; he said, sipping slowly. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      not very well to-night. And you&rsquo;ve&mdash;Why did you run away from
+      me? I wanted to find you, but I couldn&rsquo;t.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Please do not let us talk about that,&rsquo; I stopped him. &lsquo;I&mdash;I
+      must go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, of course, if I&rsquo;ve offended you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m not at all offended. But I think&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, if you aren&rsquo;t offended, stop a little, and let me see you
+      home. You&rsquo;re sure you won&rsquo;t have anything?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head, wishing that he would not drink so much. I thought it
+      could not be good for his nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Been in Paris long?&rsquo; he asked me, with a slightly confused
+      utterance. ‘Staying in this quarter? Many English and Americans here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, in setting down the glass, he upset it, and it smashed on the
+      pavement like the first one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Damn!&rsquo; he exclaimed, staring forlornly at the broken glass, as if
+      in the presence of some irreparable misfortune. And before I could put in
+      a word, he turned to me with a silly smile, and approaching his face to
+      mine till his hat touched the brim of my hat, he said thickly: &lsquo;After
+      all, you know, I&rsquo;m the greatish pianist in the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth struck me like a blow. In my amazing ignorance of certain
+      aspects of life I had not suspected it. Diaz was drunk. The ignominy of
+      it! The tragedy of it! He was drunk. He had fallen to the beast. I drew
+      back from that hot, reeking face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t think I am?&rsquo; he muttered. &lsquo;You think young
+      What&rsquo;s-his-name can play Ch&mdash;Chopin better than me? Is that it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to run away, to cease to exist, to hide with my shame in some
+      deep abyss. And there I was on the boulevard, next to this animal, sharing
+      his table and the degradation! And I could not move. There are people so
+      gifted that in a dilemma they always know exactly the wisest course to
+      adopt. But I did not know. This part of my story gives me infinite pain to
+      write, and yet I must write it, though I cannot persuade myself to write
+      it in full; the details would be too repulsive. Nevertheless, forget not
+      that I lived it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his face to mine again, and began to stammer something, and I drew
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are ashamed of me, madam,&rsquo; he said sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you are not quite yourself&mdash;not quite well,&rsquo; I
+      replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I am drunk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I mean what I say. You are not quite well. Please do not twist my words.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I am drunk,&rsquo; he insisted, raising his voice. &lsquo;I am
+      not drunk; I have never been drunk. That I can swear with my hand on my
+      heart. But you are ashamed of being seen with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you ought to go home,&rsquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is only to get rid of me!&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no,&rsquo; I appealed to him persuasively. &lsquo;Do not wound me. I
+      will go with you as far as your house, if you like. You are too ill to be
+      alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment an empty open cab strolled by, and, without pausing for his
+      answer, I signalled the driver. My heart beat wildly. My spirit was in an
+      uproar. But I was determined not to desert him, not to abandon him to a
+      public disgrace. I rose from my seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re very good,&rsquo; he said, in a new voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cab had stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come!&rsquo; I entreated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rapped uncertainly on the window, and then, as the waiter did not
+      immediately appear, he threw some silver on the table, and aimed himself
+      in the direction of the cab. I got in. Diaz slipped on the step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve forgotten somethin&rsquo;,&rsquo; he complained. &lsquo;What
+      is it? My umbrella&mdash;yes, my umbrella&mdash;<i>pépin</i> as they say
+      here. &lsquo;Scuse me moment.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His umbrella was, in fact, lying under a chair. He stooped with difficulty
+      and regained it, and then the waiter, who had at length arrived, helped
+      him into the cab, and he sank like a mass of inert clay on my skirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell the driver the address,&rsquo; I whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver, with head turned and a grin on his face, was waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Rue de Douai,&rsquo; said Diaz sullenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What number?&rsquo; the driver asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does that regard you?&rsquo; Diaz retorted crossly in French. &lsquo;I
+      will tell you later.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell him now,&rsquo; I pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, to oblige you, I will. Twenty-seven. But what I can&rsquo;t stand
+      is the impudence of these fellows.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver winked at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just so,&rsquo; I soothed Diaz, and we drove off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have never been happier than in unhappiness. Happiness is not joy, and
+      it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more
+      disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realization of one&rsquo;s
+      secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence.
+      As I crossed Paris with the drunken Diaz leaning clumsily against my
+      shoulder, I was profoundly unhappy. I was desolated by the sight of this
+      ruin, and yet I was happier than I had been since Frank died. I had
+      glimpses and intimations of the baffling essence of our human lives here,
+      strange, fleeting comprehensions of the eternal wonder and the eternal
+      beauty.... In vain, professional writer as I am, do I try to express
+      myself. What I want to say cannot be said; but those who have truly lived
+      will understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed over the Seine, lighted and asleep in the exquisite Parisian
+      night, and the rattling of the cab on the cobble-stones roused Diaz from
+      his stupor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where are we?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just going through the Louvre,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know how I got to the other s-side of the river,&rsquo; he
+      said. ‘Don&rsquo;t remember. So you&rsquo;re coming home with me, eh? You
+      aren&rsquo;t ‘shamed of me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are hurting me,&rsquo; I said coldly, &lsquo;with your elbow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, a thousand pardons! a thous&rsquo; parnds, Magda! That isn&rsquo;t
+      your real name, is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat upright and turned his face to glance at mine with a fatuous smile;
+      but I would not look at him. I kept my eyes straight in front. Then a
+      swerve of the carriage swung his body away from me, and he subsided into
+      the corner. The intoxication was gaining on him every minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What shall I do with him?&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I blushed as we drove up the Avenue de l&rsquo;Opera and across the Grand
+      Boulevard, for it seemed to me that all the gay loungers must observe Diaz&rsquo;
+      condition. We followed darker thoroughfares, and at last the cab, after
+      climbing a hill, stopped before a house in a street that appeared rather
+      untidy and irregular. I got out first, and Diaz stumbled after me, while
+      two women on the opposite side of the road stayed curiously to watch us.
+      Hastily I opened my purse and gave the driver a five-franc-piece, and he
+      departed before Diaz could decide what to say. I had told him to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not wish to tell the driver to go. I told him in spite of myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz, grumbling inarticulately, pulled the bell of the great door of the
+      house. But he had to ring several times before finally the door opened;
+      and each second was a year for me, waiting there with him in the street.
+      And when the door opened he was leaning against it, and so pitched forward
+      into the gloom of the archway. A laugh&mdash;the loud, unrestrained laugh
+      of the courtesan&mdash;came from across the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The archway was as black as night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shut the door, will you?&rsquo; I heard Diaz&rsquo; voice. &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t
+      see it. Where are you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I was not going to shut the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you got a servant here?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘She comes in the mornings,&rsquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then there is no one in your flat?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not a shoul,&rsquo; said Diaz. &lsquo;Needn&rsquo;t be &lsquo;fraid.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I&rsquo;m not afraid,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;But I wanted to know. Which
+      floor is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Third. I&rsquo;ll light a match.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I pushed to the door, whose automatic latch clicked. We were fast in
+      the courtyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz dropped his matches in attempting to strike one. The metal box
+      bounced on the tiles. I bent down and groped with both hands till I found
+      it. And presently we began painfully to ascend the staircase, Diaz holding
+      his umbrella and the rail, and I striking matches from time to time. We
+      were on the second landing when I heard the bell ring again, and the
+      banging of the front-door, and then voices at the foot of the staircase. I
+      trembled lest we should be over-taken, and I would have hurried Diaz on,
+      but he would not be hurried. Happily, as we were halfway between the
+      second and third story, the man and the girl whose voices I heard stopped
+      at the second. I caught sight of them momentarily through the banisters.
+      The man was striking matches as I had been. &lsquo;<i>C&rsquo;est ici</i>,&rsquo;
+      the girl whispered. She was dressed in blue with a very large hat. She put
+      a key in the door when they had stopped, and then our matches went out
+      simultaneously. The door shut, and Diaz and I were alone on the staircase
+      again. I struck another match; we struggled on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I had taken his key from Diaz&rsquo; helpless hand, and opened his
+      door and guided him within, and closed the door definitely upon the outer
+      world, I breathed a great sigh. Every turn of the stair had been a station
+      of the cross for me. We were now in utter darkness. The classical
+      effluvium of inebriety mingled with the classical odour of the furnished
+      lodging. But I cared not. I had at last successfully hidden his shame. No
+      one could witness it now but me. So I was glad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither of us said anything as, still with the aid of matches, I
+      penetrated into the flat. Silently I peered about until I perceived a pair
+      of candles, which I lighted. Diaz, with his hat on his head and his
+      umbrella clasped tightly in his hand, fell into a chair. We glanced at
+      each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You had better go to bed,&rsquo; I suggested. &lsquo;Take your hat off.
+      You will feel better without it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not move, and I approached him and gently took his hat. I then
+      touched the umbrella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no, no!&rsquo; he cried suddenly; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m always losing this
+      umbrella, and I won&rsquo;t let it out of my sight.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you wish,&rsquo; I replied coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was standing by him when he got up with a surprising lurch and put a
+      hand on my shoulder. He evidently meant to kiss me. I kept him at arm&rsquo;s
+      length, feeling a sort of icy anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to bed,&rsquo; I repeated fiercely. &lsquo;It is the only place for
+      you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made inarticulate noises in his throat, and ultimately achieved the
+      remark:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re very hard, Magda.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he bent himself towards the next room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You will want a candle,&rsquo; I said, with bitterness. &lsquo;No; I will
+      carry it. Let me go first.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I preceded him through a tiny salon into the bedroom, and, leaving him
+      there with one candle, came back into the first room. The whole place was
+      deplorable, though not more deplorable than I had expected from the look
+      of the street and the house and the stairs and the girl with the large
+      hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless,
+      and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel&mdash;a
+      kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings
+      and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with enormous
+      red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once been a
+      carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with actually
+      a bed! It was the ready-made human kennel of commerce, which every large
+      city supplies wholesale in tens of thousands to its victims. In that
+      street there were hundreds such; in the house alone there were probably a
+      score at least. Their sole virtue was their privacy. Ah the blessedness of
+      the sacred outer door, which not even the tyrant concierge might violate!
+      I thought of all the other interiors of the house, floor above floor, and
+      serried one against another&mdash;vile, mean, squalid, cramped, unlovely,
+      frowsy, fetid; but each lighted and intensely alive with the interplay of
+      hearts; each cloistered, a secure ground where the instincts that move the
+      world might show themselves naturally and in secret. There was something
+      tragically beautiful in that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had heard uncomfortable sounds from the bedroom. Then Diaz called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s no use. Can&rsquo;t do it. Can&rsquo;t get into bed.&rsquo; I
+      went directly to him. He sat on the bed, still clasping the umbrella, one
+      arm out of his coat. His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man
+      who retires baffled from some tremendously complicated problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Put down your umbrella,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t be foolish.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m not foolish,&rsquo; he retorted irritably. &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t
+      want to loosh thish umbrella again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well then,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;hold it in the other hand, and I will
+      help you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that
+      revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He
+      was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty
+      centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should
+      exist&mdash;there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened,
+      shut in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted.
+      Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his mother.
+      I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed, clutching the
+      umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it from both
+      hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one
+      clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left
+      him to his inanimate companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was
+      prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs
+      alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to get
+      out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a cab
+      in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to walk
+      even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was, seated
+      in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself in the
+      vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful, passionate city
+      in the night&mdash;the night when the commonest noises seem to carry some
+      mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth walks abroad
+      naked and whispers her secrets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of
+      the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night,
+      the lamp was extinguished by a careful municipality, and I was left in
+      utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and
+      sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with
+      difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow&mdash;as if the city had not
+      been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was
+      about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up, and
+      I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound
+      disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz&rsquo; bedroom. As of
+      old, he slept with the tranquillity of a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished
+      floor under the table. The night had passed, and it appeared to be almost
+      a miracle that the night had passed, and that I had lived through it and
+      was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed
+      back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in
+      blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom. She
+      went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more sane,
+      more astringent. And yet only a few hours&mdash;and it had been night,
+      strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were
+      warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dreaming souls. But
+      that tall woman must go to bed in day, and rise to meet the first wind of
+      the morning, and perhaps never have known the sweet poison of the night. I
+      sank back into my chair....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sharp, decisive sound of a key in the lock of the
+      entrance-door. I jumped up, fully awake, with beating heart and blushing
+      face. Someone was invading the flat. Someone would catch me there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course it was his servant. I had entirely forgotten her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We met in the little passage. She was a stout creature and appeared to
+      fill the flat. She did not seem very surprised at the sight of me, and she
+      eyed me with the frigid disdain of one who conforms to a certain code for
+      one who does not conform to it. She sat in judgment on my well-hung skirt
+      and the rings on my fingers and the wickedness in my breast, and condemned
+      me to everlasting obloquy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Madame is going?&rsquo; she asked coldly, holding open the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, madame,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Are you the <i>femme de ménage</i> of
+      monsieur?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur is ill,&rsquo; I said, deciding swiftly what to do. &lsquo;He
+      does not wish to be disturbed. He would like you to return at two o&rsquo;clock.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before two I should have departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur knows well that I have another <i>ménage</i> from twelve to two,&rsquo;
+      protested the woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Three o&rsquo;clock, then,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Bien</i>, madame,&rsquo; said she, and, producing the contents of a
+      reticule: ‘Here are the bread, the butter, the milk, and the newspaper,
+      madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took the things, and she left, and I shut the door and bolted it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In anticipation, the circumstances of such an encounter would have caused
+      me infinite trouble of spirit. &lsquo;But after all it was not so very
+      dreadful,&rsquo; I thought, as I fastened the door. &lsquo;Do I care for
+      his <i>femme de ménage</i>?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great door of the house would be open now, and the stairs no longer
+      affrighting, and I might slip unobserved away. But I could not bring
+      myself to leave until I had spoken with Diaz, and I would not wake him. It
+      was nearly noon when he stirred. I heard his movements, and a slight
+      moaning sigh, and he called me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you there, Magda?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How feeble and appealing his voice!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer I stepped into his bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a quiver of
+      the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is is the ordered
+      and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be abhorrent, nothing
+      blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In the
+      presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we
+      maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin and of justice? We are, and that
+      is all we should dare to say. And yet, when I saw Diaz stretched on that
+      wretched bed my first movement was one of physical disgust. He had not
+      shaved for several days. His hair was like a doormat. His face was unclean
+      and puffed; his lips full and cracked; his eyes all discoloured. If aught
+      can be vile, he was vile. If aught can be obscene, he was obscene. His
+      limbs twitched; his features were full of woe and desolation and
+      abasement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at me heavily, mournfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz, Diaz!&rsquo; said my soul. &lsquo;Have you come to this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great and overmastering pity seized me, and I went to him, and laid my
+      hand gently on his. He was so nervous and tremulous that he drew away his
+      hand as if I had burnt it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Magda,&rsquo; he murmured, &lsquo;my head! There was a piece of hot
+      brick in my mouth, and I tried to take it out. But it was my tongue. Can I
+      have some tea? Will you give me some cold water first?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strange that the frank and simple way in which he accepted my presence
+      there, and assumed my willingness to serve him, filled me with a new joy!
+      He said nothing of the night. I think that Diaz was one of the few men who
+      are strong enough never to regret the past. If he was melancholy, it was
+      merely because he suffered bodily in the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave him water, and he thanked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now I will make some tea,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went into the tiny kitchen and looked around, lifting my skirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you find the things?&rsquo; he called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s all that splashing?&rsquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m washing a saucepan,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I never have my meals here,&rsquo; he called. &lsquo;Only tea. There are
+      two taps to the gas-stove&mdash;one a little way up the chimney.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, I was joyous, actively so. I brought the tea to the bedroom with a
+      glad smile. I had put two cups on the tray, which I placed on the
+      night-table; and there were some biscuits. I sat at the foot of the bed
+      while we drank. And the umbrella, unperceived by Diaz, lay with its handle
+      on a pillow, ludicrous and yet accusing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are an angel,&rsquo; said Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t call me that,&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because I wish it,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Angel&rsquo; was Ispenlove&rsquo;s
+      word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, what shall I call you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My name is Carlotta Peel,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Not Magdalen at all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was astounding, incredible, that he should be learning my name then for
+      the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall always call you Magda,&rsquo; he responded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And now I must go,&rsquo; I stated, when I had explained to him about the
+      servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you&rsquo;ll come back?&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No question of his coming to me! I must come to him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To a place like this?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unthinkingly I put into my voice some of the distaste I felt for his
+      deplorable apartments, and he was genuinely hurt. I believe that in all
+      honesty he deemed his apartments to be quite adequate and befitting. His
+      sensibilities had been so dulled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw up his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;if you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I stopped him quickly. &lsquo;I will come here. I was only
+      teasing you. Let me see. I&rsquo;ll come back at four, just to see how you
+      are. Won&rsquo;t you get up in the meantime?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, placated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I may do,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll try to. But in case I don&rsquo;t,
+      will you take my key? Where did you put it last night?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He summoned me to him just as I was opening the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are magnificent,&rsquo; he replied, with charming, impulsive
+      eagerness, his eyes resting upon me long. He was the old Diaz again.
+      &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t thank you. But when you come back I shall play to
+      you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Till four o&rsquo;clock,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he called again, just as I was leaving, &lsquo;bring one of
+      your books with you, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hesitated, with my hand on the door. When I gave him my name he had made
+      no sign that it conveyed to him anything out of the ordinary. That was
+      exactly like Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you read any of them?&rsquo; I asked loudly, without moving from the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he answered. &lsquo;But I have heard of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really!&rsquo; I said, keeping my tone free from irony. &lsquo;Well, I
+      will not bring you one of my books.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked hard at the door in front of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For you I will be nothing but a woman,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I fled down the stairs and past the concierge swiftly into the street,
+      as anxious as a thief to escape notice. I got a fiacre at once, and drove
+      away. I would not analyze my heart. I could not. I could but savour the
+      joy, sweet and fresh, that welled up in it as from some secret source. I
+      was so excited that I observed nothing outside myself, and when the cab
+      stopped in front of my hotel, it seemed to me that the journey had
+      occupied scarcely a few seconds. Do you imagine I was saddened by the
+      painful spectacle of Diaz&rsquo; collapse in life? No! I only knew that he
+      needed sympathy, and that I could give it to him with both hands. I could
+      give, give! And the last thing that the egotist in me told me before it
+      expired was that I was worthy to give. My longing to assuage the lot of
+      Diaz became almost an anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I returned at about half-past five, bright and eager, with vague
+      anticipations. I seemed to have become used to the house. It no longer
+      offended me, and I had no shame in entering it. I put the key into the
+      door of Diaz&rsquo; flat with a clear, high sense of pleasure. He had
+      entrusted me with his key; I could go in as I pleased; I need have no fear
+      of inconveniencing him, of coming at the wrong moment. It seemed
+      wonderful! And as I turned the key and pushed open the door my sole wish
+      was to be of service to him, to comfort him, to render his life less
+      forlorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Here I am!&rsquo; I cried, shutting the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the smaller of the two tiny sitting-rooms the piano, which had been
+      closed, was open, and I saw that it was a Pleyel. But both rooms were
+      empty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you still in bed, then?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went cautiously into the bedroom. It, too, was empty. The bed was made,
+      and the flat generally had a superficial air of tidiness. Evidently the
+      charwoman had been and departed; and doubtless Diaz had gone out, to
+      return immediately. I sat down in the chair in which I had spent most of
+      the night. I took off my hat and put it by the side of a tiny satchel
+      which I had brought, and began to wait for him. How delicious it would be
+      to open the door to him! He would notice that I had taken off my hat, and
+      he would be glad. What did the future, the immediate future, hold for me?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A long time I waited, and then I yawned heavily, and remembered that for
+      several days I had had scarcely any sleep. I shut my eyes to relieve the
+      tedium of waiting. When I reopened them, dazed, and startled into sudden
+      activity by mysterious angry noises, it was quite dark. I tried to recall
+      where I was, and to decide what the noises could be. I regained my
+      faculties with an effort. The noises were a beating on the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is Diaz,&rsquo; I said to myself; &lsquo;and he can&rsquo;t get in!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I felt very guilty because I had slept. I must have slept for hours.
+      Groping for a candle, I lighted it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Coming! coming!&rsquo; I called in a loud voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went into the passage with the candle and opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Diaz. The gas was lighted on the stairs. Between that and my candle
+      he stood conspicuous in all his details. Swaying somewhat, he supported
+      himself by the balustrade, and was thus distant about two feet from the
+      door. He was drunk&mdash;viciously drunk; and in an instant I knew the
+      cruel truth concerning him, and wondered that I had not perceived it
+      before. He was a drunkard&mdash;simply that. He had not taken to drinking
+      as a consequence of nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdown was a euphemism
+      for the result of alcoholic excess. I saw his slow descent as in a vision,
+      and everything was explained. My heart leapt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can save him,&rsquo; I said to myself. &lsquo;I can restore him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was aware of the extreme difficulty of curing a drunkard, of the immense
+      proportion of failures. But, I thought, if a woman such as I cannot by the
+      lavishing of her whole soul and body deliver from no matter what fiend a
+      man such as Diaz, then the world has changed, and the eternal Aphrodite is
+      dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can save him!&rsquo; I repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, heavenly moment!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Aren&rsquo;t you coming in?&rsquo; I addressed him quietly. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve
+      been waiting for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you?&rsquo; he angrily replied. &lsquo;I waited long enough for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;come in.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who is it?&rsquo; he demanded. &lsquo;I inzizt&mdash;who is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s I,&rsquo; I answered; &lsquo;Magda.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That&rsquo;s no&rsquo; wha&rsquo; I mean,&rsquo; he went on. &lsquo;And
+      wha&rsquo;s more&mdash;you know it. Who is it addrezzes you, madame?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I humoured him, &lsquo;it&rsquo;s you, of course&mdash;Diaz.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the sound of a door opening on one of the lower storeys, and I
+      hoped I had pacified him, and that he would enter; but I was mistaken. He
+      stamped his foot furiously on the landing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz!&rsquo; he protested, shouting. &lsquo;Who dares call me Diaz? Wha&rsquo;s
+      my full name?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Emilio Diaz,&rsquo; I murmured meekly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That&rsquo;s better,&rsquo; he grumbled. &lsquo;What am I?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wha&rsquo; am I?&rsquo; he roared; and his voice went up and down the
+      echoing staircase. &lsquo;I won&rsquo;t put foot ev&rsquo;n on doormat
+      till I&rsquo;m told wha&rsquo; I am here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are the&mdash;the master,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;But do come in.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The mas&rsquo;r! Mas&rsquo;r of wha&rsquo;?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Master of the pianoforte,&rsquo; I answered at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, suddenly appeased, and put his foot unsteadily on the doormat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good!&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;But, un&rsquo;stan&rsquo;, I wouldn&rsquo;t
+      ev&rsquo;n have pu&rsquo; foot on doormat&mdash;no, not ev&rsquo;n on
+      doormat&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came in, and I shut the door, and I was alone with my wild beast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Kiss me,&rsquo; he commanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I kissed him on the mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t put your arms roun&rsquo; me,&rsquo; he growled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I deposited the candle on the floor, and put my arms round his neck,
+      standing on tip-toe, and kissed him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went past me, staggering and growling, into the sitting-room at the end
+      of the passage, and furiously banged down the lid of the piano, so that
+      every cord in it jangled deafeningly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Light the lamp,&rsquo; he called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘In one second,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I locked the outer door on the inside, slipped the key into my pocket, and
+      picked up the candle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What were you doing out there?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I had to pick the candle up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized my hat from the table and threw it to the floor. Then he sat
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nex&rsquo; time,&rsquo; he remarked, &lsquo;you&rsquo;ll know better&rsquo;n
+      to keep me waiting.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I lighted a lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m very sorry,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Won&rsquo;t you go to bed?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall go to bed when I want,&rsquo; he answered. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      thirsty. In the cupboard you&rsquo;ll see a bottle. I&rsquo;ll trouble you
+      to give it me, with a glass and some water.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This cupboard?&rsquo; I said questioningly, opening a cupboard papered to
+      match the rest of the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you can&rsquo;t be thirsty, Diaz?&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Must I repea&rsquo; wha&rsquo; I said?&rsquo; he glared at me. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      thirsty. Give me the bottle.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took out the bottle nearest to hand. It was of a dark green colour, and
+      labelled &lsquo;Extrait d&rsquo;Absinthe. Pernod fils.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not this one, Diaz?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;Give it me. And get a glass and some
+      water.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wha&rsquo;? You won&rsquo;t give it me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He jumped up recklessly and faced me. His hat fell off the back of his
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me that bottle!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His breath poisoned the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I retreated in the direction of the window, and put my hand on the knob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang at me, but not before I had opened the window and thrown out the
+      bottle. I heard it fall in the roadway with a crash and scattering of
+      glass. Happily it had harmed no one. Diaz was momentarily checked. He
+      hesitated. I eyed him as steadily as I could, closing the while the window
+      behind me with my right hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He may try to kill me,&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My heart was thudding against my dress, not from fear, but from
+      excitement. My situation seemed impossible to me, utterly passing belief.
+      Yesterday I had been a staid spinster, attended by a maid, in a hotel of
+      impeccable propriety. Today I had locked myself up alone with a riotous
+      drunkard in a vile flat in a notorious Parisian street. Was I mad? What
+      force, secret and powerful, had urged me on?... And there was the foul
+      drunkard, with clenched hands and fiery eyes, undecided whether or not to
+      murder me. And I waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved away, inarticulately grumbling, and resumed with difficulty his
+      hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ver&rsquo; well,&rsquo; he hiccupped morosely, &lsquo;ver&rsquo; well; I&rsquo;m
+      going. Tha&rsquo;s all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lurched into the passage, and then I heard him fumbling a long time
+      with the outer door. He left the door and went into his bedroom, and
+      finally returned to me. He held one hand behind his back. I had sunk into
+      a chair by the small table on which the lamp stood, with my satchel beside
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now!&rsquo; he said, halting in front of me. &lsquo;You&rsquo;ve locked
+      tha&rsquo; door. I can&rsquo;t go out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me the key.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me the key,&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I mus&rsquo; have the key.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he showed his right hand, and it held a revolver. He bent slightly
+      over the table, staring down at me as I stared up at him. But as his chin
+      felt the heat rising from the chimney of the lamp, he shifted a little to
+      one side. I might have rushed for shelter into some other room; I might
+      have grappled with him; I might have attempted to soothe him. But I could
+      neither stir nor speak. Least of all, could I give him the key&mdash;for
+      him to go and publish his own disgrace in the thoroughfares. So I just
+      gazed at him, inactive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I s&rsquo;ll kill you!&rsquo; he muttered, and raised the revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My throat became suddenly dry. I tried to make the motion of swallowing,
+      and could not. And looking at the revolver, I perceived in a swift
+      revelation the vast folly of my inexperience. Since he was already drunk,
+      why had I not allowed him to drink more, to drink himself into a stupor?
+      Drunkards can only be cured when they are sober. To commence a course of
+      moral treatment at such a moment as I had chosen was indeed the act of a
+      woman. However, it was too late to reclaim the bottle from the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw that he meant to kill me. And I knew that previously, during our
+      encounter at the window, I had only pretended to myself that I thought
+      there was a risk of his killing me. I had pretended, in order to increase
+      the glory of my martyrdom in my own sight. Moreover, my brain, which was
+      working with singular clearness, told me that for his sake I ought to give
+      up the key. His exposure as a helpless drunkard would be infinitely
+      preferable to his exposure as a murderer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet I could not persuade myself to relinquish the key. If I did so, he
+      would imagine that he had frightened me. But I had no fear, and I could
+      not bear that he should think I had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My ears sang. The room was full of a new odour, and a cloud floated
+      reluctantly upwards from the mouth of the revolver. I sneezed, and then I
+      grew aware that, firing at a distant of two feet, he had missed me. What
+      had happened to the bullet I could not guess. He put the revolver down on
+      the table with a groan, and the handle rested on my satchel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My God, Magda!&rsquo; he sighed, pushing back his hair with his beautiful
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was somewhat sobered. I said nothing, but I observed that the lamp was
+      smoking, and I turned down the wick. I was so self-conscious, so
+      irresolute, so nonplussed, that in sheer awkwardness, like a girl at a
+      party who does not know what to do with her hands, I pushed the revolver
+      off the satchel, and idly unfastened the catch of the satchel. Within it,
+      among other things, was my sedative. I, too, had fallen the victim of a
+      habit. For five years a bad sleeper, I had latterly developed into a very
+      bad sleeper, and my sedative was accordingly strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A notion struck me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Drink a little of this, my poor Diaz!&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It will make you sleep,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a convulsive movement he clutched the bottle and uncorked it, and
+      before I could interfere he had drunk nearly the whole of its contents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Stop!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;You will kill yourself!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What matter!&rsquo; he exclaimed; and staggered off to the darkness of
+      the bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed him with the lamp, but he had already fallen on the bed, and
+      seemed to be heavily asleep. I shook him; he made no response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘At any cost he must he roused,&rsquo; I said aloud. &lsquo;He must be
+      forced to walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a knocking at the outer door, low, discreet, and continuous. It
+      sounded to me like a deliverance. Whoever might be there must aid me to
+      waken Diaz. I ran to the door, taking the key out of my pocket, and opened
+      it. A tall woman stood on the doormat. It was the girl that I had glimpsed
+      on the previous night in the large hat ascending the stairs with a man.
+      But now her bright golden head was uncovered, and she wore a blue <i>peignoir</i>,
+      such as is sold ready made, with its lace and its ribbons, at all the big
+      Paris shops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, pardon, madame,&rsquo; she said, in a thin, sweet voice in French.
+      &lsquo;I was at my door, and it seemed to me that I heard&mdash;a
+      revolver. Nothing serious has passed, then? Pardon, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thank you. You are very amiable, madame,&rsquo; I replied
+      stiffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All my excuses, madame,&rsquo; said she, turning away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;I am wrong. Do not go. Someone is ill&mdash;very
+      ill. If you would&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where? What is it?&rsquo; she inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He is in the bedroom&mdash;here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both spoke breathlessly, hurrying to the bedroom, after I had fetched
+      the lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wounded? He has done himself harm? Ah!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;not that.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I explained to her that Diaz had taken at least six doses of my strong
+      solution of trional.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I seized the lamp and held it aloft over the form of the sleeper, which
+      lay on its side cross-wise, the feet projecting a little over the edge of
+      the bed, the head bent forward and missing the pillow, the arms stretched
+      out in front&mdash;the very figure of abandoned and perfect
+      unconsciousness. And the girl and I stared at Diaz, our shoulders
+      touching, in the kennel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He must be made to walk about,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;You would be
+      extremely kind to help me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, madame,&rsquo; she replied. &lsquo;He will be very well like that.
+      When one is alcoholic, one cannot poison one&rsquo;s self; it is
+      impossible. All the doctors will tell you as much. Your friend will sleep
+      for twenty hours&mdash;twenty-four hours&mdash;and he will waken himself
+      quite re-established.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are sure? You know?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I know, madame. Be tranquil. Leave him. He could not have done better. It
+      is perfect.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Perhaps I should fetch a doctor?&rsquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is not worth the pain,&rsquo; she said, with conviction. &lsquo;You
+      would have vexations uselessly. Leave him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gazed at her, studying her, and I was satisfied. With her fluffly locks,
+      and her simple eyes, and her fragile face, and her long hands, she had,
+      nevertheless, the air of knowing profoundly her subject. She was a great
+      expert on males and all that appertained to them, especially their vices.
+      I was the callow amateur. I was compelled to listen with respect to this
+      professor in the professor&rsquo;s garb. I was impressed, in spite of
+      myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘One might arrange him more comfortably,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And we lifted the senseless victim, and put him on his back, and
+      straightened his limbs, as though he had been a corpse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How handsome he is!&rsquo; murmured my visitor, half closing her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You think so?&rsquo; I said politely, as if she had been praising one of
+      my private possessions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh yes. We are neighbours, madame. I have frequently remarked him, you
+      understand, on the stairs, in the street.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Has he been here long?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About a year, madame. You have, perhaps, not seen him since a long time.
+      An old friend?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is ten years ago,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! Ten years! In England, without doubt?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘In England, yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ten years!&rsquo; she repeated, musing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am certain she has a kind heart,&rsquo; I said to myself, and I decided
+      to question her: &lsquo;Will you not sit down, madame?&rsquo; I invited
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, madame! it is you who should sit down,&rsquo; she said quickly.
+      &lsquo;You must have suffered.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both sat down. There were only two chairs in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I would like to ask you,&rsquo; I said, leaning forward towards her,
+      &lsquo;have you ever seen him&mdash;drunk&mdash;before?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; she replied instantly; &lsquo;never before yesterday evening.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Be frank,&rsquo; I urged her, smiling sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why should I not be frank, madame?&rsquo; she said, with a grave, gentle
+      appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if she had said: &lsquo;We are talking woman to woman. I know
+      one of your secrets. You can guess mine. The male is present, but he is
+      deaf. What reason, therefore, for deceit?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am much obliged to you,&rsquo; I breathed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not at all,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Decidedly he is alcoholic&mdash;that
+      sees itself,&rsquo; she proceeded. &lsquo;But drunk&mdash;no!... He was
+      always alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Always alone?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Always.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes filled. I thought I had never seen a creature more gentle,
+      delicate, yielding, acquiescent, and fair. She was not beautiful, but she
+      had grace and distinction of movement. She was a Parisienne. She had won
+      my sympathy. We met in a moment when my heart needed the companionship of
+      a woman&rsquo;s heart, and I was drawn to her by one of those sudden
+      impulses that sometimes draw women to each other. I cared not what she
+      was. Moreover, she had excited my curiosity. She was a novelty in my life.
+      She was something that I had heard of, and seen&mdash;yes, and perhaps
+      envied in secret, but never spoken with. And she shattered all my
+      preconceptions about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are an old tenant of this house?&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; she said; &lsquo;it suits me. But the great heats are
+      terrible here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not leave Paris, then?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Never. Except to see my little boy.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I started, envious of her, and also surprised. It seemed strange that this
+      ribboned and elegant and plastic creature, whose long, thin arms were used
+      only to dalliance, should be a mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you have a little boy?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; he lives with my parents at Meudon. He is four years old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Excuse me,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Be frank with me once again. Do you love
+      your child, honestly? So many women don&rsquo;t, it appears.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I love him?&rsquo; she cried, and her face glowed with her love.
+      &lsquo;I adore him!&rsquo; Her sincerity was touching and overwhelming.
+      &lsquo;And he loves me, too. If he is naughty, one has only to tell him
+      that he will make his <i>petite mère</i> ill, and he will be good at once.
+      When he is told to obey his grandfather, because his grandfather provides
+      his food, he says bravely: &ldquo;No, not grandpapa; it is <i>petite mère</i>!&rdquo;
+      Is it not strange he should know that I pay for him? He has a little
+      engraving of the Queen of Italy, and he says it is his <i>petite mère</i>.
+      Among the scores of pictures he has he keeps only that one. He takes it to
+      bed with him. It is impossible to deprive him of it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled divinely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How beautiful!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And you go to see him often?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As often as I have time. I take him out for walks. I run with him till we
+      reach the woods, where I can have him to myself alone. I never stop; I
+      avoid people. No one except my parents knows that he is my child. One
+      supposes he is a nurse-child, received by my parents. But all the world
+      will know now,&rsquo; she added, after a pause. &lsquo;Last Monday I went
+      to Meudon with my friend Alice, and Alice wanted to buy him some sweets at
+      the grocer&rsquo;s. In the shop I asked him if he would like <i>dragées</i>,
+      and he said &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; The grocer said to him, &ldquo;Yes who,
+      young man?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes, <i>petite mère</i>,&rdquo; he said, very
+      loudly and bravely. The grocer understood. We all lowered our heads.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something so affecting in the way she half whispered the last
+      phrase, that I could have wept; and yet it was comical, too, and she
+      appreciated that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have no child, madame?&rsquo; she asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;How I envy you!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You need not,&rsquo; she observed, with a touch of hardness. &lsquo;I
+      have been so unhappy, that I can never be as unhappy again. Nothing
+      matters now. All I wish is to save enough money to be able to live quietly
+      in a little cottage in the country.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With your child,&rsquo; I put in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My child will grow up and leave me. He will become a man, and he will
+      forget his <i>petite mère.&lsquo;</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not talk like that,&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced at me almost savagely. I was astonished at the sudden change
+      in her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo; she inquired coldly. &lsquo;Is it not true, then? Do you
+      still believe that there is any difference between one man and another?
+      They are all alike&mdash;all, all, all! I know. And it is we who suffer,
+      we others.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you have some tender souvenir of your child&rsquo;s father?&rsquo;
+      I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I know who my child&rsquo;s father is?&rsquo; she demanded. &lsquo;My
+      child has thirty-six fathers!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You seem very bitter,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;for your age. You are much
+      younger than I am.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled and shook her honey-coloured hair, and toyed with the ribbons
+      of her <i>peignoir</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What I say is true,&rsquo; she said gently. &lsquo;But, there, what would
+      you have? We hate them, but we love them. They are beasts! beasts! but we
+      cannot do without them!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes rested on Diaz for a moment. He slept without the least sound,
+      the stricken and futile witness of our confidences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You will take him away from Paris soon, perhaps?&rsquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I can,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sound of light footsteps on the stair. They stopped at the
+      door, which I remembered we had not shut. I jumped up and went into the
+      passage. Another girl stood in the doorway, in a <i>peignoir</i> the exact
+      counterpart of my first visitor&rsquo;s, but rose-coloured. And this one,
+      too, was languorous and had honey-coloured locks. It was as though the
+      mysterious house was full of such creatures, each with her secret lair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pardon, madame,&rsquo; said my visitor, following and passing me; and
+      then to the newcomer: &lsquo;What is it, Alice?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is Monsieur Duchatel who is arrived.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; with a disdainful gesture. &lsquo;<i>Je m&rsquo;en fiche.</i>
+      Let him go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is the nephew, my dear; not the uncle.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, the nephew! I come. <i>Bon soir, madams, et bonne nuit</i>.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two <i>peignoirs</i> fluttered down the stairs together. I returned to
+      my Diaz, and seeing his dressing-gown behind the door of the bedroom, I
+      took it and covered him with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      His first words were:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda, you look like a ghost. Have you been sitting there like that all
+      the time?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I lay down.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘By your side.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tea-time. The water is boiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Was I dreadful last night?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dreadful? How?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have a sort of recollection of getting angry and stamping about. I didn&rsquo;t
+      do anything foolish?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You took a great deal too much of my sedative,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I feel quite well,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;but I didn&rsquo;t know I had
+      taken any sedative at all. I&rsquo;m glad I didn&rsquo;t do anything silly
+      last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran away to prepare the tea. The situation was too much for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor Diaz!&rsquo; I said, when we had begun to drink the tea, and he
+      was sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes full of sleep, his chin
+      rough, and his hair magnificently disarranged, &lsquo;you did one thing
+      that was silly last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t tell me I struck you?&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh no!&rsquo; and I laughed. &lsquo;Can&rsquo;t you guess what I mean?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I got vilely drunk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he burst out passionately, seeming at this point fully to
+      arouse himself, to resume acutely his consciousness, &lsquo;why were you
+      late? You said four o&rsquo;clock. I thought you had deceived me. I
+      thought I had disgusted you, and that you didn&rsquo;t mean to return. I
+      waited more than an hour and a quarter, and then I went out in despair.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I came just afterwards,&rsquo; I protested. &lsquo;You had only to
+      wait a few more minutes. Surely you could have waited a few more minutes?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You said four o&rsquo;clock,&rsquo; he repeated obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was barely half-past five when I came,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I had meant never to drink again,&rsquo; he went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were so kind to me. But then, when you didn&rsquo;t come&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You doubted me, Diaz. You ought to have been sure of me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was wrong.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;It was I who was wrong. But I never thought
+      that an hour and a half would make any difference.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, Magda, Magda!&rsquo;&mdash;he suddenly began to weep; it was
+      astounding&mdash;&lsquo;remember that you had deserted me once before.
+      Remember that. If you had not done that, my life might have been
+      different. It <i>would</i> have been different.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t say so,&rsquo; I pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I must say so. You cannot imagine how solitary my life has been.
+      Magda, I loved you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I too wept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His accent was sincerity itself. I saw the young girl hurrying secretly
+      out of the Five Towns Hotel. Could it be true that she had carried away
+      with her, unknowing, the heart of Diaz? Could it be true that her panic
+      flight had ruined a career? The faint possibility that it was true made me
+      sick with vain grief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And now I am old and forgotten and disgraced,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How old are you, Diaz?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thirty-six,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;you have thirty years to live.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; and what years?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Famous years. Brilliant years.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am done for&mdash;&rsquo; he murmured, and his head sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you so weak, then?&rsquo; I took his hand. &lsquo;Are you so weak?
+      Look at me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He obeyed, and his wet eyes met mine. In that precious moment I lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You could not have looked at me if you had not been strong, very strong,&rsquo;
+      I said firmly. &lsquo;You told me once that you had a house near
+      Fontainebleau. Have you still got it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose so.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let us go there, and&mdash;and&mdash;see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should like to go,&rsquo; I insisted, with a break in my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My God!&rsquo; he exclaimed in a whisper, &lsquo;my God!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was sobbing violently, and my forehead was against the rough stuff of
+      his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And one morning, long afterwards, I awoke very early, and the murmuring of
+      the leaves of the forest came through the open window. I had known that I
+      should wake very early, in joyous anticipation of that day. And as I lay
+      he lay beside me, lost in the dreamless, boyish, natural sleep that he
+      never sought in vain. He lay, as always, slightly on his right side, with
+      his face a little towards me&mdash;his face that was young again, and from
+      which the bane had passed. It was one of the handsomest, fairest faces in
+      the world, one of the most innocent, and one of the strongest; the face of
+      a man who follows his instincts with the direct simplicity of a savage or
+      a child, and whose instincts are sane and powerful. Seen close, perfectly
+      at rest, as I saw it morning after morning, it was full of a special and
+      mysterious attraction. The fine curves of the nostrils and of the lobe of
+      the ear, the masterful lines of the mouth, the contours of the cheek and
+      chin and temples, the tints of the flesh subtly varying from rose to
+      ivory, the golden crown of hair, the soft moustache. I had learned every
+      detail by heart; my eyes had dwelt on them till they had become my soul&rsquo;s
+      inheritance, till they were mystically mine, drawing me ever towards them,
+      as a treasure draws. Gently moving, I would put my ear close, close, and
+      listen to the breath of life as it entered regularly, almost
+      imperceptibly, vivifying that organism in repose. There is something
+      terrible in the still beauty of sleep. It is as though the spiritual
+      fabric hangs inexplicably over the precipice of death. It seems
+      impossible, or at least miraculous, that the intake and the expulsion upon
+      which existence depends should continue thus, minute by minute, hour by
+      hour. It is as though one stood on the very confines of life, and could
+      one trace but one step more, one single step, one would unveil the eternal
+      secret. I would not listen long; the torture was too sweet, too exquisite,
+      and I would gently slide back to my place.... His hand was on the
+      counterpane, near to my breast&mdash;the broad hand of the pianist, with a
+      wrist of incredible force, and the fingers tapering suddenly at the end to
+      a point. I let my own descend on it as softly as snow. Ah, ravishing
+      contact! He did not move. And while my small hand touched his I gazed into
+      the spaces of the bedroom, with its walls of faded blue tapestry and its
+      white curtains, and its marble and rosewood, and they seemed to hold
+      peace, as the hollows of a field hold dew; they seemed to hold happiness
+      as a great tree holds sunlight in its branches; and outside was the
+      murmuring of the leaves of the forest and the virginal freshness of the
+      morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surely he must wake earlier that day! I pursed my lips and blew tenderly,
+      mischievously, on his cheek, lying with my cheek full on the pillow, so
+      that I could watch him. The muscles of his mouth twitched, his inner being
+      appeared to protest. And then began the first instinctive blind movement
+      of the day with him. His arms came forward and found my neck, and drew me
+      forcibly to him, and then, just before our lips touched, he opened his
+      eyes and shut them again. So it occurred every morning. Ere even his brain
+      had resumed activity his heart had felt its need of me. This it was that
+      was so wonderful, so overpowering! And the kiss, languid and yet warm,
+      heavy with a human scent, with the scent of the night, honest, sensuous,
+      and long&mdash;long! As I lay thus, clasped in his arms, I half closed my
+      eyes, and looked into his eyes through my lashes, smiling, and all was a
+      delicious blur....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the summit of bliss! No! I have never mounted higher! I asked
+      myself, astounded, what I had done that I should receive such happiness,
+      what I had done that existence should have no flaw for me. And what <i>had</i>
+      I done? I know not, I know not. It passes me. I am lost in my joy. For I
+      had not even cured him. I had anticipated painful scenes, interminable
+      struggles, perhaps a relapse. But nothing of the kind. He had simply
+      ceased at once the habit&mdash;that was all. We never left each other. And
+      his magnificent constitution had perfectly recovered itself in a few
+      months. I had done nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he murmured indistinctly, drawing his mouth an inch away
+      from mine, &lsquo;why can&rsquo;t your dark hair always be loose over your
+      shoulders like that? It is glorious!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What ideas you have!&rsquo; I murmured, more softly than he. &lsquo;And
+      do you know what it is to-day?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve forgotten?&rsquo; I pouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Guess.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No; you must tell me. Not your birthday? Not mine?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just a year since I met you,&rsquo; I whispered timidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our mouths met again, and, so enlocked, we rested, savouring the true
+      savour of life. And presently my hand stole up to his head and stroked his
+      curls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every morning he began to practise at eight o&rsquo;clock, and continued
+      till eleven. The piano, a Steinway in a hundred Steinways, was in the
+      further of the two drawing-rooms. He would go into the room smoking a
+      cigarette, and when he had thrown away the cigarette I would leave him.
+      And as soon as I had closed the door the first notes would resound, slow
+      and solemn, of the five-finger exercises with which he invariably
+      commenced his studies. That morning, as often, I sat writing in the
+      enclosed garden. I always wrote in pencil on my knee. The windows of the
+      drawing-room were wide open, and Diaz&rsquo; music filled the garden. The
+      sheer beauty of his tone was such that to hear him strike even an isolated
+      note gave pleasure. He created beauty all the time. His five-finger
+      exercises were lovely patterns of sound woven with exact and awful
+      deliberation. It seemed impossible that these should be the same bald and
+      meaningless inventions which I had been wont to repeat. They were
+      transformed. They were music. The material in which he built them was
+      music itself, enchanting the ear as much by the quality of the tone as by
+      the impeccable elegance of the form. To hear Diaz play a scale, to catch
+      that measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of
+      equal splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born&mdash;this
+      was to perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the
+      divine magic that is the soul of the divinest art. I used to believe that
+      nothing could surpass the beauty of a scale, until Diaz, after writing
+      formal patterns in the still air innumerably, and hypnotizing me with that
+      sorcery, would pass suddenly to the repetition of fragments of Bach. And
+      then I knew that hitherto he had only been trying to be more purely and
+      severely mechanical than a machine, and that now the interpreter was at
+      work. I have heard him repeat a passage fifty times&mdash;and so slowly!&mdash;and
+      each rendering seemed more beautiful than the last; and it was more
+      beautiful than the last. He would extract the final drop of beauty from
+      the most beautiful things in the world. Washed, drenched in this
+      circumambient ether of beauty, I wrote my verse. Perhaps it may appear
+      almost a sacrilege that I should have used the practising of a Diaz as a
+      background for my own creative activity. I often thought so. But when one
+      has but gold, one must put it to lowly use. So I wrote, and he passed from
+      Bach to Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Usually he would come out into the garden for five minutes at half-past
+      nine to smoke a cigarette, but that morning it had struck ten before the
+      music ceased. I saw him. He walked absent-minded along the terrace in the
+      strange silence that had succeeded. He was wearing his riding-breeches,
+      for we habitually rode at eleven. And that morning I did not hide my work
+      when he came. It was, in fact, finished; the time had arrived to disclose
+      it. He stopped in front of me in the sunlight, utterly preoccupied with
+      himself and his labours. He had the rapt look on his face which results
+      from the terrible mental and spiritual strain of practising as he
+      practised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Satisfied?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He frowned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There are times when one gets rather inspired,&rsquo; he said, looking at
+      me, as it were, without seeing me. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s as if the whole soul
+      gets into one&rsquo;s hands. That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s wanted.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You had it this morning?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘A bit.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled with candid joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘While I was listening&mdash;&rsquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; he broke in impulsively, violently, &lsquo;it isn&rsquo;t you
+      that have to listen. It&rsquo;s I that have to listen. It&rsquo;s the
+      player that has to listen. He&rsquo;s got to do more than listen. He&rsquo;s
+      got to be <i>in</i> the piano with his inmost heart. If he isn&rsquo;t on
+      the full stretch of analysis the whole blessed time, he might just as well
+      be turning the handle of a barrel-organ.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He always talked about his work during the little &lsquo;recess&rsquo;
+      which he took in the middle of the morning. He pretended to be talking to
+      me, but it was to himself that he talked. He was impatient if I spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be greater than ever,&rsquo; he proceeded, after a moment. And
+      his attitude towards himself was so disengaged, so apart and aloof, so
+      critically appreciative, that it was impossible to accuse him of egoism.
+      He was, perhaps, as amazed at his own transcendent gift as any other
+      person could be, and he was incapable of hiding his sensations. &lsquo;Yes,&rsquo;
+      he repeated; &lsquo;I think I shall be greater than ever. You see, a
+      Chopin player is born; you can&rsquo;t make him. With Chopin it&rsquo;s
+      not a question of intellect. It&rsquo;s all tone with Chopin&mdash;<i>tone</i>,
+      my child, even in the most bravura passages. You&rsquo;ve got to get it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed over the tree-tops into the blue sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I may be ready in six months,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you will,&rsquo; I concurred, with a judicial air. But I honestly
+      deemed him to be more than ready then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twelve months previously he had said: &lsquo;With six hours&rsquo;
+      practice a day for two years I shall recover what I have lost.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had succeeded beyond his hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you writing in that book?&rsquo; he inquired carelessly as he threw
+      down the cigarette and turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have just finished something,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m glad you aren&rsquo;t idle. It&rsquo;s
+      so boring.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He returned to the piano, perfectly incurious about what I did,
+      self-absorbed as a god. And I was alone in the garden, with the semicircle
+      of trees behind me, and the façade of the old house and its terrace in
+      front. And lying on the lawn, just under the terrace, was the white end of
+      the cigarette which he had abandoned; it breathed upwards a thin spiral of
+      blue smoke through the morning sunshine, and then it ceased to breathe.
+      And the music recommenced, on a different plane, more brilliantly than
+      before. It was as though, till then, he had been laboriously building the
+      bases of a tremendous triumphal arch, and that now the two wings met,
+      dazzlingly, soaringly, in highest heaven, and the completed arch became a
+      rainbow glittering in the face of the infinite. He played two of his great
+      concert pieces, and their intricate melodies&mdash;brocaded, embroidered,
+      festooned&mdash;poured themselves through the windows into the garden in a
+      procession majestic and impassioned, perturbing the intent soul of the
+      solitary listener, swathing her in intoxicating sound. It was the unique
+      virtuoso born again, proudly displaying the ultimate sublime end of all
+      those slow-moving exercises to which he had subdued his fingers. Not for
+      ten years had I heard him play so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we first came into the house I had said bravely to myself: &lsquo;His
+      presence shall not deter me from practising as I have always done.&rsquo;
+      And one afternoon I had sat down to the piano full of determination to
+      practise without fear of him, without self-consciousness. But before my
+      hands had touched the keys shame took me, unreasoning, terror-struck
+      shame, and I knew in an instant that while he lived I should never more
+      play the piano. He laughed lightly when I told him, and I called myself
+      silly. Yet now, as I sat in the garden, I saw how right I had been. And I
+      wondered that I should ever have had the audacity even to dream of playing
+      in his house; the idea was grotesque. And he did not ask me to play, save
+      when there arrived new orchestral music arranged for four hands. Then I
+      steeled myself to the ordeal of playing with him, because he wished to try
+      over the music. And he would thank me, and say that pianoforte duets were
+      always very enjoyable. But he did not pretend that I was not an amateur,
+      and he never&mdash;thank God!&mdash;suggested that we should attempt <i>Tristan</i>
+      again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he finished. And I heard distantly the bell which he had rung for
+      his glass of milk. And, remembering that I was not ready for the ride, I
+      ran with guilty haste into the house and upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two bay horses were waiting, our English groom at their heads, when I
+      came out to the porch. Diaz was impatiently tapping his boot with his
+      whip. He was not in the least a sporting man, but he loved the sensation
+      of riding, and the groom would admit that he rode passably; but he loved
+      more to strut in breeches, and to imitate in little ways the sporting man.
+      I had learnt to ride in order to please him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come along,&rsquo; he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes said: &lsquo;You are always late.&rsquo; And I was. Some people
+      always know exactly what point they have reached in the maze and jungle of
+      the day, just as mariners are always aware, at the back of their minds, of
+      the state of the tide. But I was not born so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz helped me to mount, and we departed, jingling through the gate and
+      across the road into a glade of the forest, one of those long sandy
+      defiles, banked on either side, and over-shadowed with tall oaks, which
+      pierce the immense forest like rapiers. The sunshine slanted through the
+      crimsoning leafwork and made irregular golden patches on the dark sand to
+      the furthest limit of the perspective. And though we could not feel the
+      autumn wind, we could hear it in the tree-tops, and it had the sound of
+      the sea. The sense of well-being and of joy was exquisite. The beauty of
+      horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and irrational as young
+      girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange is that their vast strength
+      does not seem incongruous with it. To be above that proud and lovely
+      organism, listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nervous far beyond the
+      human, to feel one&rsquo;s self almost part of it by intimate contact, to
+      yield to it, and make it yield, to draw from it into one&rsquo;s self some
+      of its exultant vitality&mdash;in a word, to ride&mdash;yes, I could
+      comprehend Diaz&rsquo; fine enthusiasm for that! I could share it when he
+      was content to let the horses amble with noiseless hoofs over the soft
+      ways. But when he would gallop, and a strong wind sprang up to meet our
+      faces, and the earth shook and thundered, and the trunks of the trees
+      raced past us, then I was afraid. My fancy always saw him senseless at the
+      foot of a tree while his horse calmly cropped the short grass at the sides
+      of the path, or with his precious hand twisted and maimed! And I was in
+      agony till he reined in. I never dared to speak to him of this fear, nor
+      even hint to him that the joy was worth less than the peril. He would have
+      been angry in his heart, and something in him stronger than himself would
+      have forced him to increase the risks. I knew him! ... Ah! but when we
+      went gently, life seemed to be ideal for me, impossibly perfect! It seemed
+      to contain all that I could ever have demanded of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at him sideways, so noble and sane and self-controlled. And the
+      days in Paris had receded, far and dim and phantom-like. Was it
+      conceivable that they had once been real, and that we had lived through
+      them? And was this Diaz, the world-renowned darling of capitals, riding by
+      me, a woman whom he had met by fantastic chance? Had he really hidden
+      himself in my arms from the cruel stare of the world and the insufferable
+      curiosity of admirers who, instead of admiring, had begun to pity? Had I
+      in truth saved him? Was it I who would restore him to his glory? Oh, the
+      astounding romance that my life had been! And he was with me! He shared my
+      life, and I his! I wondered what would happen when he returned to his
+      bright kingdom. I was selfish enough to wish that he might never return to
+      his kingdom, and that we might ride and ride for ever in the forest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then we came to a circular clearing, with an iron cross in the middle,
+      where roads met, a place such as occurs magically in some ballade of
+      Chopin&rsquo;s. And here we drew rein on the leaf-strewn grass, breathing
+      quickly, with reddened cheeks, and the horses nosed each other, with long
+      stretchings of the neck and rattling of bits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you&rsquo;ve been writing again?&rsquo; said Diaz, smiling
+      quizzically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve been writing a long time, but I
+      haven&rsquo;t let <i>you</i> know anything about it; and just to-day I&rsquo;ve
+      finished it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it&mdash;another novel?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No; a little drama in verse.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Going to publish it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why, naturally.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was aware that I enjoyed fame in England and America. He was probably
+      aware that my books had brought me a considerable amount of money. He had
+      read some of my works, and found them excellent&mdash;indeed, he was quite
+      proud of my talent. But he did not, he could not, take altogether
+      seriously either my talent or my fame. I knew that he always regarded me
+      as a child gracefully playing at a career. For him there was only one sort
+      of fame; all the other sorts were shadows. A supreme violinist might,
+      perhaps, approach the real thing, in his generous mind; but he was
+      incapable of honestly believing that any fame compared with that of a
+      pianist. The other fames were very well, but they were paste to the
+      precious stone, gewgaws to amuse simple persons. The sums paid to sopranos
+      struck him as merely ridiculous in their enormity. He could not be called
+      conceited; nevertheless, he was magnificently sure that he had been, and
+      still was, the most celebrated person in the civilized world. Certainly he
+      had no superiors in fame, but he would not admit the possibility of
+      equals. Of course, he never argued such a point; it was a tacit
+      assumption, secure from argument. And with that he profoundly reverenced
+      the great composers. The death of Brahms affected him for years. He
+      regarded it as an occasion for universal sorrow. Had Brahms condescended
+      to play the piano, Diaz would have turned the pages for him, and deemed
+      himself honoured&mdash;him whom queens had flattered!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Did you imagine,&rsquo; I began to tease him, after a pause, &lsquo;that
+      while you are working I spend my time in merely existing?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You exist&mdash;that is enough, my darling,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Strange
+      that a beautiful woman can&rsquo;t understand that in existing she is
+      doing her life&rsquo;s work!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he leaned over and touched my right wrist below the glove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You dear thing!&rsquo; I murmured, smiling. &lsquo;How foolish you can
+      be!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s the drama about?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About La Vallière,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘La Vallière! But that&rsquo;s the kind of subject I want for my opera!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I have thought so.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Could you turn it into a libretto, my child?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, dearest.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because it already is a libretto. I have written it as such.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For whom else?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I looked at him fondly, and I think tears came to my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are a genius, Magda!&rsquo; he exclaimed. &lsquo;You leave nothing
+      undone for me. The subject is the very thing to suit Villedo.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who is Villedo?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My jewel, you don&rsquo;t know who Villedo is! Villedo is the director of
+      the Opéra Comique in Paris, the most artistic opera-house in Europe. He
+      used to beg me every time we met to write him an opera.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And why didn&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because I had neither the subject nor the time. One doesn&rsquo;t write
+      operas after lunch in hotel parlours; and as for a good libretto&mdash;well,
+      outside Wagner, there&rsquo;s only one opera in the world with a good
+      libretto, and that&rsquo;s <i>Carmen</i>.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz, who had had a youthful operatic work performed at the Royal School
+      of Music in London, and whose numerous light compositions for the
+      pianoforte had, of course, enjoyed a tremendous vogue, was much more
+      serious about his projected opera than I had imagined. He had frequently
+      mentioned it to me, but I had not thought the idea was so close to his
+      heart as I now perceived it to be. I had written the libretto to amuse
+      myself, and perhaps him, and lo! he was going to excite himself; I well
+      knew the symptoms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You wrote it in that little book,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You haven&rsquo;t
+      got it in your pocket?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;I haven&rsquo;t even a pocket.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would not laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come,&rsquo; he said&mdash;&lsquo;come, let&rsquo;s see it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gathered up his loose rein and galloped off. He could not wait an
+      instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come along!&rsquo; he cried imperiously, turning his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am coming,&rsquo; I replied; &lsquo;but wait for me. Don&rsquo;t leave
+      me like that, Diaz.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old fear seized me, but nothing could stop him, and I followed as fast
+      as I dared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where is it?&rsquo; he asked, when we reached home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Upstairs,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came upstairs behind me, pulling my habit playfully, in an effort
+      to persuade us both that his impatience was a simulated one. I had to find
+      my keys and unlock a drawer. I took the small, silk-bound volume from the
+      back part of the drawer and gave it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;But remember lunch is ready.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He regarded the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a pretty binding!&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Who worked it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I did.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And, of course, your handwriting is so pretty, too!&rsquo; he added,
+      glancing at the leaves. &lsquo;&ldquo;La Vallière, an opera in three acts.&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We exchanged a look, each of us deliciously perturbed, and then he ran off
+      with the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had to be called three times from the garden to lunch, and he brought
+      the book with him, and read it in snatches during the meal, and while
+      sipping his coffee. I watched him furtively as he turned over the pages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, you&rsquo;ve done it!&rsquo; he said at length&mdash;&lsquo;you&rsquo;ve
+      done it! You evidently have a gift for libretto. It is neither more nor
+      less than perfect! And the subject is wonderful!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose, walked round the table, and, taking my head between his hands,
+      kissed me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;you&rsquo;re the cleverest girl that was
+      ever born.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, do you think you will compose it?&rsquo; I asked, joyous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I think I will compose it! Why, what do you imagine? I&rsquo;ve
+      already begun. It composes itself. I&rsquo;m now going to read it all
+      again in the garden. Just see that I&rsquo;m not worried, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean you don&rsquo;t want me there. You don&rsquo;t care for me any
+      more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It amused me to pretend to pout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he laughed; &lsquo;that&rsquo;s it. I don&rsquo;t care for
+      you any more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have no fear!&rsquo; I cried after him. &lsquo;I shan&rsquo;t come into
+      your horrid garden!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His habit was to resume his practice at three o&rsquo;clock. The hour was
+      then half-past one. I wondered whether he would allow himself to be
+      seduced from the piano that afternoon by the desire to compose. I hoped
+      not, for there could be no question as to the relative importance to him
+      of the two activities. To my surprise, I heard the piano at two o&rsquo;clock,
+      instead of at three, and it continued without intermission till five. Then
+      he came, like a sudden wind, on to the terrace where I was having tea.
+      Diaz would never take afternoon tea. He seized my hand impulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; he said&mdash;&lsquo;down under the trees there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What for?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, Diaz, let me put my cup down. I shall spill the tea on my dress.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll take your cup.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I haven&rsquo;t nearly finished my tea, either. And you&rsquo;re
+      hurting me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll bring you a fresh cup,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Come, come!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he dragged me off, laughing, to the lower part of the garden, where
+      were two chairs in the shade. And I allowed myself to be dragged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There! Sit down. Don&rsquo;t move. I&rsquo;ll fetch your tea.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently he returned with the cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now that you&rsquo;ve nearly killed me,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;and spoilt
+      my dress, perhaps you&rsquo;ll explain.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He produced the silk-bound book of manuscript from his pocket and put it
+      in my unoccupied hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to read it to me aloud, all of it,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a strange boy you are!&rsquo; I chided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I drank the tea, straightened my features into seriousness, and began
+      to read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reading occupied less than an hour. He made no remark when it was
+      done, but held out his hand for the book, and went out for a walk. At
+      dinner he was silent till the servants had gone. Then he said musingly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That scene in the cloisters between Louise and De Montespan is a great
+      idea. It will be magnificent; it will be the finest thing in the opera.
+      What a subject you have found! what a subject!&rsquo; His tone altered.
+      &lsquo;Magda, will you do something to oblige me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If it isn&rsquo;t foolish.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to go to bed.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Out of the way?&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to bed and to sleep,&rsquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want to walk about this floor. I must be alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;just to prove how humble and obedient I am, I
+      will go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I held up my mouth to be kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wondrous, the joy I found in playing the decorative, acquiescent,
+      self-effacing woman to him, the pretty, pouting plaything! I liked him to
+      dismiss me, as the soldier dismisses his charmer at the sound of the
+      bugle. I liked to think upon his obvious conviction that the libretto was
+      less than nothing compared to the music. I liked him to regard the whole
+      artistic productivity of my life as the engaging foible of a pretty woman.
+      I liked him to forget that I had brought him alive out of Paris. I liked
+      him to forget to mention marriage to me. In a word, he was Diaz, and I was
+      his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as I lay in bed I even tried to go to sleep, in my obedience, because
+      I knew he would wish it. But I could not easily sleep for anticipating his
+      triumph of the early future. His habits of composition were extremely
+      rapid. It might well occur that he would write the entire opera in a few
+      months, without at all sacrificing the piano. And naturally any operatic
+      manager would be loath to refuse an opera signed by Diaz. Villedo,
+      apparently so famous, would be sure to accept it, and probably would
+      produce it at once. And Diaz would have a double triumph, a dazzling and
+      gorgeous re-entry into the world. He might give his first recital in the
+      same week as the <i>première</i> of the opera. And thus his shame would
+      never be really known to the artistic multitude. The legend of a nervous
+      collapse could be insisted on, and the opera itself would form a
+      sufficient excuse for his retirement.... And I should be the secret cause
+      of all this glory&mdash;I alone! And no one would ever guess what Diaz
+      owed to me. Diaz himself would never appreciate it. I alone, withdrawn
+      from the common gaze, like a woman of the East, Diaz&rsquo; secret
+      fountain of strength and balm&mdash;I alone should be aware of what I had
+      done. And my knowledge would be enough for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I imagine I must have been dreaming when I felt a hand on my cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda, you aren&rsquo;t asleep, are you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was standing over me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I answered, in a voice made feeble by sleep. And I looked
+      up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Put something on and come downstairs, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, I don&rsquo;t know. One o&rsquo;clock.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve been working for over three hours, then!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said proudly. &lsquo;Come along. I want to play you my
+      notion of the overture. It&rsquo;s only in the rough, but it&rsquo;s
+      there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve begun with the overture?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not, my child? Here&rsquo;s your dressing-gown. Which is the top end
+      of it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed him downstairs, and sat close by him at the piano, with one
+      limp hand on his shoulder. There was no light in the drawing-rooms, save
+      one candle on the piano. My slipper escaped off my bare foot. As Diaz
+      played he looked at me constantly, demanding my approval, my enthusiasm,
+      which I gave him from a full heart. I thought the music charming, and, of
+      course, as he played it...!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall only have three motives,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;That&rsquo;s the
+      La Vallière motive. Do you see the idea?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean she limps?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Precisely. Isn&rsquo;t it delightful?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘She won&rsquo;t have to limp much, you know. She didn&rsquo;t.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just the faintest suggestion. It will be delicious. I can see Morenita in
+      the part. Well, what do you think of it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not speak. His appeal, suddenly wistful, moved me so. I leaned
+      forward and kissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear girl!&rsquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he blew out the candle. He was beside himself with excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz,&rsquo; I cried, &lsquo;what&rsquo;s the matter with you? Do have a
+      little sense. And you&rsquo;ve made me lose my slipper.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll carry you upstairs,&rsquo; he replied gaily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint illumination came from the hall, so that we could just see each
+      other. He lifted me off the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No!&rsquo; I protested, laughing. &lsquo;And my slipper.... The servants!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Stuff!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a trifle in those arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The triumphal re-entry into the world has just begun, and exactly as Diaz
+      foretold. And the life of the forest is over. We have come to Paris, and
+      he has taken Paris, and already he is leaving it for other shores, and I
+      am to follow. At this moment, while I write because I have not slept and
+      cannot sleep, his train rolls out of St. Lazare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last night! How glorious! But he is no longer wholly mine. The world has
+      turned his face a little from my face....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if I had never before realized the dazzling significance of the
+      fame of Diaz. I had only once seen him in public. And though he conquered
+      in the Jubilee Hall of the Five Towns, his victory, personal and artistic,
+      at the Opera Comique, before an audience as exacting, haughty, and
+      experienced as any in Europe, was, of course, infinitely more striking&mdash;a
+      victory worthy of a Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat alone and hidden at the back of a <i>baignoire</i> in the
+      auditorium. I had drawn up the golden grille, by which the occupants of a
+      <i>baignoire</i> may screen themselves from the curiosity of the <i>parterre</i>.
+      I felt like some caged Eastern odalisque, and I liked so to feel. I liked
+      to exist solely for him, to be mysterious, and to baffle the general gaze
+      in order to be more precious to him. Ah, how I had changed! How he had
+      changed me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Thursday, a subscription night, and, in addition, all Paris was in
+      the theatre, a crowded company of celebrities, of experts, and of
+      perfectly-dressed women. And no one knew who I was, nor why I was there.
+      The vogue of a musician may be universal, but the vogue of an English
+      writer is nothing beyond England and America. I had not been to a
+      rehearsal. I had not met Villedo, nor even the translator of my verse. I
+      had wished to remain in the background, and Diaz had not crossed me. Thus
+      I gazed through the bars of my little cell across the rows of bald heads,
+      and wonderful coiffures, and the waving arms of the conductor, and the
+      restless, gliding bows of the violinists, and saw a scene which was
+      absolutely strange and new to me. And it seemed amazing that these figures
+      which I saw moving and chanting with such grace in a palace garden,
+      authentic to the last detail of historical accuracy, were my La Vallière
+      and my Louis, and that this rich and coloured music which I heard was the
+      same that Diaz had sketched for me on the piano, from illegible scraps of
+      ruled paper, on the edge of the forest. The full miracle of operatic art
+      was revealed to me for the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when the curtain fell on the opening act, the intoxicating human
+      quality of an operatic success was equally revealed to me for the first
+      time. How cold and distant the success of a novelist compared to this! The
+      auditorium was suddenly bathed in bright light, and every listening face
+      awoke to life as from an enchantment, and flushed and smiled, and the
+      delicatest hands in France clapped to swell the mighty uproar that filled
+      the theatre with praise. Paris, upstanding on its feet, and leaning over
+      balconies and cheering, was charmed and delighted by the fable and the
+      music, in which it found nothing but the sober and pretty elegance that it
+      loves. And Paris applauded feverishly, and yet with a full sense of the
+      value of its applause&mdash;given there in the only French theatre where
+      the claque has been suppressed. And then the curtain rose, and La Vallière
+      and Louis tripped mincingly forward to prove that after all they were
+      Morenita and Montfériot, the darlings of their dear Paris, and utterly
+      content with their exclusively Parisian reputation. Three times they came
+      forward. And then the applause ceased, for Paris is not Naples, and it is
+      not Madrid, and the red curtain definitely hid the stage, and the theatre
+      hummed with animated chatter as elegant as Diaz&rsquo; music, and my ear,
+      that loves the chaste vivacity of the French tongue, was caressed on every
+      side by its cadences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This is the very heart of civilization,&rsquo; I said to myself. &lsquo;And
+      even in the forest I could not breathe more freely.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stared up absently at Benjamin Constant&rsquo;s blue ceiling,
+      meretricious and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of
+      Paris, and my eyes moistened because the world is so beautiful in such
+      various ways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the door of the <i>baignoire</i> opened. It was Diaz himself who
+      appeared. He had not forgotten me in the excitements of the stage and the
+      dressing-rooms. He put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and I glanced at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well?&rsquo; he murmured, and gave me a box of bonbons elaborately tied
+      with rich ribbons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I murmured, &lsquo;Well?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glory of his triumph was upon him. But he understood why my eyes were
+      wet, and his fingers moved soothingly on my shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t come round?&rsquo; he asked. &lsquo;Both Villedo and
+      Morenita are dying to meet you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re satisfied?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘More than satisfied,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;The thing is wonderful.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think it&rsquo;s rather charming,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;By the way, I&rsquo;ve
+      just had an offer from New York for it, and another from Rome.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded my appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t want anything?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thanks,&rsquo; I said, opening the box of bonbons, &lsquo;except
+      these. Thanks so much for thinking of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he left me again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the second act the legend&mdash;has not the tale of La Vallière
+      acquired almost the quality of a legend?&mdash;grew in persuasiveness and
+      in magnificence. It was the hour of La Vallière&rsquo;s unwilling
+      ascendancy, and it foreboded also her fall. The situations seemed to me to
+      be poignantly beautiful, especially that in which La Vallière and
+      Montespan and the Queen found themselves together. And Morenita had
+      perceived my meaning with such a sure intuition. I might say that she
+      showed me what I had meant. Diaz, too, had given to my verse a voice than
+      which it appeared impossible that anything could be more appropriate. The
+      whole effect was astonishing, ravishing. And within me&mdash;far, far
+      within the recesses of my glowing heart&mdash;a thin, clear whisper spoke
+      and said that I, and I alone, was the cause of that beauty of sight and
+      sound. Not Morenita, and not Montfériot, not Diaz himself, but Magda, the
+      self-constituted odalisque, was its author. I had thought of it; I had
+      schemed it; I had fashioned it; I had evoked the emotion in it. The others
+      had but exquisitely embroidered my theme. Without me they must have been
+      dumb and futile. On my shoulders lay the burden and the glory. And though
+      I was amazed, perhaps naively, to see what I had done, nevertheless I had
+      done it&mdash;I! The entire opera-house, that complicated and various
+      machine, was simply a means to express me. And it was to my touch on their
+      heartstrings that the audience vibrated. With all my humility, how proud I
+      was&mdash;coldly and arrogantly proud, as only the artist can be! I wore
+      my humility as I wore my black gown. Even Diaz could not penetrate to the
+      inviolable place in my heart, where the indestructible egoism defied the
+      efforts of love to silence it. And yet people say there is nothing
+      stronger than love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the close of the act, while the ringing applause, much more
+      enthusiastic than before, gave certainty of a genuine and extraordinary
+      success, I could not help blushing. It was as if I was in danger of being
+      discovered as the primal author of all that fleeting loveliness, as if my
+      secret was bound to get about, and I to be forced from my seclusion in
+      order to receive the acclamations of Paris. I played nervously and
+      self-consciously with my fan, and I wrapped my humility closer round me,
+      until at length the tumult died away, and the hum of charming, eager
+      chatter reassured my ears again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz did not come. The entr&rsquo;acte stretched out long, and the chatter
+      lost some of its eagerness, and he did not come. Perhaps he could not
+      come. Perhaps he was too much engaged, too much preoccupied, to think of
+      the gallantry which he owed to his mistress. A man cannot always be
+      dreaming of his mistress. A mistress must be reconciled to occasional
+      neglect; she must console herself with chocolates. And they were
+      chocolates from Marquis&rsquo;s, in the Passage des Panoramas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he came, accompanied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A whirl of high-seasoned, laughing personalities invaded my privacy. Diaz,
+      smiling humorously, was followed by a man and a cloaked woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear lady,&rsquo; he said, with an intimate formality, &lsquo;I present
+      Mademoiselle Morenita and Monsieur Villedo. They insisted on seeing you.
+      Mademoiselle, Monsieur&mdash;Mademoiselle Peel.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stood up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All our excuses,&rsquo; said Villedo, in a low, discreet voice, as he
+      carefully shut the door. &lsquo;All our excuses, madame. But it was
+      necessary that I should pay my respects&mdash;it was stronger than I.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came forward, took my hand, and raised it to his lips. He is a
+      little finicking man, with a little gray beard, and the red rosette in his
+      button-hole, and a most consummate ease of manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur,&rsquo; I replied, &lsquo;you are too amiable. And you, madame.
+      I cannot sufficiently thank you both.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morenita rushed at me with a swift, surprising movement, her cloak
+      dropping from her shoulders, and taking both my hands, she kissed me
+      impulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have genius,&rsquo; she said; &lsquo;and I am proud. I am ashamed
+      that I cannot read English; but I have the intention to learn in order to
+      read your books. Our Diaz says wonderful things of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She is a tall, splendidly-made, opulent creature, of my own age, born for
+      the footlights, with an extremely sweet and thrilling voice, and that
+      slight coarseness or exaggeration of gesture and beauty which is the
+      penalty of the stage. She did not in the least resemble a La Vallière as
+      she stood there gazing at me, with her gleaming, pencilled eyes and heavy,
+      scarlet lips. It seemed impossible that she could refine herself to a La
+      Vallière. But that woman is the drama itself. She would act no matter
+      what. She has always the qualities necessary to a rôle. And the gods have
+      given her green eyes, so that she may be La Vallière to the very life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I began to thank her for her superb performance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is I who should thank you,&rsquo; she answered. &lsquo;It will be my
+      greatest part. Never have I had so many glorious situations in a part. Do
+      you like my limp?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, her head on one side. Success glittered in those orbs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You limp adorably,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is my profession to make compliments,&rsquo; Villedo broke in; and
+      then, turning to Morenita, &lsquo;<i>N&rsquo;est-ce pas, ma belle créature</i>?
+      But really&rsquo;&mdash;he turned to me again&mdash;&lsquo;but very
+      sincerely, all that there is of most sincerely, dear madame, your libretto
+      is made with a virtuosity astonishing. It is <i>du théâtre</i>. And with
+      that a charm, an emotion...! One would say&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it continued, the flattering stream, while Diaz listened, touched,
+      and full of pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;It is not I who deserve praise.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An electric bell trembled in the theatre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morenita picked up her cloak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Mon ami</i>,&rsquo; she warned Villedo. &lsquo;I must go. Diaz, <i>mon
+      petit</i>! you will persuade Mademoiselle Peel to come to the room of the
+      Directeur later. Madame, a few of us will meet there&mdash;is it not so,
+      Villedo? We shall count on you, madame. You have hidden yourself too long.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I glanced at Diaz, and he nodded. As a fact, I wished to refuse; but I
+      could not withstand the seduction of Morenita. She had a physical
+      influence which was unique in my experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I accept,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>A tout à l&rsquo;heure</i>, then,&rsquo; she twittered gaily; and they
+      left as they had come, Villedo affectionately toying with Morenita&rsquo;s
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz remained behind a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am so glad you didn&rsquo;t decline,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You see,
+      here in this theatre Morenita is a queen. I wager she has never before in
+      all her life put herself out of the way as she has done for you to-night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really!&rsquo; I faltered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, indeed, as I pondered over it, the politeness of these people
+      appeared to be marvellous, and so perfectly accomplished. Villedo, who has
+      made a European reputation and rejuvenated his theatre in a dozen years,
+      is doubtless, as he said, a professional maker of compliments. In his
+      position a man must be. But, nevertheless, last night&rsquo;s triumph is
+      officially and very genuinely Villedo&rsquo;s. While as for Morenita and
+      Diaz, the mere idea of these golden stars waiting on me, the librettist,
+      effacing themselves, rendering themselves subordinate at such a moment,
+      was fantastic. It passed the credible.... A Diaz standing silent and
+      deferential, while an idolized prima donna stepped down from her throne to
+      flatter me in her own temple! All that I had previously achieved of renown
+      seemed provincial, insular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Diaz took his own right place in the spacious salon of Villedo
+      afterwards, after all the applause had ceased, and the success had been
+      consecrated, and the enraptured audience had gone, and the lights were
+      extinguished in the silent auditorium. It is a room that seems to be
+      furnished with nothing but a grand piano and a large, flat writing-table
+      and a few chairs. On the walls are numberless signed portraits of singers
+      and composers, and antique playbills of the Opéra Comique, together with
+      strange sinister souvenirs of the great fires which have destroyed the
+      house and its patrons in the past. When Diaz led me in, only Villedo and
+      the principal artists and Pouvillon, the conductor, were present.
+      Pouvillon, astonishingly fat, was sitting on the table, idly swinging the
+      electric pendant over his head; while Morenita occupied Villedo&rsquo;s
+      armchair, and Villedo talked to Montfériot and another man in a corner.
+      But a crowd of officials of the theatre ventured on Diaz&rsquo; heels. And
+      then came Monticelli, the <i>première danseuse</i>, in a coat and skirt,
+      and then some of her rivals. And as the terrible Director did not protest,
+      the room continued to fill until it was full to the doors, where stood a
+      semicircle of soiled, ragged scene-shifters and a few fat old women, who
+      were probably dressers. Who could protest on such a night? The democracy
+      of a concerted triumph reigned. Everybody was joyous, madly happy.
+      Everybody had done something; everybody shared the prestige, and the rank
+      and file might safely take generals by the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was then the centre of attraction. It was recognised that he had
+      entered that sphere from a wider one, bringing with him a radiance
+      brighter than he found there. He was divine last night. All felt that he
+      was divine. He spoke to everyone with an admirable modesty, gaily, his
+      eyes laughing. Several women kissed him, including Morenita. Not that I
+      minded. In the theatre the code is different, coarser, more banal. He
+      alone raised this crowd above its usual level and gave it distinction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Someone suggested that, as the piano was there, he should play, and the
+      demand ran from mouth to mouth. Villedo, appreciating its audacity, made a
+      gesture to indicate that such a thing could not be asked. But Diaz
+      instantly said that, if it would give pleasure, he would play with
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sat down to the piano, and looked round, smiling, and the room was
+      hushed in a moment, and each face was turned towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo; he ejaculated. And then, as no definite recommendation was
+      offered, he said: &lsquo;Do you wish that I improvise?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea was accepted with passionate, noisy enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cold perspiration broke out over my whole body. I must have turned very
+      pale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are not ill, madame?&rsquo; asked that ridiculous fop, Montfèriot,
+      who had been presented to me, and was whispering the most fatuous
+      compliments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, I thank you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact was that Diaz, since his retirement, had not yet played to anyone
+      except myself. This was his first appearance. I was afraid for him. I
+      trembled for him. I need not have done. He was absolutely master of his
+      powers. His fingers announced, quite simply, one of the most successful
+      airs from <i>La Vallière</i>, and then he began to decorate it with an
+      amazing lacework of variations, and finished with a bravura display such
+      as no pianist could have surpassed. The performance, marvellous in itself,
+      was precisely suited to that audience, and it electrified the audience; it
+      electrified even me. Diaz fought his way through kisses and embraces to
+      Villedo, who stood on his toes and wept and put his arms round Diaz&rsquo;
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Cher maître</i>,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;you overwhelm us!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are too kind, all of you,&rsquo; said Diaz. &lsquo;I must ask
+      permission to retire. I have to conduct Mademoiselle Peel to her hotel,
+      and there is much for me to do during the night. You know I start very
+      early to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Hélas!</i> Morenita sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had blushed. Decidedly I behaved like a girl last night. But, indeed,
+      the new, swift realization, as Diaz singled me out of that multitude, that
+      after all he utterly belonged to me, that he was mine alone, was more than
+      I could bear with equanimity. I was the proudest woman in the universe. I
+      scorned the lot of all other women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The adieux were exchanged, and there were more kisses. &lsquo;<i>Au
+      revoir! Bon voyage</i>! Much success over there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The majority of these good, generous souls were in tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Villedo opened a side-door, and we escaped into a corridor, only Morenita
+      and one or two others accompanying us to the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And on the pavement a carpet had been laid. The electric brougham was
+      waiting. I gathered up my skirt and sprang in. Diaz followed, smiling at
+      me. He put his head out of the window and said a few words. Morenita blew
+      a kiss. Villedo bowed profoundly. The carriage moved in the direction of
+      the boulevard.... I had carried him off. Oh, the exquisite dark intimacy
+      of the interior of that smooth-rolling brougham! When, after the theatre,
+      a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory in
+      the fact that she is his? Is it not the most delicious of avowals? There
+      is something in the enforced bend of one&rsquo;s head as one steps in. And
+      when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wondered idly what Morenita and Villedo thought of our relations. They
+      must surely guess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went down the boulevard and by the Rue Royale into the Place de la
+      Concorde, where vehicles flitted mysteriously in a maze of lights under
+      the vast dome of mysterious blue. And Paris, in her incomparable toilette
+      of a June night, seemed more than ever the passionate city of love that
+      she is, recognising candidly, with the fearless intellectuality of the
+      Latin temperament, that one thing only makes life worth living. How soft
+      was the air! How languorous the pose of the dim figures that passed us
+      half hidden in other carriages! And in my heart was the lofty joy of work
+      done, definitely accomplished, and a vista of years of future pleasure. My
+      happiness was ardent and yet calm&mdash;a happiness beyond my hopes,
+      beyond what a mortal has the right to dream of. Nothing could impair it,
+      not even Diaz&rsquo; continued silence as to a marriage between us, not
+      even the imminent brief separation that I was to endure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My child,&rsquo; said Diaz suddenly, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m very hungry. I&rsquo;ve
+      never been so hungry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You surely didn&rsquo;t forget to have your dinner?&rsquo; I exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I did,&rsquo; he admitted like a child; &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve just
+      remembered.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz!&rsquo; I pouted, and for some strange reason my bliss was
+      intensified, ‘you are really terrible! What can I do with you? You will
+      eat before you leave me. I must see to that. We can get something for you
+      at the hotel, perhaps.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Suppose we go to a supper restaurant?&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without waiting for my reply, he seized the dangling end of the
+      speaking-tube and spoke to the driver, and we swerved round and regained
+      the boulevard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the private room of a great, glittering restaurant, one of a long
+      row of private rooms off a corridor, I ate strawberries and cream and
+      sipped champagne while Diaz went through the entire menu of a supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Your eyes look sad,&rsquo; he murmured, with a cigar between his teeth.
+      &lsquo;What is it? We shall see each other again in a fortnight.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was to resume his career by a series of concerts in the United States.
+      A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents,
+      had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and
+      fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played
+      at no concert before he played in New York. And in order to reach New York
+      in time for the first concert, it was imperative that he should catch the
+      <i>Touraine</i> at Havre. I was to follow in a few days by a
+      Hamburg-American liner. Diaz had judged it more politic that we should not
+      travel together. In this he was undoubtedly right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am both sad and happy,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved his chair until it touched mine, and put his arm round my neck,
+      and brought my face close to his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Look at me,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I looked into his large, splendid eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mustn&rsquo;t think,&rsquo; he whispered, &lsquo;that, because I don&rsquo;t
+      talk about it, I don&rsquo;t feel that I owe everything to you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I let my face fall on his breast. I knew I had flushed to the ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor boy,&rsquo; I sobbed, &lsquo;if you talk about that I shall never
+      forgive you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was heaven itself. No woman has ever been more ecstatically happy than
+      I was then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rang for the bill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We parted at the door of my hotel. In the carriage we had exchanged one
+      long, long kiss. At the last moment I wanted to alter the programme, go
+      with him to his hotel to assist in his final arrangements, and then see
+      him off at early morning at the station. But he refused. He said he could
+      not bear to part from me in public. Perhaps it was best so. Just as I
+      turned away he put a packet into my hand. It contained seven banknotes for
+      ten thousand francs each, money that it had been my delight to lend him
+      from time to time. Foolish, vain, scrupulous boy! I knew not where he had
+      obtained&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      It is now evening. Diaz is on the sea. While writing those last lines I
+      was attacked by fearful pains in the right side, and cramp, so that I
+      could not finish. I can scarcely write now. I have just seen the old
+      English doctor. He says I have appendicitis, perhaps caused by pips of
+      strawberries. And that unless I am operated on at once&mdash;And that even
+      if&mdash;He is telephoning to the hospital. Diaz! No; I shall come safely
+      through the affair. Without me Diaz would fall again. I see that now. And
+      I have had no child. I must have a child. Even that girl in the blue <i>peignoir</i>
+      had a&mdash;Chance is a strange&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Extract translated from &lsquo;Le Temps,&rsquo; the Paris Evening Paper</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OBSEQUIES OF MISS PELL (<i>sic</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obsequies of Mademoiselle Pell, the celebrated English poetess, and
+      author of the libretto of <i>La Vallière</i>, were celebrated this morning
+      at eleven o&rsquo;clock in the Church of St. Honoré d&rsquo;Eylau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief mourners were the doctor who assisted at the last moments of
+      Mademoiselle Pell, and M. Villedo, director of the Opéra-Comique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the wreaths we may cite those of the Association of Dramatic
+      Artists, of Madame Morenita, of the management of the Opéra-Comique, and
+      of the artists of the Opéra-Comique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mass was said by a vicar of the parish, and general absolution given by M.
+      le Curé Marbeau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the service there was given, under the direction of M. Lêtang,
+      chapel-master, the <i>Funeral March</i> of Beethoven, the <i>Kyrie</i> of
+      Neidermeyer, the <i>Pie Jesu</i> of Stradella, the <i>Ego Sum</i> of
+      Gounod, the <i>Libera Me</i> of S. Rousseau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      M. Deep officiated at the organ.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the ceremony the remains were transported to the cemetery of
+      Père-Lachaise and cremated.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <pre>
+
+
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diff --git a/old/11360.txt b/old/11360.txt
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+++ b/old/11360.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sacred And Profane Love , by E. Arnold Bennett
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Sacred And Profane Love 
+
+Author: E. Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: February 28, 2004  [eBook #11360]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE ***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+
+A NOVEL IN THREE EPISODES
+
+BY ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+1905
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO MY FRIEND EDEN PHILLPOTTS
+
+THE NOVELIST FOR WHOM MAN AND NATURE ARE INSEPARABLE WITH PROFOUND
+RESPECT FOR THE CLASSICAL DIGNITY OF HIS AIM AND EQUAL ADMIRATION
+FOR THE AUSTERE SPLENDOUR OF HIS PERFORMANCE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+PART II
+
+THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+
+_'How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women of the
+past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have opened for the
+kiss, and who are dead! The kiss--it is immortal! It passes from lip to
+lip, from century to century, from age to age. Men gather it, give it
+back, and die.'_--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
+
+
+
+
+SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+
+
+PART I
+
+IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love--and by love I
+mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the
+soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to
+the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of
+my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in
+amorous dreams.
+
+I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the
+piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to
+conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me:
+warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round
+on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and
+I asked myself: 'Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?' For
+even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and
+the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at
+the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of
+those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort
+of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian
+room, large and stately and symmetrical, full--but not too full--of
+twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes,
+gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and
+here and there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, recalled the Empire
+period and the deserted Napoleonic palaces of France. The expanse of
+yellow and green carpet had been married to the floor by two generations
+of decorous feet, and the meaning of its tints was long since explained
+away. Never have I seen a carpet with less individuality of its own than
+that carpet; it was so sweetly faded, amiable, and flat, that its sole
+mission in the world seemed to be to make things smooth for the chairs.
+The wall-paper looked like pale green silk, and the candles were
+reflected in it as they were reflected in the crystals of the chandelier.
+The grand piano, a Collard and Collard, made a vast mass of walnut in the
+chamber, incongruous, perhaps, but still there was something in its mild
+and indecisive tone that responded to the furniture. It, too, spoke of
+Evangelicalism, the Christian Year, and a dignified reserved confidence
+in Christ's blood. It, too, defied the assault of time and the invasion
+of ideas. It, too, protested against Chopin and romance, and demanded
+Thalberg's variations on 'Home, Sweet Home.'
+
+My great-grandfather, the famous potter--second in renown only to
+Wedgwood--had built that Georgian house, and my grandfather had furnished
+it; and my parents, long since dead, had placidly accepted it and the
+ideal that it stood for; and it had devolved upon my Aunt Constance, and
+ultimately it would devolve on me, the scarlet woman in a dress of
+virginal white, the inexplicable offspring of two changeless and
+blameless families, the secret revolutionary, the living lie! How had I
+come there?
+
+I went to the window, and, pulling the curtain aside, looked vaguely out
+into the damp, black garden, from which the last light was fading. The
+red, rectangular house stood in the midst of the garden, and the garden
+was surrounded by four brick walls, which preserved it from four streets
+where dwelt artisans of the upper class. The occasional rattling of a
+cart was all we caught of the peaceable rumour of the town; but on clear
+nights the furnaces of Cauldon Bar Ironworks lit the valley for us, and
+we were reminded that our refined and inviolate calm was hemmed in by
+rude activities. On the east border of the garden was a row of poplars,
+and from the window I could see the naked branches of the endmost. A
+gas-lamp suddenly blazed behind it in Acre Lane, and I descried a bird in
+the tree. And as the tree waved its plume in the night-wind, and the bird
+swayed on the moving twig, and the gas-lamp burned meekly and patiently
+beyond, I seemed to catch in these simple things a glimpse of the secret
+meaning of human existence, such as one gets sometimes, startlingly, in a
+mood of idle receptiveness. And it was so sad and so beautiful, so full
+of an ecstatic melancholy, that I dropped the curtain. And my thought
+ranged lovingly over our household--prim, regular, and perfect: my old
+aunt embroidering in the breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in
+the impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion
+that Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in
+fancy all over the house--the attics, my aunt's bedroom so miraculously
+neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the corridors where
+clocks ticked.
+
+I had the sense of the curious compact organism of which my aunt was the
+head, and into which my soul had strayed by some caprice of fate. What I
+felt was that the organism was suspended in a sort of enchantment,
+lifelessly alive, unconsciously expectant of the magic touch which would
+break the spell, and I wondered how long I must wait before I began to
+live. I know now that I was happy in those serene preliminary years, but
+nevertheless I had the illusion of spiritual woe. I sighed grievously as
+I went back to the piano, and opened the volume of Mikuli's Chopin.
+
+Just as I was beginning to play, Rebecca came into the room. She was a
+maid of forty years, and stout; absolutely certain of a few things, and
+quite satisfied in her ignorance of all else; an important person in our
+house, and therefore an important person in the created universe, of
+which our house was for her the centre. She wore the white cap with
+distinction, and when an apron was suspended round her immense waist it
+ceased to be an apron, and became a symbol, like the apron of a
+Freemason.
+
+'Well, Rebecca?' I said, without turning my head.
+
+I guessed urgency, otherwise Rebecca would have delegated Lucy.
+
+'If you please, Miss Carlotta, your aunt is not feeling well, and she
+will not be able to go to the concert to-night.'
+
+'Not be able to go to the concert!' I repeated mechanically.
+
+'No, miss.'
+
+'I will come downstairs.'
+
+'If I were you, I shouldn't, miss. She's dozing a bit just now.'
+
+'Very well.'
+
+I went on playing. But Chopin, who was the chief factor in my emotional
+life; who had taught me nearly all I knew of grace, wit, and tenderness;
+who had discovered for me the beauty that lay in everything, in sensuous
+exaltation as well as in asceticism, in grief as well as in joy; who had
+shown me that each moment of life, no matter what its import, should be
+lived intensely and fully; who had carried me with him to the dizziest
+heights of which passion is capable; whose music I spiritually
+comprehended to a degree which I felt to be extraordinary--Chopin had
+almost no significance for me as I played then the most glorious of his
+compositions. His message was only a blurred sound in my ears. And
+gradually I perceived, as the soldier gradually perceives who has been
+hit by a bullet, that I was wounded.
+
+The shock was of such severity that at first I had scarcely noticed it.
+What? My aunt not going to the concert? That meant that I could not go.
+But it was impossible that I should not go. I could not conceive my
+absence from the concert--the concert which I had been anticipating and
+preparing for during many weeks. We went out but little, Aunt Constance
+and I. An oratorio, an amateur operatic performance, a ballad concert in
+the Bursley Town Hall--no more than that; never the Hanbridge Theatre.
+And now Diaz was coming down to give a pianoforte recital in the Jubilee
+Hall at Hanbridge; Diaz, the darling of European capitals; Diaz, whose
+name in seven years had grown legendary; Diaz, the Liszt and the
+Rubenstein of my generation, and the greatest interpreter of Chopin since
+Chopin died--Diaz! Diaz! No such concert had ever been announced in the
+Five Towns, and I was to miss it! Our tickets had been taken, and they
+were not to be used! Unthinkable! A photograph of Diaz stood in a silver
+frame on the piano; I gazed at it fervently. I said: 'I will hear you
+play the Fantasia this night, if I am cut in pieces for it to-morrow!'
+Diaz represented for me, then, all that I desired of men. All my dreams
+of love and freedom crystallized suddenly into Diaz.
+
+I ran downstairs to the breakfast-room.
+
+'You aren't going to the concert, auntie?' I almost sobbed.
+
+She sat in her rocking-chair, and the gray woollen shawl thrown round her
+shoulders mingled with her gray hair. Her long, handsome face was a
+little pale, and her dark eyes darker than usual.
+
+'I don't feel well enough,' she replied calmly.
+
+She had not observed the tremor in my voice.
+
+'But what's the matter?' I insisted.
+
+'Nothing in particular, my dear. I do not feel equal to the exertion.'
+
+'But, auntie--then I can't go, either.'
+
+'I'm very sorry, dear,' she said. 'We will go to the next concert.'
+
+'Diaz will never come again!' I exclaimed passionately. 'And the tickets
+will be wasted.'
+
+'My dear,' my Aunt Constance repeated, 'I am not equal to it. And you
+cannot go alone.'
+
+I was utterly selfish in that moment. I cared nothing whatever for my
+aunt's indisposition. Indeed, I secretly accused her of maliciously
+choosing that night of all nights for her mysterious fatigue.
+
+'But, auntie,' I said, controlling myself, 'I must go, really. I shall
+send Lucy over with a note to Ethel Ryley to ask her to go with me.'
+
+'Do,' said my aunt, after a considerable pause, 'if you are bent
+on going.'
+
+I have often thought since that during that pause, while we faced each
+other, my aunt had for the first time fully realized how little she knew
+of me; she must surely have detected in my glance a strangeness, a
+contemptuous indifference, an implacable obstinacy, which she had never
+seen in it before. And, indeed, these things were in my glance. Yet I
+loved my aunt with a deep affection. I had only one grievance against
+her. Although excessively proud, she would always, in conversation with
+men, admit her mental and imaginative inferiority, and that of her sex.
+She would admit, without being asked, that being a woman she could not
+see far, that her feminine brain could not carry an argument to the end,
+and that her feminine purpose was too infirm for any great enterprise.
+She seemed to find a morbid pleasure in such confessions. As regards
+herself, they were accurate enough; the dear creature was a singularly
+good judge of her own character. What I objected to was her assumption,
+so calm and gratuitous, that her individuality, with all its confessed
+limitations, was, of course, superior--stronger, wiser, subtler than
+mine. She never allowed me to argue with her; or if she did, she treated
+my remarks with a high, amused tolerance. 'Wait till you grow older,' she
+would observe, magnificently ignorant of the fact that my soul was
+already far older than hers. This attitude naturally made me secretive in
+all affairs of the mind, and most affairs of the heart.
+
+We took in the county paper, the _Staffordshire Recorder,_ and the _Rock_
+and the _Quiver_. With the help of these organs of thought, which I
+detested and despised, I was supposed to be able to keep discreetly and
+sufficiently abreast of the times. But I had other aids. I went to the
+Girls' High School at Oldcastle till I was nearly eighteen. One of the
+mistresses there used to read continually a red book covered with brown
+paper. I knew it to be a red book because the paper was gone at the
+corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in
+the book--she would pick it up at every spare moment--excited in me an
+ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on the
+title-page, _Introduction to the Study of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer.
+Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that astonished
+and charmed me. I said: 'Why are not our school histories like this?' The
+owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it to me, but she would
+not, nor would she give me any reason for declining. Soon afterwards I
+left school. I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free Library at the
+Wedgwood Institution. But the book was not in the catalogue. (How often,
+in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the reading-room, where men
+read the daily papers and the magazines, without daring to enter!) At
+length I audaciously decided to buy the book. I ordered it, not at our
+regular stationer's in Oldcastle Street, but at a little shop of the
+same kind in Trafalgar Road. In three days it arrived. I called for it,
+and took it home secretly in a cardboard envelope-box. I went to bed
+early, and I began to read. I read all night, thirteen hours. O book with
+the misleading title--for you have nothing to do with sociology, and you
+ought to have been called _How to Think Honestly_--my face flushed again
+and again as I perused your ugly yellowish pages! Again and again I
+exclaimed: 'But this is marvellous!' I had not guessed that anything so
+honest, and so courageous, and so simple, and so convincing had ever been
+written. I am capable now of suspecting that Spencer was not a supreme
+genius; but he taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing
+is sacred that will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory. The next
+morning after breakfast I fell asleep in a chair. 'My dear!' protested
+Aunt Constance. 'Ah,' I thought, 'if you knew, Aunt Constance, if you had
+the least suspicion, of the ideas that are surging and shining in my
+head, you would go mad--go simply mad!' I did not care much for
+deception, but I positively hated clumsy concealment, and the red book
+was in the house; at any moment it might be seized. On a shelf of books
+in my bedroom was a novel called _The Old Helmet_, probably the silliest
+novel in the world. I tore the pages from the binding and burnt them; I
+tore the binding from Spencer and burnt it; and I put my treasure in the
+covers of _The Old Helmet_. Once Rebecca, a person privileged, took the
+thing away to read; but she soon brought it back. She told me she had
+always understood that _The Old Helmet_ was more, interesting than that.
+
+Later, I discovered _The Origin of Species_ in the Free Library. It
+finished the work of corruption. Spencer had shown me how to think;
+Darwin told me what to think. The whole of my upbringing went for naught
+thenceforward. I lived a double life. I said nothing to my aunt of the
+miracle wrought within me, and she suspected nothing. Strange and
+uncanny, is it not, that such miracles can escape the observation of a
+loving heart? I loved her as much as ever, perhaps more than ever. Thank
+Heaven that love can laugh at reason!
+
+So much for my intellectual inner life. My emotional inner life is less
+easy to indicate. I became a woman at fifteen--years, interminable years,
+before I left school. I guessed even then, vaguely, that my nature was
+extremely emotional and passionate. And I had nothing literary on which
+to feed my dreams, save a few novels which I despised, and the Bible and
+the plays and poems of Shakespeare. It is wonderful, though, what good I
+managed to find in those two use-worn volumes. I knew most of the Song of
+Solomon by heart, and many of the sonnets; and I will not mince the fact
+that my favourite play was _Measure for Measure_. I was an innocent
+virgin, in the restricted sense in which most girls of my class and age
+are innocent, but I obtained from these works many a lofty pang of
+thrilling pleasure. They illustrated Chopin for me, giving precision and
+particularity to his messages. And I was ashamed of myself. Yes; at the
+bottom of my heart I was ashamed of myself because my sensuous being
+responded to the call of these masterpieces. In my ignorance I thought I
+was lapsing from a sane and proper ideal. And then--the second miracle in
+my career, which has been full of miracles--I came across a casual
+reference, in the _Staffordshire Recorder_, of all places, to the
+_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ of Theophile Gautier. Something in the
+reference, I no longer remember what, caused me to guess that the book
+was a revelation of matters hidden from me. I bought it. With the
+assistance of a dictionary, I read it, nightly, in about a week. Except
+_Picciola_, it was the first French novel I had ever read. It held me
+throughout; it revealed something on nearly every page. But the climax
+dazzled and blinded me. It was exquisite, so high and pure, so
+startling, so bold, that it made me ill. When I recovered I had fast in
+my heart's keeping the new truth that in the body, and the instincts of
+the body, there should be no shame, but rather a frank, joyous pride.
+From that moment I ceased to be ashamed of anything that I honestly
+liked. But I dared not keep the book. The knowledge of its contents would
+have killed my aunt. I read it again; I read the last pages several
+times, and then I burnt it and breathed freely.
+
+Such was I, as I forced my will on my aunt in the affair of the concert.
+And I say that she who had never suspected the existence of the real me,
+suspected it then, when we glanced at each other across the
+breakfast-room. Upon these apparent trifles life swings, as upon a pivot,
+into new directions.
+
+I sat with my aunt while Lucy went with the note. She returned soon with
+the reply, and the reply was:
+
+'So sorry I can't accept your kind invitation. I should have liked to go
+awfully. But Fred has got the toothache, and I must not leave him.'
+
+The toothache! And my very life, so it seemed to me, hung in the balance.
+
+I did not hesitate one second.
+
+'Hurrah!' I cried. 'She can go. I am to call for her in the cab.'
+
+And I crushed the note cruelly, and threw it in the fire.
+
+'Tell him to call at Ryleys',' I said to Rebecca as she was putting me
+and my dress into the cab.
+
+And she told the cabman with that sharp voice of hers, always arrogant
+towards inferiors, to call at Ryleys.'
+
+I put my head out of the cab window as soon as we were in
+Oldcastle Street.
+
+'Drive straight to Hanbridge,' I ordered.
+
+The thing was done.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He was like his photograph, but the photograph had given me only the most
+inadequate idea of him. The photograph could not render his extraordinary
+fairness, nor the rich gold of his hair, nor the blue of his dazzling
+eyes. The first impression was that he was too beautiful for a man, that
+he had a woman's beauty, that he had the waxen beauty of a doll; but the
+firm, decisive lines of the mouth and chin, the overhanging brows, and
+the luxuriance of his amber moustache, spoke more sternly. Gradually one
+perceived that beneath the girlish mask, beneath the contours and the
+complexion incomparably delicate, there was an individuality intensely
+and provocatively male. His body was rather less than tall, and it was
+muscular and springy. He walked on to the platform as an unspoilt man
+should walk, and he bowed to the applause as if bowing chivalrously to a
+woman whom he respected but did not love. Diaz was twenty-six that year;
+he had recently returned from a tour round the world; he was filled full
+of triumph, renown, and adoration. As I have said, he was already
+legendary. He had become so great and so marvellous that those who had
+never seen him were in danger of forgetting that he was a living human
+being, obliged to eat and drink, and practise scales, and visit his
+tailor's. Thus it had happened to me. During the first moments I found
+myself thinking, 'This cannot be Diaz. It is not true that at last I see
+him. There must be some mistake.' Then he sat down leisurely to the
+piano; his gaze ranged across the hall, and I fancied that, for a second,
+it met mine. My two seats were in the first row of the stalls, and I
+could see every slightest change of his face. So that at length I felt
+that Diaz was real, and that he was really there close in front of me, a
+seraph and yet very human. He was all alone on the great platform, and
+the ebonized piano seemed enormous and formidable before him. And all
+around was the careless public--ignorant, unsympathetic, exigent,
+impatient, even inimical--two thousand persons who would get value for
+their money or know the reason why. The electric light and the inclement
+gaze of society rained down cruelly upon that defenceless head. I wanted
+to protect it. The tears rose to my eyes, and I stretched out towards
+Diaz the hands of my soul. My passionate sympathy must have reached him
+like a beneficent influence, of which, despite the perfect
+self-possession and self-confidence of his demeanour, it seemed to me
+that he had need.
+
+I had risked much that night. I had committed an enormity. No one but a
+grown woman who still vividly remembers her girlhood can appreciate my
+feelings as I drove from Bursley to Hanbridge in the cab, and as I got
+out of the cab in the crowd, and gave up my ticket, and entered the
+glittering auditorium of the Jubilee Hall. I was alone, at night, in the
+public places, under the eye of the world. And I was guiltily alone.
+Every fibre of my body throbbed with the daring and the danger and the
+romance of the adventure. The horror of revealing the truth to Aunt
+Constance, as I was bound to do--of telling her that I had lied, and that
+I had left my maiden's modesty behind in my bedroom, gripped me at
+intervals like some appalling and exquisite instrument of torture. And
+yet, ere Diaz had touched the piano with his broad white hand, I was
+content, I was rewarded, and I was justified.
+
+The programme began with Chopin's first Ballade.
+
+There was an imperative summons, briefly sustained, which developed into
+an appeal and an invocation, ascending, falling, and still higher
+ascending, till it faded and expired, and then, after a little pause, was
+revived; then silence, and two chords, defining and clarifying the
+vagueness of the appeal and the invocation. And then, almost before I was
+aware of it, there stole forth from under the fingers of Diaz the song of
+the soul of man, timid, questioning, plaintive, neither sad nor joyous,
+but simply human, seeking what it might find on earth. The song changed
+subtly from mood to mood, expressing that which nothing but itself could
+express; and presently there was a low and gentle menace, thrice repeated
+under the melody of the song, and the reply of the song was a proud cry,
+a haughty contempt of these furtive warnings, and a sudden winged leap
+into the empyrean towards the Eternal Spirit. And then the melody was
+lost in a depth, and the song became turgid and wild and wilder,
+hysteric, irresolute, frantically groping, until at last it found its
+peace and its salvation. And the treasure was veiled in a mist of
+arpeggios, but one by one these were torn away, and there was a hush, a
+pause, and a preparation; and the soul of man broke into a new song of
+what it had found on earth--the magic of the tenderness of love--an air
+so caressing and so sweet, so calmly happy and so mournfully sane, so
+bereft of illusions and so naive, that it seemed to reveal in a few
+miraculous phrases the secret intentions of God. It was too beautiful; it
+told me too much about myself; it vibrated my nerves to such an
+unbearable spasm of pleasure that I might have died had I not willed to
+live.... It gave place momentarily to the song of the question and the
+search, but only to return, and to return again, with a more thrilling
+and glorious assurance. It was drowned in doubt, but it emerged
+triumphantly, covered with noble and delicious ornaments, and swimming
+strongly on mysterious waves. And finally, with speed and with fire, it
+was transformed and caught up into the last ecstasy, the ultimate
+passion. The soul swept madly between earth and heaven, fell, rose; and
+there was a dreadful halt. Then a loud blast, a distortion of the magic,
+an upward rush, another and a louder blast, and a thunderous fall,
+followed by two massive and terrifying chords....
+
+Diaz was standing up and bowing to his public. What did they understand?
+Did they understand anything? I cannot tell. But I know that they felt.
+A shudder of feeling had gone through the hall. It was in vain that
+people tried to emancipate themselves from the spell by the violence of
+their applause. They could not. We were all together under the
+enchantment. Some may have seen clearly, some darkly, but we were equal
+before the throne of that mighty enchanter. And the enchanter bowed and
+bowed with a grave, sympathetic smile, and then disappeared. I had not
+clapped my hands; I had not moved. Only my full eyes had followed him as
+he left the platform; and when he returned--because the applause would
+not cease--my eyes watched over him as he came back to the centre of the
+platform. He stood directly in front of me, smiling more gaily now. And
+suddenly our glances met! Yes; I could not be mistaken. They met, and
+mine held his for several seconds.... Diaz had looked at me. Diaz had
+singled me out from the crowd. I blushed hotly, and I was conscious of a
+surpassing joy. My spirit was transfigured. I knew that such a man was
+above kings. I knew that the world and everything of loveliness that it
+contained was his. I knew that he moved like a beautiful god through the
+groves of delight, and that what he did was right, and whom he beckoned
+came, and whom he touched was blessed. And my eyes had held his eyes for
+a little space.
+
+The enchantment deepened. I had read that the secret of playing Chopin
+had died with Chopin; but I felt sure that evening, as I have felt sure
+since, that Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have
+received Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a
+superior. For Diaz had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of
+the keyboard that Chopin could not have possessed. Diaz had come to the
+front in a generation of pianists who had lifted technique to a plane of
+which neither Liszt nor Rubinstein dreamed. He had succeeded primarily by
+his gigantic and incredible technique. And then, when his technique had
+astounded the world, he had invited the world to forget it, as the glass
+is forgotten through which is seen beauty. And Diaz's gift was now such
+that there appeared to intervene nothing between his conception of the
+music and the strings of the piano, so perfected was the mechanism.
+Difficulties had ceased to exist.
+
+The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if
+they were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they
+should fall off. It was not so with Diaz. When Diaz played you
+experienced the pure emotions caused by the unblurred contemplation of
+that beauty which the great masters had created, and which Diaz had
+tinted with the rare dyes of his personality. You forgot all but beauty.
+The piano was not a piano; it was an Arabian magic beyond physical laws,
+and it, too, had a soul.
+
+So Diaz laid upon us the enchantment of Chopin and of himself. Mazurkas,
+nocturnes, waltzes, scherzos, polonaises, preludes, he exhibited to us in
+groups those manifestations of that supreme spirit--that spirit at once
+stern and tender, not more sad than joyous, and always sane, always
+perfectly balanced, always preoccupied with beauty. The singular myth of
+a Chopin decadent, weary, erratic, mournful, hysterical, at odds with
+fate, was completely dissipated; and we perceived instead the grave
+artist nourished on Bach and studious in form, and the strong soul that
+had dared to look on life as it is, and had found beauty everywhere. Ah!
+how the air trembled and glittered with visions! How melody and harmony
+filled every corner of the hall with the silver and gold of sound! How
+the world was changed out of recognition! How that which had seemed
+unreal became real, and that which had seemed real receded to a horizon
+remote and fantastic!...
+
+He was playing the fifteenth Prelude in D flat now, and the water was
+dropping, dropping ceaselessly on the dead body, and the beautiful calm
+song rose serenely in the dream, and then lost itself amid the presaging
+chords of some sinister fate, and came again, exquisite and fresh as
+ever, and then was interrupted by a high note like a clarion; and while
+Diaz held that imperious, compelling note, he turned his face slightly
+from the piano and gazed at me. Several times since the first time our
+eyes had met, by accident as I thought. But this was a deliberate seeking
+on his part. Again I flushed hotly. Again I had the terrible shudder of
+joy. I feared for a moment lest all the Five Towns was staring at me,
+thus singled out by Diaz; but it was not so: I had the wit to perceive
+that no one could remark me as the recipient of that hurried and burning
+glance. He had half a dozen bars to play, yet his eyes did not leave
+mine, and I would not let mine leave his. He remained moveless while the
+last chord expired, and then it seemed to me that his gaze had gone
+further, had passed through me into some unknown. The applause startled
+him to his feet.
+
+My thought was: 'What can he be thinking of me?... But hundreds of women
+must have loved him!'
+
+In the interval an attendant came on to the platform and altered the
+position of the piano. Everybody asked: 'What's that for?' For the new
+position was quite an unusual one; it brought the tail of the piano
+nearer to the audience, and gave a better view of the keyboard to the
+occupants of the seats in the orchestra behind the platform. 'It's a
+question of the acoustics, that's what it is,' observed a man near me,
+and a woman replied: 'Oh, I see!'
+
+When Diaz returned and seated himself to play the Berceuse, I saw that he
+could look at me without turning his head. And now, instead of flushing,
+I went cold. My spine gave way suddenly. I began to be afraid; but of
+what I was afraid I had not the least idea. I fixed my eyes on my
+programme as he launched into the Berceuse. Twice I glanced up, without,
+however, moving my head, and each time his burning blue eyes met mine.
+(But why did I choose moments when the playing of the piece demanded less
+than all his attention?) The Berceuse was a favourite. In sentiment it
+was simpler than the great pieces that had preceded it. Its excessive
+delicacy attracted; the finesse of its embroidery swayed and enraptured
+the audience; and the applause at the close was mad, deafening, and
+peremptory. But Diaz was notorious as a refuser of encores. It had been
+said that he would see a hall wrecked by an angry mob before he would
+enlarge his programme. Four times he came forward and acknowledged the
+tribute, and four times he went back. At the fifth response he halted
+directly in front of me, and in his bold, grave eyes I saw a question. I
+saw it, and I would not answer. If he had spoken aloud to me I could not
+have more clearly understood. But I would not answer. And then some power
+within myself, hitherto unsuspected by me, some natural force, took
+possession of me, and I nodded my head.... Diaz went to the piano.
+
+He hesitated, brushing lightly the keys.
+
+'The Prelude in F sharp,' my thought ran. 'If he would play that!'
+
+And instantly he broke into that sweet air, with its fateful hushed
+accompaniment--the trifle which Chopin threw off in a moment of his
+highest inspiration.
+
+'It is the thirteenth Prelude,' I reflected. I was disturbed,
+profoundly troubled.
+
+The next piece was the last, and it was the Fantasia, the masterpiece
+of Chopin.
+
+In the Fantasia there speaks the voice of a spirit which has attained all
+that humanity may attain: of wisdom, of power, of pride and glory. And
+now it is like the roll of an army marching slowly through terrific
+defiles; and now it is like the quiet song of royal wanderers meditating
+in vast garden landscapes, with mossy masonry and long pools and
+cypresses, and a sapphire star shining in the purple sky on the shoulder
+of a cypress; and now it is like the cry of a lost traveller, who,
+plunging heavily through a virgin forest, comes suddenly upon a green
+circular sward, smooth as a carpet, with an antique statue of a beautiful
+nude girl in the midst; and now it is like the oratory of richly-gowned
+philosophers awaiting death in gorgeous and gloomy palaces; and now it is
+like the upward rush of winged things that are determined to achieve,
+knowing well the while that the ecstasy of longing is better than the
+assuaging of desire. And though the voice of this spirit speaking in the
+music disguises itself so variously, it is always the same. For it
+cannot, and it would not, hide the strange and rare timbre which
+distinguishes it from all others--that quality which springs from a pure
+and calm vision, of life. The voice of this spirit says that it has lost
+every illusion about life, and that life seems only the more beautiful.
+It says that activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but
+another form of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but
+another form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. It
+says there is no end, only a means; and that the highest joy is to
+suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will but live, it
+cries, that grave but yet passionate voice--if you will but live! Were
+there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more than live. The
+true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and lose, and weep
+and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to live, and blind
+your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of existence....
+
+No, no; I cannot--I cannot describe further the experiences of my soul
+while Diaz played. When words cease, music has scarcely begun. I know
+now--I did not know it then--that Diaz was playing as perhaps he had
+never played before. The very air was charged with exquisite emotion,
+which went in waves across the hall, changing and blanching faces,
+troubling hearts, and moistening eyes.... And then he finished. It was
+over. In every trembling breast was a pang of regret that this spell,
+this miracle, this divine revolution, could not last into eternity....
+He stood bowing, one hand touching the piano. And as the revolution he
+had accomplished in us was divine, so was he divine. I felt, and many
+another woman in the audience felt, that no reward could be too great for
+the beautiful and gifted creature who had entranced us and forced us to
+see what alone in life was worth seeing: that the whole world should be
+his absolute dominion; that his happiness should be the first concern of
+mankind; that if a thousand suffered in order to make him happy for a
+moment, it mattered not; that laws were not for him; that if he sinned,
+his sin must not be called a sin, and that he must be excused from
+remorse and from any manner of woe.
+
+The applauding multitude stood up, and moved slightly towards the exits,
+and then stopped, as if ashamed of this readiness to desert the sacred
+temple. Diaz came forward three times, and each time the applause
+increased to a tempest; but he only smiled--smiled gravely. I could not
+see distinctly whether his eyes had sought mine, for mine were full of
+tears. No persuasions could induce him to show himself a fourth time, and
+at length a middle-aged man appeared and stated that Diaz was extremely
+gratified by his reception, but that he was also extremely exhausted and
+had left the hall.
+
+We departed, we mortals; and I was among the last to leave the
+auditorium. As I left the lights were being extinguished over the
+platform, and an attendant was closing the piano. The foyer was crowded
+with people waiting to get out. The word passed that it was raining
+heavily. I wondered how I should find my cab. I felt very lonely and
+unknown; I was overcome with sadness--with a sense of the futility and
+frustration of my life. Such is the logic of the soul, and such the force
+of reaction. Gradually the foyer emptied.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+'You think I am happy,' said Diaz, gazing at me with a smile
+suddenly grave; 'but I am not. I seek something which I cannot find.
+And my playing is only a relief from the fruitless search; only
+that. I am forlorn.'
+
+'You!' I exclaimed, and my eyes rested on his, long.
+
+Yes, we had met. Perhaps it had been inevitable since the beginning of
+time that we should meet; but it was none the less amazing. Perhaps I had
+inwardly known that we should meet; but, none the less, I was astounded
+when a coated and muffled figure came up swiftly to me in the emptying
+foyer, and said: 'Ah! you are here! I cannot leave without thanking you
+for your sympathy. I have never before felt such sympathy while playing.'
+It was a golden voice, pitched low, and the words were uttered with a
+very slight foreign accent, which gave them piquancy. I could not reply;
+something rose in my throat, and the caressing voice continued: 'You are
+pale. Do you feel ill? What can I do? Come with me to the artists' room;
+my secretary is there.' I put out a hand gropingly, for I could not see
+clearly, and I thought I should reel and fall. It touched his shoulder.
+He took my arm, and we went; no one had noticed us, and I had not spoken
+a word. In the room to which he guided me, through a long and sombre
+corridor, there was no sign of a secretary. I drank some water. 'There,
+you are better!' he cried. 'Thank you,' I said, but scarcely whispering.
+'How fortunate I ventured to come to you just at that moment! You might
+have fallen'; and he smiled again. I shook my head. I said: 'It was your
+coming--that--that--made me dizzy!' 'I profoundly regret--' he began.
+'No, no,' I interrupted him; and in that instant I knew I was about to
+say something which society would, justifiably, deem unpardonable in a
+girl situated as I was. 'I am so glad you came'; and I smiled, courageous
+and encouraging. For once in my life--for the first time in my adult
+life--I determined to be my honest self to another. 'Your voice is
+exquisitely beautiful,' he murmured. I thrilled.
+
+Of what use to chronicle the steps, now halting, now only too hasty, by
+which our intimacy progressed in that gaunt and echoing room? He asked me
+no questions as to my identity. He just said that he would like to play
+to me in private if that would give me pleasure, and that possibly I
+could spare an hour and would go with him.... Afterwards his brougham
+would be at my disposal. His tone was the perfection of deferential
+courtesy. Once the secretary came in--a young man rather like
+himself--and they talked together in a foreign language that was not
+French nor German; then the secretary bowed and retired.... We were
+alone.... There can be no sort of doubt that unless I was prepared to
+flout the wisdom of the ages, I ought to have refused his suggestion. But
+is not the wisdom of the ages a medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I
+was prepared to flout it, as in our highest and our lowest moments we
+often are. Moreover, how many women in my place, confronted by that
+divine creature, wooed by that wondrous personality, intoxicated by that
+smile and that voice, allured by the appeal of those marvellous hands,
+would have found the strength to resist? I did not resist, I yielded; I
+accepted. I was already in disgrace with Aunt Constance--as well be
+drowned in twelve feet of water as in six!
+
+So we drove rapidly away in the brougham, through the miry,
+light-reflecting streets of Hanbridge in the direction of Knype. And the
+raindrops ran down the windows of the brougham, and in the cushioned
+interior we could see each other darkly. He did his best to be at ease,
+and he almost succeeded. My feeling towards him, as regards the external
+management, the social guidance, of the affair, was as though we were at
+sea in a dangerous storm, and he was on the bridge and I was a mere
+passenger, and could take no responsibility. Who knew through what
+difficult channels we might not have to steer, and from what lee-shores
+we might not have to beat away? I saw that he perceived this. When I
+offered him some awkward compliment about his good English, he seized the
+chance of a narrative, and told me about his parentage: how his mother
+was Scotch, and his father Danish, and how, after his father's death, his
+mother had married Emilio Diaz, a Spanish teacher of music in Edinburgh,
+and how he had taken, by force of early habit, the name of his
+stepfather. The whole world was familiar with these facts, and I was
+familiar with them; but their recital served our turn in the brougham,
+and, of course, Diaz could add touches which had escaped the
+_Staffordshire Recorder_, and perhaps all other papers. He was explaining
+to me that his secretary was his stepfather's son by another wife, when
+we arrived at the Five Towns Hotel, opposite Knype Railway Station. I
+might have foreseen that that would be our destination. I hooded myself
+as well as I could, and followed him quickly to the first-floor. I sank
+down into a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my
+cloak, and then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table
+were some glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that
+the secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly
+departed. My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its
+full enormity. 'Oh,' I sighed, 'if I were a man like you!' Then it was
+that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was not happy,
+that he was forlorn.
+
+'Yes,' he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; 'I am profoundly
+dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year it is a
+homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You do not
+know how I hate a strange piano. That one'--he pointed to a huge
+instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially for
+him--'is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only yesterday, and
+after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across the world,
+and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a museum, and
+bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.'
+
+'But have you no friends?' I ventured.
+
+'Who can tell?' he replied. 'If I have, I scarcely ever see them.'
+
+'And no home?'
+
+'I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I
+loathe it.'
+
+'Why do you loathe it?'
+
+'Ah! For what it has witnessed--for what it has witnessed.' He sighed.
+'Suppose we discuss something else.'
+
+You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in
+social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know
+that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath
+that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious,
+dazzling haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new
+being, excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said:
+
+'You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for
+love of you.'
+
+He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing.
+
+'Let me guess at your history,' he said. 'You have lived much alone with
+your thoughts, and you have read a great deal of the finest romantic
+poetry, and you have been silent, especially with men. You have seen
+little of men.'
+
+'But I understand them,' I answered boldly.
+
+'I believe you do,' he admitted; and he laughed. 'So I needn't explain to
+you that a thousand women dying of love for one man will not help that
+man to happiness, unless he is dying of love for the thousand and first.'
+
+'And have you never loved?'
+
+The words came of themselves out of my mouth.
+
+'I have deceived myself--in my quest of sympathy,' he said.
+
+'Can you be sure that, in your quest of sympathy, you are not deceiving
+yourself tonight?'
+
+'Yes,' he cried quickly, 'I can.' And he sprang up and almost ran to the
+piano. 'You remember the D flat Prelude?' he said, breaking into the
+latter part of the air, and looking at me the while. 'When I came to that
+note and caught your gaze'--he struck the B flat and held it--'I knew
+that I had found sympathy. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Do you
+remember?'
+
+'Remember what?'
+
+'The way we looked at each other.'
+
+'Yes,' I breathed, 'I remember.'
+
+'How can I thank you? How can I thank you?'
+
+He seemed to be meditating. His simplicity, his humility, his kindliness
+were more than I could bear.
+
+'Please do not speak like that,' I entreated him, pained. 'You are the
+greatest artist in the world, and I am nobody--nobody at all. I do not
+know why I am here. I cannot imagine what you have seen in me. Everything
+is a mystery. All I feel is that I am in your presence, and that I am not
+worthy to be. No matter how long I live, I shall never experience again
+the joy that I have now. But if you talk about thanking me, I must run
+away, because I cannot stand it--and--and--you haven't played for me, and
+you said you would.'
+
+He approached me, and bent his head towards mine, and I glanced up
+through a mist and saw his eyes and the short, curly auburn locks on
+his forehead.
+
+'The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most
+lasting things,' he said softly, 'are often mysterious and inexplicable
+and sudden. And let me tell you that you do not know how lovely you are.
+You do not know the magic of your voice, nor the grace of your gestures.
+But time and man will teach you. What shall I play?'
+
+He was very close to me.
+
+'Bach,' I ejaculated, pointing impatiently to the piano.
+
+I fancied that Bach would spread peace abroad in my soul.
+
+He resumed his place at the piano, and touched the keys.
+
+'Another thing that makes me more sure that I am not deceiving myself
+to-night,' he said, taking his fingers off the keys, but staring at the
+keyboard, 'is that you have not regretted coming here. You have not
+called yourself a wicked woman. You have not even accused me of taking
+advantage of your innocence.'
+
+And ere I could say a word he had begun the Chromatic Fantasia,
+smiling faintly.
+
+And I had hoped for peace from Bach! I had often suspected that deep
+passion was concealed almost everywhere within the restraint and the
+apparent calm of Bach's music, but the full force of it had not been
+shown to me till this glorious night. Diaz' playing was tenfold more
+impressive, more effective, more revealing in the hotel parlour than in
+the great hall. The Chromatic Fantasia seemed as full of the magnificence
+of life as that other Fantasia which he had given an hour or so earlier.
+Instead of peace I had the whirlwind; instead of tranquillity a riot;
+instead of the poppy an alarming potion. The rendering was masterly to
+the extreme of masterliness.
+
+When he had finished I rose and passed to the fireplace in silence; he
+did not stir.
+
+'Do you always play like that?' I asked at length.
+
+'No,' he said; 'only when you are there. I have never played the Chopin
+Fantasia as I played it to-night. The Chopin was all right; but do not
+be under any illusion: what you have just heard is Bach played by a
+Chopin player.'
+
+Then he left the piano and went to the small table where the
+glasses were.
+
+'You must be in need of refreshment,' he whispered gaily. 'Nothing is
+more exhausting than listening to the finest music.'
+
+'It is you who ought to be tired,' I replied; 'after that long concert,
+to be playing now.'
+
+'I have the physique of a camel,' he said. 'I am never tired so long as I
+am sure of my listeners. I would play for you till breakfast to-morrow.'
+
+The decanter contained a fluid of a pleasant green tint. He poured very
+carefully this fluid to the depth of half an inch in one glass and
+three-quarters of an inch in another glass. Then he filled both glasses
+to the brim with water, accomplishing the feat with infinite pains and
+enjoyment, as though it had been part of a ritual.
+
+'There!' he said, offering me in his steady hand the glass which had
+received the smaller quantity of the green fluid. 'Taste.'
+
+'But what is it?' I demanded.
+
+'Taste,' he repeated, and he himself tasted.
+
+I obeyed. At the first mouthful I thought the liquid was somewhat
+sinister and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my
+opinion, and found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet
+not strong.
+
+'Do you like it?' he asked.
+
+I nodded, and drank again.
+
+'It is wonderful,' I answered. 'What do you call it?'
+
+'Men call it absinthe,' he said.
+
+'But--'
+
+I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.
+
+'Don't be frightened,' he soothed me. 'I know what you were going to
+say. You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of all poisons,
+that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most terrible of all
+drunkards. So it is; so it does. But not as we are drinking it; not as I
+invariably drink it.'
+
+'Of course,' I said, proudly confident in him. 'You would not have
+offered it to me otherwise.'
+
+'Of course I should not,' he agreed. 'I give you my word that a few drops
+of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and the least
+harmful stimulant in the world.'
+
+'I am sure of it,' I said.
+
+'But drink slowly,' he advised me.
+
+I refused the sandwiches. I had no need of them. I felt sufficient unto
+myself. I no longer had any apprehension. My body, my brain, and my soul
+seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency. The fear of being
+maladroit departed from me. Ideas--delicate and subtle ideas--welled up
+in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them. I began
+to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric
+interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still
+stood by the fire.
+
+'Yes, he said, 'that is very interesting.'
+
+'What does the Fantasia mean to you?' I asked him.
+
+'Nothing,' he said.
+
+'Nothing!'
+
+'Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense.
+You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
+forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
+emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it
+can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the
+greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas.
+Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes
+direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but
+which the soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the
+Fantasia is that it moves me profoundly. I _know how_ it moves me, but I
+cannot tell you; I cannot even tell myself.'
+
+Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.
+
+'Oh, do go on,' I entreated him. 'Tell me more about music. Do you not
+think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do, since
+you always play him.'
+
+He smiled.
+
+'No,' he said, 'I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art. When
+fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes
+impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme.
+No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song.
+The whole last act of _The Twilight of the Gods_ is not greater than a
+little song of Grieg's.'
+
+'I see,' I murmured humbly. '_The Twilight of the Gods_--that is Wagner,
+isn't it?'
+
+'Yes. Don't you know your Wagner?'
+
+'No. I--'
+
+'You don't know _Tristan_?'
+
+He jumped up, excited.
+
+'How could I know it?' I expostulated. 'I have never seen any opera. I
+know the marches from _Tannhaeuser_ and _Lohengrin_, and "O Star of Eve!"'
+
+'But it is impossible that you don't know _Tristan_!' he exclaimed. 'The
+second act of _Tristan_ is the greatest piece of love-music--No, it
+isn't.' He laughed. 'I must not contradict myself. But it is
+marvellous--marvellous! You know the story?'
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'Play me some of it.'
+
+'I will play the Prelude,' he answered.
+
+I gulped down the remaining drops in my glass and crossed the room to a
+chair where I could see his face. And he played the Prelude to the most
+passionately voluptuous opera ever written. It was my first real
+introduction to Wagner, my first glimpse of that enchanted field. I was
+ravished, rapt away.
+
+'Wagner was a great artist in spite of himself,' said Diaz, when he had
+finished. 'He assigned definite and precise ideas to all those melodies.
+Nothing could be more futile. I shall not label them for you. But perhaps
+you can guess the love-motive for yourself.'
+
+'Yes, I can,' I said positively. 'It is this.'
+
+I tried to hum the theme, but my voice refused obedience. So I came to
+the piano, and played the theme high up in the treble, while Diaz was
+still sitting on the piano-stool. I trembled even to touch the piano in
+his presence; but I did it.
+
+'You have guessed right,' he said; and then he asked me in a casual tone:
+'Do you ever play pianoforte duets?'
+
+'Often,' I replied unsuspectingly, 'with my aunt. We play the symphonies
+of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and overtures, and so on.'
+
+'Awfully good fun, isn't it?' he smiled.
+
+'Splendid!' I said.
+
+'I've got _Tristan_ here arranged for pianoforte duet,' he said.
+'Tony, my secretary, enjoys playing it. You shall play part of the
+second act with me.'
+
+'Me! With you!'
+
+'Certainly.'
+
+'Impossible! I should never dare! How do you know I can play at all?'
+
+'You have just proved it to me,' said he. 'Come; you will not
+refuse me this!'
+
+I wanted to leave the vicinity of the piano. I felt that, once out of the
+immediate circle of his tremendous physical influence, I might manage to
+escape the ordeal which he had suggested. But I could not go away. The
+silken nets of his personality had been cast, and I was enmeshed. And if
+I was happy, it was with a dreadful happiness.
+
+'But, really, I can't play with you,' I said weakly.
+
+His response was merely to look up at me over his shoulder. His beautiful
+face was so close to mine, and it expressed such a naive and strong
+yearning for my active and intimate sympathy, and such divine frankness,
+and such perfect kindliness, that I had no more will to resist. I knew I
+should suffer horribly in spoiling by my coarse amateurishness the
+miraculous finesse of his performance, but I resigned myself to
+suffering. I felt towards him as I had felt during the concert: that he
+must have his way at no matter what cost, that he had already earned the
+infinite gratitude of the entire world--in short, I raised him in my soul
+to a god's throne; and I accepted humbly the great, the incredible honour
+he did me. And I was right--a thousand times right.
+
+And in the same moment he was like a charming child to me: such is always
+in some wise the relation between the creature born to enjoy and the
+creature born to suffer.
+
+'I'll try,' I said; 'but it will be appalling.'
+
+I laughed and shook my head.
+
+'We shall see how appalling it will be,' he murmured, as he got the
+volume of music.
+
+He fetched a chair for me, and we sat down side by side, he on the stool
+and I on the chair.
+
+'I'm afraid my chair is too low,' I said.
+
+'And I'm sure this stool is too high,' he said. 'Suppose we exchange.'
+
+So we both rose to change the positions of the chair and the stool, and
+our garments touched and almost our faces, and at that very moment there
+was a loud rap at the door.
+
+I darted away from him.
+
+'What's that?' I cried, low in a fit of terror.
+
+'Who's there?' he called quietly; but he did not stir.
+
+We gazed at each other.
+
+The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.
+
+'Who's there?' Diaz demanded again.
+
+'Go to the door,' I whispered.
+
+He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor.
+Diaz went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the
+corridor, and looked into the darkness.
+
+'Curious!' he commented tranquilly. 'I see no one.'
+
+He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby
+to shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of
+our own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on
+the small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a
+half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other
+room; one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ball,
+which caught the light of the candle on the piano.
+
+'You were startled,' he said. 'You must have a little more of our
+cordial--just a spoonful.'
+
+He poured out for me an infinitesimal quantity, and the same for himself.
+
+I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling
+incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and
+that did not leave me.
+
+We sat down a second time to the piano.
+
+'You understand,' he explained, staring absently at the double page of
+music, 'this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is dark in
+the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king, her
+husband, has just gone off hunting--you will hear the horns dying in the
+distance--and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch is burning
+in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the signal by
+extinguishing it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment when
+they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that you
+will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers. Are
+you ready?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous.
+I was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes.
+The notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was
+the big black letters at the top, 'Zweiter Aufzug.' And furthermore, on
+that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the bass of
+the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and
+closed my eyes.
+
+'I can't,' I whispered, 'I can't. I would if I could.'
+
+He gently took my hand.
+
+'My dear companion,' he said, 'tell me your name.'
+
+I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason,
+flashed through my mind.
+
+'Magdalen,' I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and sincere
+that he believed it.
+
+I could see that he was taken aback.
+
+'It is a holy name and a good name,' he said, after a pause. 'Magda, you
+are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read
+it, won't you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me, and
+play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.'
+
+And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The
+influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had
+resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and
+lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and
+dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in
+conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing
+out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had
+ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I
+abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not
+disgrace myself.'
+
+'Unless it was Chopin,' whispered Diaz. 'No one could ever see two things
+at once as well as Wagner.'
+
+We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the
+page, and then the hunters' horns were heard departing from the garden of
+love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a scarce-heard drone,
+out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the horns died away,
+so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the future. I
+surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty which we
+were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.
+
+The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once
+feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of
+modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of
+heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I
+might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and
+complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam
+about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a
+background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they
+were the emotions of love--the sense of the splendour of love, the
+headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the
+finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the
+universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: 'Where love is,
+there is God also.'
+
+The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be
+approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy,
+but I held on, and the climax arrived--a climax which touched the
+limits of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in
+coming together.
+
+'Tristan has come into the garden,' I muttered.
+
+And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.
+
+We plunged forward into the love-scene itself--the scene in which the
+miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all
+miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then
+occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces,
+what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what
+sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In
+what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that
+marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond
+the common lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more
+fully than I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a
+supreme experience, and that another such could not be contained in my
+life.... And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on
+the music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the
+left hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar,
+and becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air
+fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of
+the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The
+whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought
+gently and persistently against the rhythm.
+
+'Hear the beating of their hearts,' Diaz' whisper floated over the
+chords.
+
+It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the
+vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands
+fell from the keyboard. He looked at me--and with what a glance!
+
+'I can bear no more,' I cried wildly. 'It is too beautiful, too
+beautiful!'
+
+And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my
+face in my hands.
+
+He came to me, and bent over me.
+
+'Magda,' he whispered, 'show me your face.' With his hands he delicately
+persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to look on him. 'How
+dark and splendid you are, Magda!' he said, still holding my hands. 'How
+humid and flashing your eyes! And those eyelashes, and that hair--dark,
+dark! And that bosom, with its rise and fall! And that low, rich voice,
+that is like dark wine! And that dress--dark, and full of mysterious
+shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known each other in a
+previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this moment is the
+fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You were to be
+mine. You are mine, Magda!'
+
+There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny
+to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief
+instant, to this noble and glorious creature, on whom the gods had
+showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not
+already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of
+society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the
+resistless tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable,
+and everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we
+were together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in
+contact. He held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at
+once that those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was
+proud and glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that
+point I ceased to have volition....
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+When I woke up, perplexed at first, but gradually remembering where I
+was, and what had occurred to me, the realistic and uncompromising light
+of dawn had commenced its pitiless inquiry, and it fell on the brass
+knob, which I had noticed a few hours before, from the other room, and
+on another brass knob a few feet away. My eyes smarted; I had
+disconcerting sensations at the back of my head; my hair was brittle,
+and as though charged with a dull electricity; I was conscious of actual
+pain, and an incubus, crushing but intangible, lay heavily, like a
+physical weight, on my heart. After the crest of the wave the trough--it
+must be so; but how profound the instinct which complains! I listened. I
+could hear his faint, regular breathing. I raised myself carefully on
+one elbow and looked at him. He was as beautiful in sleep as in
+consciousness; his lips were slightly parted, his cheek exquisitely
+flushed, and nothing could disarrange that short, curly hair. He slept
+with the calmness of the natural innocent man, to whom the assuaging of
+desires brings only content.
+
+I felt that I must go, and hastily, frantically. I could not face him
+when he woke; I should not have known what to say; I should have been
+abashed, timid, clumsy, unequal to myself. And, moreover, I had the
+egoist's deep need to be alone, to examine my soul, to understand it
+intimately and utterly. And, lastly, I wanted to pay the bill of pleasure
+at once. I could never tolerate credit; I was like my aunt in that.
+Therefore, I must go home and settle the account in some way. I knew not
+how; I knew only that the thing must be done. Diaz had nothing to do with
+that; it was not his affair, and I should have resented his interference.
+Ah! when I was in the bill-paying mood, how hard I could be, how stony,
+how blind! And that morning I was like a Malay running amok.
+
+Think not that when I was ready to depart I stopped and stooped to give
+him a final tender kiss. I did not even scribble a word of adieu or of
+explanation. I stole away on tiptoe, without looking at him. This sounds
+brutal, but it is a truth of my life, and I am writing my life--at
+least, I am writing those brief hours of my existence during which I
+lived. I had always a sort of fierce courage; and as I had proved the
+courage of my passion in the night, so I proved the courage of my--not
+my remorse, not my compunction, not my regret--but of my intellectual
+honesty in the morning. Proud and vain words, perhaps. Who can tell? No
+matter what sympathies I alienate, I am bound to say plainly that,
+though I am passionate, I am not sentimental. I came to him out of the
+void, and I went from him into the void. He found me, and he lost me.
+Between the autumn sunset and the autumn sunrise he had learnt to know
+me well, but he did not know my name nor my history; he had no clue, no
+cord to pull me back.
+
+I passed into the sitting-room, dimly lighted through the drawn curtains,
+and there was the score of _Tristan_ open on the piano. Yes; and if I
+were the ordinary woman I would add that there also were the ashes in the
+cold grate, and so symbolize the bitterness of memory and bring about a
+pang. But I have never regretted what is past. The cinders of that fire
+were to me cinders of a fire and nothing more.
+
+In the doorway I halted. To go into the corridor was like braving the
+blast of the world, and I hesitated. Possibly I hesitated for a very
+little thing. Only the women among you will guess it. My dress was dark
+and severe. I had a simple, dark cloak. But I had no hat. I had no hat,
+and the most important fact in the universe for me then was that I had no
+hat. My whole life was changed; my heart and mind were in the throes of a
+revolution. I dared not imagine what would happen between my aunt and me;
+but this deficiency in my attire distressed me more than all else. At the
+other end of the obscure corridor was a chambermaid kneeling down and
+washing the linoleum. Ah, maid! Would I not have exchanged fates with
+you, then! I walked boldly up to her. She seemed to be surprised, but she
+continued to wring out a cloth in her pail as she looked at me.
+
+'What time is it, please?' I asked her.
+
+'Better than half-past six, ma'am,' said she.
+
+She was young and emaciated.
+
+'Have you got a hat you can lend me? Or I'll buy it from you.'
+
+'A hat, ma'am?'
+
+'Yes, a hat,' I repeated impatiently. And I flushed. 'I must go out at
+once, and I've--I've no hat And I can't--'
+
+It is extraordinary how in a crisis one's organism surprises one. I had
+thought I was calm and full of self-control, but I had almost no command
+over my voice.
+
+'I've got a boat-shaped straw, ma'am, if that's any use to you,' said the
+girl kindly.
+
+What she surmised or what she knew I could not say. But I have found out
+since in my travels, that hotel chambermaids lose their illusions early.
+At any rate her tone was kindly.
+
+'Get it me, there's a good girl,' I entreated her.
+
+And when she brought it, I drew out the imitation pearl pins and put them
+between my teeth, and jammed the hat on my head and skewered it savagely
+with the pins.
+
+'Is that right?'
+
+'It suits you better than it does me, ma'am, I do declare,' she said.
+'Oh, ma'am, this is too much--I really couldn't!'
+
+I had given her five shillings.
+
+'Nonsense! I am very much obliged to you,' I whispered hurriedly,
+and ran off.
+
+She was a good girl. I hope she has never suffered. And yet I would
+not like to think she had died of consumption before she knew what
+life meant.
+
+I hastened from the hotel. A man in a blue waistcoat with shining black
+sleeves was moving a large cocoa-nut mat in the hall, and the pattern of
+the mat was shown in dust on the tiles where the mat had been. He glanced
+at me absently as I flitted past; I encountered no other person. The
+square between the hotel and the station was bathed in pure
+sunshine--such sunshine as reaches the Five Towns only after a rain-storm
+has washed the soot out of the air. I felt, for a moment, obscene in that
+sunshine; but I had another and a stronger feeling. Although there was
+not a soul in the square, I felt as if I was regarding the world and
+mankind with different eyes from those of yesterday. Then I knew nothing;
+to-day I knew everything--so it seemed to me. It seemed to me that I
+understood all sorts of vague, subtle things that I had not understood
+before; that I had been blind and now saw; that I had become kinder, more
+sympathetic, more human. What these things were that I understood, or
+thought I understood, I could not have explained. All I felt was that a
+radical change of attitude had occurred in me. 'Poor world!
+
+Poor humanity! My heart melts for you!' Thus spoke my soul, pouring
+itself out. The very stone facings of the station and the hotel seemed
+somehow to be humanized and to need my compassion.
+
+I walked with eyes downcast into the station. I had determined to take
+the train from Knype to Shawport, a distance of three miles, and then to
+walk up the hill from Shawport through Oldcastle Street to Bursley. I
+hoped that by such a route at such an hour, I should be unlikely to meet
+acquaintances, of whom, in any case, I had few. My hopes appeared to be
+well founded, for the large booking-hall at the station was thronged with
+a multitude entirely strange to me--workmen and workwomen and workgirls
+crowded the place. The first-class and second-class booking-windows were
+shut, and a long tail of muscular men, pale men, stout women, and thin
+women pushed to take tickets at the other window. I was obliged to join
+them, and to wait my turn amid the odour of corduroy and shawl, and the
+strong odour of humanity; my nostrils were peculiarly sensitive that
+morning. Some of the men had herculean arms and necks, and it was these
+who wore pieces of string tied round their trousers below the knee,
+disclosing the lines of their formidable calves. The women were mostly
+pallid and quiet. All carried cans, or satchels, or baskets; here and
+there a man swung lightly on his shoulder a huge bag of tools, which I
+could scarcely have raised from the ground. Everybody was natural,
+direct, and eager; and no one attempted to be genteel or refined; no one
+pretended that he did not toil with his hands for dear life. I
+anticipated that I should excite curiosity, but I did not. The people had
+a preoccupied, hurried air. Only at the window itself, when the
+ticket-clerk, having made me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of
+his lair to get my ticket, did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and
+inimical interest in this drone who caused delay to busy people.
+
+It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same
+on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I
+could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full
+tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they
+employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains
+generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at
+one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.
+
+'These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of
+_our_ wealth and luxury!' I thought; for I was just beginning, at that
+period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social
+organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on
+paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep
+of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable
+directness. They frightened me with their vivid humanity.
+
+I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a
+compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls
+were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her
+dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.
+From the young man's soiled white jacket under his black coat, I
+gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and
+left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession
+of compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people.
+None of my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance. It
+was uncanny.
+
+Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained
+prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn,
+musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life.
+'Ah,' I thought, 'you little know what I know! I may appear a butterfly,
+but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence. I am above you, beyond
+you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by the turmoil
+in my heart!' And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that they probably
+knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten more than I
+had ever learnt. I remembered an absorbing correspondence about the
+manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the _Staffordshire
+Recorder_--a correspondence which had driven Aunt Constance to conceal
+the paper after the second week. I guessed that they might smile at the
+simplicity of my heart could they see it. Meaning of existence! Why, they
+were reared in it! The naturalness of natural people and of natural acts
+struck me like a blow, and I withdrew, whipped, into myself. My adventure
+grew smaller. But I recalled its ecstasies. I dwelt on the romantic
+perfection of Diaz. It seemed to me amazing, incredible, that Diaz, the
+glorious and incomparable Diaz, had loved me--_me_! out of all the
+ardent, worshipping women that the world contained. I wondered if he had
+wakened up, and I felt sorry for him. So far, I had not decided how soon,
+if at all, I should communicate with him. My mind was incapable of
+reaching past the next few hours--the next hour.
+
+We stopped at a station surrounded by the evidences of that tireless,
+unceasing, and tremendous manufacturing industry which distinguishes the
+Five Towns, and I was left alone in the compartment. The train rumbled on
+through a landscape of fiery furnaces, and burning slag-heaps, and foul
+canals reflecting great smoking chimneys, all steeped in the mild
+sunshine. Could the toil-worn agents of this never-ending and gigantic
+productiveness find time for love? Perhaps they loved quickly and forgot,
+like animals. Thoughts such as these lurked sinister and carnal, strange
+beasts in the jungle of my poor brain. Then the train arrived at
+Shawport, and I was obliged to get out. I say 'obliged,' because I
+violently wished not to get out. I wished to travel on in that train to
+some impossible place, where things were arranged differently.
+
+The station clock showed only five minutes to seven. I was astounded. It
+seemed to me that all the real world had been astir and busy for hours.
+And this extraordinary activity went on every morning while Aunt
+Constance and I lay in our beds and thought well of ourselves.
+
+I shivered, and walked quickly up the street. I had positively not
+noticed that I was cold. I had scarcely left the station before Fred
+Ryley appeared in front of me. I saw that his face was swollen. My
+heart stopped. Of course, he would tell Ethel.... He passed me
+sheepishly without stopping, merely raising his hat, and murmuring the
+singular words:
+
+'We're both very, very sorry.'
+
+What in the name of Heaven could they possibly know, he and Ethel? And
+what right had he to ...? Did he smile furtively? Fred Ryley had
+sometimes a strange smile. I reddened, angry and frightened.
+
+The distance between the station and our house proved horribly short. And
+when I arrived in front of the green gates, and put my hand on the latch,
+I knew that I had formed no plan whatever. I opened the right-hand gate
+and entered the garden. The blinds were still down, and the house looked
+so decorous and innocent in its age. My poor aunt! What a night she must
+have been through! It was inconceivable that I should tell her what had
+happened to me. Indeed, under the windows of that house it seemed
+inconceivable that the thing had happened which had happened.
+Inconceivable! Grotesque! Monstrous!
+
+But could I lie? Could I rise to the height of some sufficient and
+kindly lie?
+
+A hand drew slightly aside the blind of the window over the porch. I
+sighed, and went wearily, in my boat-shaped straw, up the gravelled path
+to the door.
+
+Rebecca met me at the door. It was so early that she had not yet put on
+an apron. She looked tired, as if she had not slept.
+
+'Come in, miss,' she said weakly, holding open the door.
+
+It seemed to me that I did not need this invitation from a servant.
+
+'I suppose you've all been fearfully upset, wondering where I was,' I
+began, entering the hall.
+
+My adventure appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this
+buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything one
+hundredth part so dreadful.
+
+'No, miss; I wasn't upset on account of you. You're always so sensible
+like. You always know what to do. I knew as you must have stopped the
+night with friends in Hanbridge on account of the heavy rain, and perhaps
+that there silly cabman not turning up, and them tramcars all crowded;
+and, of course, you couldn't telegraph.'
+
+This view that I was specially sagacious and equal to emergencies rather
+surprised me.
+
+'But auntie?' I demanded, trembling.
+
+'Oh, miss!' cried Rebecca, glancing timidly over her shoulder, 'I want
+you to come with me into the dining-room before you go upstairs.'
+
+She snuffled.
+
+In the dining-room I went at once to the window to draw up the blinds.
+
+'Not that, not that!' Rebecca appealed, weeping. 'For pity's sake!' And
+she caught my hand.
+
+I then noticed that Lucy was standing in the doorway, also weeping.
+Rebecca noticed this too.
+
+'Lucy, you go to your kitchen this minute,' she said sharply, and then
+turned to me and began to cry again. 'Miss Peel--how can I tell you?'
+
+'Why do you call me Miss Peel?' I asked her.
+
+But I knew why. The thing flashed over me instantly. My dear aunt was
+dead.
+
+'You've got no aunt,' said Rebecca. 'My poor dear! And you at the
+concert!'
+
+I dropped my head and my bosom on the bare mahogany table and cried.
+Never before, and never since, have I spilt such tears--hot, painful
+drops, distilled plenteously from a heart too crushed and torn.
+
+'There, there!' muttered Rebecca. 'I wish I could have told you
+different--less cruel; but it wasn't in me to do it.'
+
+'And she's lying upstairs this very moment all cold and stiff,' a wailing
+voice broke in.
+
+It was Lucy, who could not keep herself away from us.
+
+'Will you go to your kitchen, my girl!'
+
+Rebecca drove her off. 'And the poor thing's not stiff either. Her poor
+body's as soft as if she was only asleep, and doctor says it will be for
+a day or two. It's like that when they're took off like that, he says.
+Oh, Miss Carlotta--'
+
+'Tell me all about it before I go upstairs,' I said.
+
+I had recovered.
+
+'Your poor aunt went to bed just as soon as you were gone, miss,' said
+Rebecca. 'She would have it she was quite well, only tired. I took her up
+a cup of cocoa at ten o'clock, and she seemed all right, and then I sends
+Lucy to bed, and I sits up in the kitchen to wait for you. Not a sound
+from your poor aunt. I must have dropped asleep, miss, in my chair, and I
+woke up with a start like, and the kitchen clock was near on one. Thinks
+I, perhaps Miss Carlotta's been knocking and ringing all this time and me
+not heard, and I rushes to the front door. But of course you weren't
+there. The porch was nothing but a pool o' water. I says to myself she's
+stopping somewhere, I says. And I felt it was my duty to go and tell your
+aunt, whether she was asleep or whether she wasn't asleep.... Well, and
+there she was, miss, with her eyes closed, and as soft as a child. I
+spoke to her, loud, more than once. "Miss Carlotta a'n't come," I says.
+"Miss Carlotta a'n't come, ma'am," I says. She never stirred. Thinks I,
+this is queer this is. And I goes up to her and touches her. Chilly! Then
+I takes the liberty of pushing back your poor aunt's eyelids, and I could
+but see the whites of her eyes; the eyeballs was gone up, and a bit
+outwards. Yes; and her poor dear chin was dropped. Thinks I, here's
+trouble, and Miss Carlotta at the concert. I runs to our bedroom, and I
+tells Lucy to put a cloak on and fetch Dr. Roycroft. "Who for?" she says.
+"Never you mind who for!" I says, says I. "You up and quick. But you can
+tell the doctor it's missis as is took." And in ten minutes he was here,
+miss. But it's only across the garden, like. "Yes," he said, "she's been
+dead an hour or more. Failure of the heart's action," he said. "She died
+in her sleep," he said. "Thank God she died in her sleep if she was to
+die, the pure angel!" I says. I told the doctor as you were away for the
+night, miss. And I laid her out, miss, and your poor auntie wasn't my
+first, either. I've seen trouble--I've--'
+
+And Rebecca's tears overcame her voice.
+
+'I'll go upstairs with you, miss,' she struggled out.
+
+One thought that flew across my mind was that Doctor Roycroft was very
+intimate with the Ryleys, and had doubtless somehow informed them of my
+aunt's death. This explained Fred Ryley's strange words and attitude to
+me on the way from the station. The young man had been too timid to stop
+me. The matter was a trifle, but another idea that struck me was not a
+trifle, though I strove to make it so. My aunt had died about midnight,
+and it was at midnight that Diaz and I had heard the mysterious knock on
+his sitting-room door. At the time I had remarked how it resembled my
+aunt's knock. Occasionally, when the servants overslept themselves, Aunt
+Constance would go to their rooms in her pale-blue dressing-gown and
+knock on their door exactly like that. Could it be that this was one of
+those psychical manifestations of which I had read? Had my aunt, in
+passing from this existence to the next, paused a moment to warn me of
+my terrible danger? My intellect replied that a disembodied soul could
+not knock, and that the phenomenon had been due simply to some guest or
+servant of the hotel who had mistaken the room, and discovered his error
+in time. Nevertheless, the instinctive part of me--that part of us which
+refuses to fraternize with reason, and which we call the superstitious
+because we cannot explain it--would not let go the spiritualistic
+theory, and during all my life has never quite surrendered it to the
+attacks of my brain.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+'No,' I said; 'I will go upstairs alone;' and I went, leaving my cloak
+and hat with Rebecca.
+
+Already, to my hypersensitive nostrils, there was a slight odour in the
+darkened bedroom. What lay on the bed, straight and long and thin,
+resembled almost exactly my aunt as she lived. I forced myself to look on
+it. Except that the face was paler than usual, and had a curious
+transparent, waxy appearance, and that the cheeks were a little hollowed,
+and the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth somewhat
+deepened, there had been no outward change.... And _this_ once was she! I
+thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved
+me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling,
+sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The
+shaft of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the
+same hour, and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled
+and quailed. I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul
+also was solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not
+a moral coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at
+that calm and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much
+I had lost. At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt
+Constance at over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among men for
+interminable years, and never _known_! It seemed impossible, shockingly
+against Nature, that my aunt's existence should have been so! I pitied
+her profoundly. I felt that essentially she was girlish compared to me.
+And yet--and yet--that which she had kept and which I had given away was
+precious, too--indefinably and wonderfully precious! The price of
+knowledge and of ecstasy seemed heavy to me then. The girl that had gone
+with Diaz into that hotel apartment had come out no more. She had expired
+there, and her extinction was the price, Oh, innocence! Oh, divine
+ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered
+you! And herein is the woman's tragedy.
+
+There in that mausoleum I decided that I must never see Diaz again. He
+was fast in my heart, a flashing, glorious treasure, but I must never see
+him again. I must devote myself to memory.
+
+On the dressing-table lay a brown-paper parcel which seemed out of place
+there. I opened it, and it contained a magnificently-bound copy of _The
+Imitation of Christ_. Upon the flyleaf was written: 'To dearest Carlotta
+on attaining her majority. With fondest love. C.P.'
+
+It was too much; it was overwhelming. I wept again. Soul so kind and
+pure! The sense of my loss, the sense of the simple, proud rectitude of
+her life, laid me low.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the
+conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or
+flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains
+loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy,
+wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of
+existence; trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the
+air of your own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night
+with your yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave
+the night behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that
+carry bread and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of
+fresh water; trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through
+the landscapes and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting,
+formidable, and yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your
+arrogance and your pathos.
+
+That little journey from Knype to Shawport had implanted itself painfully
+in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of
+life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months
+had elapsed--three months of growing misery and despair; three months of
+tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the
+exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange
+fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs
+of wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy,
+and no interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there
+by my secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of
+the Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been
+so minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would
+not. Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been
+able to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the
+house; I sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca
+and the clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as
+though I had sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week,
+I cut myself to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a
+sort of terrible languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony,
+and yet tortured by my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that
+no philosophy could stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more
+than the strapping and the labelling of my trunks that morning after I
+had slept, dreamfully, in the bed that I should never use again--the bed
+that, indeed, was even then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I
+wept at all, I should have wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks:
+'Miss Peel, passenger to Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,'
+with two thick lines drawn under the 'Euston.' That writing of labels was
+the climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and
+all bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some
+day, when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has
+been fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved
+passionately the disfigured hills and valleys of the Five Towns. And as I
+think of Oldcastle Street, dropping away sleepily and respectably from
+the Town Hall of Bursley, with the gold angel holding a gold crown on its
+spire, I vibrate with an inexplicable emotion. What is there in Oldcastle
+Street to disturb the dust of the soul?
+
+I must tell you here that Diaz had gone to South America on a triumphal
+tour of concerts, lest I forget! I read it in the paper.
+
+So I arrived in London on a February day, about one o'clock. And the
+hall-porter at the Golden Cross Hotel, and the two pale girls in the
+bureau of the hotel, were sympathetic and sweet to me, because I was
+young and alone, and in mourning, and because I had great rings round my
+eyes. It was a fine day, blue and mild. At half-past three I had nothing
+in the world to do. I had come to London without a plan, without a
+purpose, with scarcely an introduction; I wished simply to plunge myself
+into its solitude, and to be alone with my secret fear. I walked out into
+the street, slowly, like one whom ennui has taught to lose no chance of
+dissipating time. I neither liked nor disliked London. I had no feelings
+towards it save one of perplexity. I thought it noisy, dirty, and
+hurried. Its great name roused no thrill in my bosom. On the morrow, I
+said, I would seek a lodging, and perhaps write to Ethel Ryley.
+Meanwhile I strolled up into Trafalgar Square, and so into Charing Cross
+Road. And in Charing Cross Road--it was the curst accident of fate--I saw
+the signboard of the celebrated old firm of publishers, Oakley and
+Dalbiac. It is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in
+this history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt's
+death I had already written my first novel, _The Jest_, and sent it to
+precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful
+extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew
+nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had
+kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely
+formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance of
+success, and that they would be prepared to publish it on certain terms,
+but that I must not expect, etc. By that time I had lost my original
+sublime faith in the exceeding excellence of my story, and I replied that
+I preferred to withdraw the book. To this letter I had received no
+answer. When I saw the famous sign over a doorway the impulse seized me
+to enter and get the manuscript, with the object of rewriting it. Soon, I
+reflected, I might not be able to enter; the portals of mankind might be
+barred to me for a space.... I saw in a flash of insight that my
+salvation lay in work, and in nothing else. I entered, resolutely. A
+brougham was waiting at the doors.
+
+After passing along counters furnished with ledgers and clerks, through a
+long, lofty room lined with great pigeon-holes containing thousands of
+books each wrapped separately in white paper, I was shown into what the
+clerk who acted as chamberlain called the office of the principal. This
+room, too, was spacious, but so sombre that the electric light was
+already burning. The first thing I noticed was that the window gave on a
+wall of white tiles. In the middle of the somewhat dingy apartment was a
+vast, square table, and at this table sat a pale, tall man, whose youth
+astonished me--for the firm of Oakley and Dalbiac was historic.
+
+He did not look up exactly at the instant of my entering, but when he did
+look up, when he saw me, he stared for an instant, and then sprang from
+his chair as though magically startled into activity. His age was about
+thirty, and he had large, dark eyes, and a slight, dark moustache, and
+his face generally was interesting; he wore a dark gray suit. I was
+nervous, but he was even more nervous; yet in the moment of looking up he
+had not seemed nervous. He could not do enough, apparently, to make me
+feel at ease, and to show his appreciation of me and my work. He spoke
+enthusiastically of _The Jest_, begging me neither to suppress it nor to
+alter it. And, without the least suggestion from me, he offered me a
+considerable sum of money in advance of royalties. At that time I
+scarcely knew what royalties were. But although my ignorance of business
+was complete, I guessed that this man was behaving in a manner highly
+unusual among publishers. He was also patently contradicting the tenor of
+his firm's letter to me. I thanked him, and said I should like, at any
+rate, to glance through the manuscript.
+
+'Don't alter it, Miss Peel, I beg,' he said. 'It is "young," I know;
+but it ought to be. I remember my wife said--my wife reads many of our
+manuscripts--by the way--' He went to a door, opened it, and called
+out, 'Mary!'
+
+A tall and slim woman, extremely elegant, appeared in reply to this
+appeal. Her hair was gray above the ears, and I judged that she was four
+or five years older than the man. She had a kind, thin face, with shining
+gray eyes, and she was wearing a hat.
+
+'Mary, this is Miss Peel, the author of _The Jest_--you remember. Miss
+Peel, my wife.'
+
+The woman welcomed me with quick, sincere gestures. Her smile was very
+pleasant, and yet a sad smile. The husband also had an air of quiet,
+restrained, cheerful sadness.
+
+'My wife is frequently here in the afternoon like this,' said the
+principal.
+
+'Yes,' she laughed; 'it's quite a family affair, and I'm almost on the
+staff. I distinctly remember your manuscript, Miss Peel, and how very
+clever and amusing it was.'
+
+Her praise was spontaneous and cordial, but it was a different thing from
+the praise of her husband. He obviously noticed the difference.
+
+'I was just saying to Miss Peel--' he began, with increased nervousness.
+
+'Pardon me,' I interrupted. 'But am I speaking to Mr. Oakley or
+Mr. Dalbiac?'
+
+'To neither,' said he. 'My name is Ispenlove, and I am the nephew of the
+late Mr. Dalbiac. Mr. Oakley died thirty years ago. I have no partner.'
+
+'You expected to see a very old gentleman, no doubt,' Mrs.
+Ispenlove remarked.
+
+'Yes,' I smiled.
+
+'People often do. And Frank is so very young. You live in London?'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I have just come up.'
+
+'To stay?'
+
+'To stay.'
+
+'Alone?'
+
+'Yes. My aunt died a few months ago. I am all that is left of my
+family.'
+
+Mrs. Ispenlove's eyes filled with tears, and she fingered a gold chain
+that hung from her neck.
+
+'But have you got rooms--a house?'
+
+'I am at a hotel for the moment.'
+
+'But you have friends?'
+
+I shook my head. Mr. Ispenlove was glancing rapidly from one to the
+other of us.
+
+'My dear young lady!' exclaimed his wife. Then she hesitated, and said:
+'Excuse my abruptness, but do let me beg you to come and have tea with us
+this afternoon. We live quite near--in Bloomsbury Square. The carriage is
+waiting. Frank, you can come?'
+
+'I can come for an hour,' said Mr. Ispenlove.
+
+I wanted very much to decline, but I could not. I could not disappoint
+that honest and generous kindliness, with its touch of melancholy. I
+could not refuse those shining gray eyes. I saw that my situation and my
+youth had lacerated Mrs. Ispenlove's sensitive heart, and that she wished
+to give it balm by being humane to me.
+
+We seemed, so rapid was our passage, to be whisked on an Arabian carpet
+to a spacious drawing-room, richly furnished, with thick rugs and ample
+cushions and countless knicknacks and photographs and delicately-tinted
+lampshades. There was a grand piano by Steinway, and on it Mendelssohn's
+'Songs without Words.' The fire slumbered in a curious grate that
+projected several feet into the room--such a contrivance I had never seen
+before. Near it sat Mrs. Ispenlove, entrenched behind a vast copper disc
+on a low wicker stand, pouring out tea. Mr. Ispenlove hovered about. He
+and his wife called each other 'dearest.' 'Ring the bell for me,
+dearest.' 'Yes, dearest.' I felt sure that they had no children. They
+were very intimate, very kind, and always gently sad. The atmosphere was
+charmingly domestic, even cosy, despite the size of the room--a most
+pleasing contrast to the offices which we had just left. Mrs. Ispenlove
+told her husband to look after me well, and he devoted himself to me.
+
+'Do you know,' said Mrs. Ispenlove, 'I am gradually recalling the details
+of your book, and you are not at all the sort of person that I should
+have expected to see.'
+
+'But that poor little book isn't _me_,' I answered. 'I shall never write
+another like it. I only--'
+
+'Shall you not?' Mr. Ispenlove interjected. 'I hope you will, though.'
+
+I smiled.
+
+'I only did it to see what I could do. I am going to begin something
+quite different.'
+
+'It appears to me,' said Mrs. Ispenlove--'and I must again ask you to
+excuse my freedom, but I feel as if I had known you a long time--it
+appears to me that what you want immediately is a complete rest.'
+
+'Why do you say that?' I demanded.
+
+'You do not look well. You look exhausted and worn out.'
+
+I blushed as she gazed at me. Could she--? No. Those simple gray eyes
+could not imagine evil. Nevertheless, I saw too plainly how foolish I had
+been. I, with my secret fear, that was becoming less a fear than a
+dreadful certainty, to permit myself to venture into that house! I might
+have to fly ignominiously before long, to practise elaborate falsehood,
+to disappear.
+
+'Perhaps you are right,' I agreed.
+
+The conversation grew fragmentary, and less and less formal. Mrs.
+Ispenlove was the chief talker. I remember she said that she was always
+being thrown among clever people, people who could do things, and that
+her own inability to do anything at all was getting to be an obsession
+with her; and that people like me could have no idea of the tortures of
+self-depreciation which she suffered. Her voice was strangely wistful
+during this confession. She also spoke--once only, and quite shortly,
+but with what naive enthusiasm!--of the high mission and influence of the
+novelist who wrote purely and conscientiously. After this, though my
+liking for her was undiminished, I had summed her up. Mr. Ispenlove
+offered no commentary on his wife's sentiments. He struck me as being a
+reserved man, whose inner life was intense and sufficient to him.
+
+'Ah!' I reflected, as Mrs. Ispenlove, with an almost motherly accent,
+urged me to have another cup of tea, 'if you knew me, if you knew me,
+what would you say to me? Would your charity be strong enough to overcome
+your instincts?' And as I had felt older than my aunt, so I felt older
+than Mrs. Ispenlove.
+
+I left, but I had to promise to come again on the morrow, after I had
+seen Mr. Ispenlove on business. The publisher took me down to my hotel in
+the brougham (and I thought of the drive with Diaz, but the water was not
+streaming down the windows), and then he returned to his office.
+
+Without troubling to turn on the light in my bedroom, I sank sighing on
+to the bed. The events of the afternoon had roused me from my terrible
+lethargy, but now it overcame me again. I tried to think clearly about
+the Ispenloves and what the new acquaintance meant for me; but I could
+not think clearly. I had not been able to think clearly for two months. I
+wished only to die. For a moment I meditated vaguely on suicide, but
+suicide seemed to involve an amount of complicated enterprise far beyond
+my capacity. It amazed me how I had managed to reach London. I must have
+come mechanically, in a heavy dream; for I had no hope, no energy, no
+vivacity, no interest. For many weeks my mind had revolved round an awful
+possibility, as if hypnotized by it, and that monotonous revolution
+seemed alone to constitute my real life. Moreover, I was subject to
+recurring nausea, and to disconcerting bodily pains and another symptom.
+
+'This must end!' I said, struggling to my feet.
+
+I summoned the courage of an absolute disgust. I felt that the power
+which had triumphed over my dejection and my irresolution and brought me
+to London might carry me a little further.
+
+Leaving the hotel, I crossed the Strand. Innumerable omnibuses were
+crawling past. I jumped into one at hazard, and the conductor put his arm
+behind my back to support me. He was shouting, 'Putney, Putney, Putney!'
+in an absent-minded manner: he had assisted me to mount without even
+looking at me. I climbed to the top of the omnibus and sat down, and the
+omnibus moved off. I knew not where I was going; Putney was nothing but a
+name to me.
+
+'Where to, lady?' snapped the conductor, coming upstairs.
+
+'Oh, Putney,' I answered.
+
+A little bell rang and he gave me a ticket. The omnibus was soon full. A
+woman with a young child shared my seat. But the population of the roof
+was always changing. I alone remained--so it appeared to me. And we moved
+interminably forward through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under the
+mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an arc-lamp,
+I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they were nothing
+but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were changed. A
+score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he never looked
+at me again. 'I've done with you,' his back seemed to say.
+
+The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly
+succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark;
+and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary
+window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the
+tragic romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to
+be almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London.
+Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction
+with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations,
+elbowing each other--No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I
+felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth,
+my inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the
+very things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in
+that despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of
+life, the beauty of life's exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like
+a red-hot iron.
+
+We crossed a great river by a great bridge--a mysterious and mighty
+stream; and then the streets closed in on us again. And at last, after
+hours and hours, the omnibus swerved into a dark road and
+stopped--stopped finally.
+
+'Putney!' cried the conductor, like fate.
+
+I descended. Far off, at the end of the vista of the dark road, I saw a
+red lamp. I knew that in large cities a red lamp indicated a doctor: it
+was the one useful thing that I did know.
+
+I approached the red lamp, cautiously, on the other side of the street.
+Then some power forced me to cross the street and open a wicket. And in
+the red glow of the lamp I saw an ivory button which I pushed. I could
+plainly hear the result; it made me tremble. I had a narrow escape of
+running away. The door was flung wide, and a middle-aged woman appeared
+in the bright light of the interior of the house. She had a kind face. It
+is astounding, the number of kind faces one meets.
+
+'Is the doctor in?' I asked.
+
+I would have given a year of my life to hear her say 'No.'
+
+'Yes, miss,' she said. 'Will you step in?'
+
+Events seemed to be moving all too rapidly.
+
+I passed into a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the
+surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano--scales,
+played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters
+of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano
+ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall
+man in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into the surgery.
+
+'Good-evening, madam,' he said gruffly. 'Won't you sit down?'
+
+'I--I--I want to ask you--'
+
+He put a chair for me, and I dropped into it.
+
+'There!' he said, after a moment. 'You felt as if you might faint,
+didn't you?'
+
+I nodded. The tears came into my eyes.
+
+'I thought so,' he said. 'I'll just give you a draught, if you
+don't mind.'
+
+He busied himself behind me, and presently I was drinking something out
+of a conical-shaped glass.
+
+My heart beat furiously, but I felt strong.
+
+'I want you to tell me, doctor,' I spoke firmly, 'whether I am about to
+become a mother.'
+
+'Ah?' he answered interrogatively, and then he hummed a fragment
+of an air.
+
+'I have lost my husband,' I was about to add; but suddenly I scorned such
+a weakness and shut my lips.
+
+'Since when--' the doctor began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'No,' I heard him saying. 'You have been quite mistaken. But I am not
+surprised. Such mistakes are frequently made--a kind of auto-suggestion.'
+
+'Mistaken!' I murmured.
+
+I could not prevent the room running round me as I reclined on the sofa;
+and I fainted.
+
+But in the night, safely in my room again at the hotel, I wondered
+whether that secret fear, now exorcised, had not also been a hope. I
+wondered....
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+And now I was twenty-six.
+
+Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the
+lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of
+avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary
+narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as
+for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire,
+and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder
+magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star;
+it held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so
+that if my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night
+in my drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy
+world. This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have
+loved I have loved much....
+
+My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama
+of my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I
+had achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had
+gradually passed away, and a new creature had replaced her--a creature
+rapidly developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of
+an extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my
+face had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given
+me fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the
+woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have
+prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no
+merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the
+accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy,
+and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage
+is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a
+caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in
+the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone
+lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.
+
+However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants
+to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once
+aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of
+another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her
+from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is
+a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing
+which will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule
+which I made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I
+lost much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And
+since elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a
+convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I
+surrounded myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is
+the business of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some
+persons after knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others
+after reading my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these
+persons lacked perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself,
+I had naturally sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest
+thinking, kindness of heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search
+had not been unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!
+
+That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes
+and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which
+Vicary, the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were
+perhaps a dozen guests assembled.
+
+Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent
+visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the
+usual quaint Vicary details--such as the solemn warning whisper of an
+equerry in Vicary's ear as he walked backwards, '_Mind the edge of the
+carpet';_ and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little
+hysterically--all save Vicary, whose foible was never to laugh. But
+immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those disconcerting,
+involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a chill hint of
+autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was over in an
+instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended that
+everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the
+beginning of the downfall.
+
+With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be
+interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from
+a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality
+in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since.
+I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and
+her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance.
+The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis
+Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano.
+Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what
+negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across
+to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.
+
+There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the difference
+between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord
+Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before
+mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of
+my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy,
+men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they
+are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their
+trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human
+wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and
+even their folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties
+enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of
+all luxuries--pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare
+man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening
+unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of
+English printing.
+
+As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude,
+elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me.
+And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out.
+He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air
+of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so,
+and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.
+
+'Pallor suits you,' he piped gallantly, and then added: 'But do not carry
+it to extremes.'
+
+'Am I so pale, then?' I faltered, trying to smile naturally.
+
+I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined
+it like a connoisseur.
+
+'Yes,' he said at length. 'What is the matter?'
+
+Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naive question with a
+strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living
+as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, 'Does she really
+live without love? What does she conceal?' I have read this interrogation
+in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have
+had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually
+foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had
+nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this
+sage ruin of a male almost a confessor's freedom. Moreover, we had an
+affectionate regard for each other.
+
+I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:
+
+'What is the matter?'
+
+'Love is the matter!' I might have passionately cried out to him, had we
+been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked
+him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but
+thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:
+
+'I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.'
+
+It was my sixth novel in five years.
+
+'With you,' he said, 'work is simply a drug.'
+
+'Lord Francis,' I expostulated, 'how do you know that?'
+
+'And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,' he
+proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. 'Some women take to morphia,
+others take to work.'
+
+'On the contrary,' I said, 'I have quite determined to do no more work
+for twelve months.'
+
+'Seriously?'
+
+'Seriously.'
+
+He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.
+
+'Then you mean to give yourself time to love?' he murmured, as it were
+with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features
+was intensified by an enigmatic smile.
+
+'Why not?' I laughed encouragingly. 'Why not? What do you advise?'
+
+'I advise it,' he said positively. 'I advise it. You have already wasted
+the best years.'
+
+'The best?'
+
+'One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You
+have nothing to learn about love!'
+
+He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated
+their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the
+ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.
+
+The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing
+critically at his chandeliers.
+
+'Does love bring happiness?' I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring
+his remark.
+
+'For forty years,' he quavered, 'I made love to every pretty woman I
+met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent. return on
+my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I certainly
+did not get even that in happiness. I got it in--other ways.'
+
+'And if you had to begin afresh?'
+
+He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his
+bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.
+
+'I would do the same again,' he whispered.
+
+'Would you?' I said, looking up at him. 'Truly?'
+
+'Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely
+hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through
+this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one
+involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!'
+
+He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last
+spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted
+confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive
+meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the
+eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with
+admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.
+
+'What is the title of the new book?' he demanded casually, sinking
+into a chair.
+
+'_Burning Sappho_,' I answered. 'But the title is very misleading.'
+
+'Bright star!' he exclaimed, taking my hand. 'With such a title you will
+surely beat the record of the Good Dame.'
+
+'Hsh!' I enjoined him.
+
+Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.
+
+The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to
+conceal--or to display--his courteous disdain of the ideals represented
+by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that
+impeccable _doyenne_ of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had
+captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound
+problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one
+of them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her
+dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen
+thousand pounds a year.
+
+Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother's world, and she had
+apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she
+was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply
+sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in
+her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so
+anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just
+be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how
+much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....
+
+'Yes, I remember,' Lord Francis was saying. 'It was at St. Malo. And what
+did you think of the Breton peasant?'
+
+'Oh,' said Jocelyn, 'mamma has not yet allowed us to study the condition
+of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new
+Settlement.'
+
+'It must be very exhausting, my dear child,' said Lord Francis.
+
+I rose.
+
+'I came to ask you to play something,' the child appealed to me. 'I have
+never heard you play, and everyone says--'
+
+'Jocelyn, my pet,' the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis floated
+across the room.
+
+'What, mamma?'
+
+'You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal
+to playing.'
+
+My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I
+resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I
+was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became
+violently active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt
+murderous towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I
+said, with sugar in my voice:
+
+'But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.'
+
+It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the
+mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening
+phrase of Chopin's first Ballade, that composition so laden with
+formidable memories--begun it without thinking and without
+apprehension--showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the
+silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands
+filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I
+saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one
+of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind
+and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed
+unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and
+vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess.
+And then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in
+a truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience,
+my trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were
+stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love,
+to whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman
+expecting her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous;
+a woman with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who
+was at once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I
+called my dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and
+say that he, too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the
+instrument of the god?
+
+Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and
+smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my
+gaze suddenly to the keyboard. 'You too!' I thought sadly, 'You too!...
+One day! One day even you will know what life is, and the look in those
+innocent eyes will never be innocent again!'
+
+Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of
+the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and
+stopped. It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my
+longing for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My
+fingers stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey
+me; my pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting.
+And then I became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed
+and anxious faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my
+hands. It was useless to fight further; the battle was lost.
+
+'I will not play any more,' I said quickly. 'I ought not to have tried to
+play from memory. Excuse me.'
+
+And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I
+could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and
+the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.
+
+'Poor thing!' murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. 'Do sit down, dear.'
+
+'Won't you have something to drink?' said Vicary.
+
+'I am perfectly all right,' I said. 'I'm only sorry that my memory is not
+what it used to be.' And I persisted in standing for a few moments by the
+mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of a face as white as
+milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano, frightened by she knew
+not what, like a young child.
+
+'Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,' said Lord Francis
+shakily. He had followed me. 'She has wisely decided to take a long
+holiday. Good-bye, my dear.'
+
+These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We
+shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had
+ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even
+Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not
+come! My secret was my own--and his. And no one should surprise it unless
+we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as
+they filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the
+right to be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently
+woman of the world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.
+
+Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some
+lustre ware in the further drawing-room.
+
+'I'm afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,' I said,
+approaching her.
+
+'I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,' replied Mrs. Sardis. 'The
+carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk
+with you. Do you permit?'
+
+'I shall be delighted,' I said.
+
+'You are sure you are well enough?'
+
+'There is nothing whatever the matter with me,' I answered slowly and
+distinctly. 'Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I told
+Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared, that
+she might retire to bed.
+
+Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis,
+naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still
+furtively wandered to the door.
+
+'My dear co-worker,' she began, and hesitated.
+
+'Yes,' I encouraged her.
+
+She put her matron's lips together:
+
+'You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its
+honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists
+have in the work of regenerating the world.'
+
+I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing
+to be said.
+
+'I wonder,' Mrs. Sardis continued, 'if you have ever realized what a
+power _you_ are in England and America to-day.'
+
+'Power!' I echoed. 'I have done nothing but try to write as honestly and
+as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.'
+
+'No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,' Mrs. Sardis said. 'And
+I needn't tell you that I am a warm admirer of your talent, and that I
+rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work--'
+
+'Surely,' I interrupted her coldly, 'you are not taking the trouble to
+tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous
+Anglo-Saxon public!'
+
+'Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,' she protested. 'I
+personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though their
+originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but there
+exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly objects
+to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion, ignorant
+opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to employ the
+word "immoral."'
+
+'What, then?'
+
+'I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a
+motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of
+the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal
+life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find
+in it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.'
+
+'Mrs. Sardis!' I cried. 'What do you mean?'
+
+I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this
+incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth;
+and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had
+received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and
+detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the
+conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive
+that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then,
+as suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the
+painful earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I--what were we but
+two groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one
+mystery into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our
+characters? Mrs. Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a
+natural force, as I was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat
+of the sun.
+
+'What do you mean?' I repeated quietly. 'Tell me exactly what you mean.'
+
+I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the
+freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles
+were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours,
+I should find myself.
+
+'To put it in as few words as possible,' said she, 'I mean your relations
+with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.'
+
+'My--'
+
+Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We
+had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself
+a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque
+of existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a
+moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked
+steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.
+
+'You won't affect not to understand?' she said.
+
+I assented with a motion of the head.
+
+'Many persons say there is a--a liaison between you,' she said.
+
+'And do you think that?' I asked quickly.
+
+'If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,' she
+said solemnly. 'No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and I brought
+Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only heard the
+gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne in upon
+me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not everyone
+would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content to talk
+among themselves.'
+
+'About me? Oh!' It was the expression of an almost physical pain.
+
+'What can you expect them to do?' asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.
+
+'True,' I agreed.
+
+'You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship
+with her--'
+
+'Let me tell you'--I stopped her--'that not a single word has ever passed
+between me and--and the man you mean, that everybody might not hear. Not
+a single word!'
+
+'Dearest girl,' she exclaimed; 'how glad I am! How glad I am! Now I can
+take measures to--.
+
+'But--' I resumed.
+
+'But what?'
+
+In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like
+Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her
+own code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply
+to every conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast
+stolid London that hemmed me in--of attempting to explain to such an
+excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would
+not answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a
+church steeple.
+
+'Nothing,' I said, rising, 'except that I thank you. Be sure that I
+am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very
+unpleasant to you.'
+
+She smiled, virtuously happy.
+
+'You made it easy,' she murmured.
+
+I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I
+hated kissing women!
+
+'No more need be said,' she almost whispered, as I put my hand on the
+knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.
+
+'Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair
+fame of our calling.'
+
+My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and
+I opened the door.
+
+And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove,
+haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief
+stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified
+silence down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.
+
+'Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,' I reflected.
+
+It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of
+sensations caused by Ispenlove's presence.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Without a word, we passed together into the drawing-room, and I closed
+the door. Ispenlove stood leaning against the piano, as though intensely
+fatigued; he crushed his gibus with an almost savage movement, and then
+bent his large, lustrous black eyes absently on the flat top of it. His
+thin face was whiter even than usual, and his black hair, beard, and
+moustache all dishevelled; the collar of his overcoat was twisted, and
+his dinner-jacket rose an inch above it at the back of the neck.
+
+I wanted to greet him, but I could not trust my lips. And I saw that he,
+too, was trying in vain to speak.
+
+At length I said, with that banality which too often surprises us in
+supreme moments:
+
+'What is it? Do you know that your tie is under your ear?'
+
+And as I uttered these words, my voice, breaking of itself and in
+defiance of me, descended into a tone which sounded harsh and inimical.
+
+'Ah!' he murmured, lifting his eyes to mine, 'if you turn against me
+to-night, I shall--'
+
+'Turn against you!' I cried, shocked. 'Let me help you with your
+overcoat!'
+
+And I went near him, meaning to take his overcoat.
+
+'It's finished between Mary and me,' he said, holding me with his gaze.
+'It's finished. I've no one but you now; and I've come--I've come--'
+
+He stopped. We read one another's eyes at arm's length, and all the
+sorrow and pity and love that were in each of us rose to our eyes and
+shone there. I shivered with pleasure when I saw his arms move, and then
+he clutched and dragged me to him, and I hid my glowing face on his
+shoulder, in the dear folds of his overcoat, and I felt his lips on my
+neck. And then, since neither of us was a coward, we lifted our heads,
+and our mouths met honestly and fairly, and, so united, we shut our eyes
+for an eternal moment, and the world was not.
+
+Such was the avowal.
+
+I gave up my soul to him in that long kiss; all that was me, all that was
+most secret and precious in me, ascended and poured itself out through my
+tense lips, and was received by him. I kissed him with myself, with the
+entire passionate energy of my being--not merely with my mouth. And if I
+sighed, it was because I tried to give him more--more than I had--and
+failed. Ah! The sensation of his nearness, the warmth of his face, the
+titillation of his hair, the slow, luxurious intake of our breaths, the
+sweet cruelty of his desperate clutch on my shoulders, the glimpses of
+his skin through my eyelashes when I raised ever so little my eyelids!
+Pain and joy of life, you were mingled then!
+
+I remembered that I was a woman, and disengaged myself and withdrew from
+him. I hated to do it; but I did it. We became self-conscious. The
+brilliant and empty drawing-room scanned us unfavourably with all its
+globes and mirrors. How difficult it is to be natural in a great crisis!
+Our spirits clamoured for expression, beating vainly against a thousand
+barred doors of speech. There was so much to say, to explain, to define,
+and everything was so confused and dizzily revolving, that we knew not
+which door to open first. And then I think we both felt, but I more than
+he, that explanations and statements were futile, that even if all the
+doors were thrown open together, they would be inadequate. The
+deliciousness of silence, of wonder, of timidity, of things guessed at
+and hidden....
+
+'It makes me afraid,' he murmured at length.
+
+'What?'
+
+'To be loved like that.... Your kiss ... you don't know.'
+
+I smiled almost sadly. As if I did not know what my kiss had done! As if
+I did not know that my kiss had created between us the happiness which
+brings ruin!
+
+'You _do_ love me?' he demanded.
+
+I nodded, and sat down.
+
+'Say it, say it!' he pleaded.
+
+'More than I can ever show you,' I said proudly.
+
+'Honestly,' he said, 'I can't imagine what you have been able to see in
+me. I'm nothing--I'm nobody--'
+
+'Foolish boy!' I exclaimed. 'You are you.'
+
+The profound significance of that age-worn phrase struck me for the
+first time.
+
+He rushed to me at the word 'boy,' and, standing over me, took my hand in
+his hot hand. I let it lie, inert.
+
+'But you haven't always loved me. I have always loved _you_, from the
+moment when I drove with you, that first day, from the office to your
+hotel. But you haven't always loved me.'
+
+'No,' I admitted.
+
+'Then when did you--? Tell me.'
+
+'I was dull at first--I could not see. But when you told me that the end
+of _Fate and Friendship_ was not as good as I could make it--do you
+remember, that afternoon in the office?--and how reluctant you were to
+tell me, how afraid you were to tell me?--your throat went dry, and you
+stroked your forehead as you always do when you are nervous--There!
+you are doing it now, foolish boy!'
+
+I seized his left arm, and gently pulled it down from his face. Oh,
+exquisite moment!
+
+'It was brave of you to tell me--very brave! I loved you for telling me.
+You were quite wrong about the end of that book. You didn't see the fine
+point of it, and you never would have seen it--and I liked you, somehow,
+for not seeing it, because it was so feminine--but I altered the book to
+please you, and when I had altered it, against my conscience, I loved
+you more.'
+
+'It's incredible! incredible!' he muttered, half to himself. 'I never
+hoped till lately that you would care for me. I never dared to think of
+such a thing. I knew you oughtn't to! It passes comprehension.'
+
+'That is just what love does,' I said.
+
+'No, no,' he went on quickly; 'you don't understand; you can't understand
+my feelings when I began to suspect, about two months ago, that, after
+all, the incredible had happened. I'm nothing but your publisher. I can't
+talk. I can't write. I can't play. I can't do anything. And look at the
+men you have here! I've sometimes wondered how often you've been
+besieged--'
+
+'None of them was like you,' I said. 'Perhaps that is why I have always
+kept them off.'
+
+I raised my eyes and lips, and he stooped and kissed me. He wanted to
+take me in his arms again, but I would not yield myself.
+
+'Be reasonable,' I urged him. 'Ought we not to think of our situation?'
+
+He loosed me, stammering apologies, abasing himself.
+
+'I ought to leave you, I ought never to see you again.' He spoke roughly.
+'What am I doing to you? You who are so innocent and pure!'
+
+'I entreat you not to talk like that,' I gasped, reddening.
+
+'But I must talk like that,' he insisted. 'I must talk like that. You had
+everything that a woman can desire, and I come into your life and offer
+you--what?'
+
+'I _have_ everything a woman can desire,' I corrected him softly.
+
+'Angel!' he breathed. 'If I bring you disaster, you will forgive me,
+won't you?'
+
+'My happiness will only cease with your love,' I said.
+
+'Happiness!' he repeated. 'I have never been so happy as I am now; but
+such happiness is terrible. It seems to me impossible that such happiness
+can last.'
+
+'Faint heart!' I chided him.
+
+'It is for you I tremble,' he said. 'If--if--' He stopped. 'My darling,
+forgive me!'
+
+How I pitied him! How I enveloped him in an effluent sympathy that rushed
+warm from my heart! He accused himself of having disturbed my existence.
+Whereas, was it not I who had disturbed his? He had fought against me, I
+knew well, but fate had ordained his defeat. He had been swept away; he
+had been captured; he had been caught in a snare of the high gods. And he
+was begging forgiveness, he who alone had made my life worth living! I
+wanted to kneel before him, to worship him, to dry his tears with my
+hair. I swear that my feelings were as much those of a mother as of a
+lover. He was ten years older than me, and yet he seemed boyish, and I an
+aged woman full of experience, as he sat there opposite to me with his
+wide, melancholy eyes and restless mouth.
+
+'Wonderful, is it not,' he said, 'that we should be talking like this
+to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?'
+
+'Wonderful!' I responded. 'But yesterday we talked with our eyes, and our
+eyes did not say Mr. or Miss. Our eyes said--Ah, what they said can
+never be translated into words!'
+
+My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable
+curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun. Could it be true that
+Heaven had made that fine creature--noble and modest, nervous and full of
+courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things, fine and
+delicate--could it be true that Heaven had made him and then given him to
+me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves constituted
+perfection? Oh, wonder, wonder! Oh, miraculous bounty which I had not
+deserved! This thing had happened to me, of all women! How it showed, by
+comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my worldly
+splendour! I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled
+interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had
+almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water
+and the palm. And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade.
+Wonderful!
+
+'Why were you so late to-night?' I asked abruptly.
+
+'Late?' he replied absently. 'Is it late?'
+
+We both looked at the clock. It was yet half an hour from midnight.
+
+'Of course it isn't--not _very_,' I said. I was forgetting that.
+Everybody left so early.'
+
+'Why was that?'
+
+I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by
+reason of his failure to appear. He glanced at me with tender amaze.
+
+'But I am fortunate to-day,' I exclaimed. 'Was it not lucky they left
+when they did? Suppose you had arrived, in that state, dearest man, and
+burst into a room full of people? What would they have thought? Where
+should I have looked?'
+
+'Angel!' he cried. 'I'm so sorry. I forgot it was your evening. I must
+have forgotten. I forgot everything, except that I was bound to see you
+at once, instantly, with all speed.'
+
+Poor boy! He was like a bird fluttering in my hand. Millions of women
+must have so pictured to themselves the men who loved them, and whom
+they loved.
+
+'But still, you _were_ rather late, you know,' I smiled.
+
+'Do not ask me why,' he begged, with an expression of deep pain on his
+face. 'I have had a scene with Mary. It would humiliate me to tell
+you--to tell even you--what passed between us. But it is over. Our
+relations in the future can never, in any case, be more than formal.'
+
+A spasm of fierce jealousy shot through me--jealousy of Mary, my friend
+Mary, who knew him with such profound intimacy that they could go
+through a scene together which was 'humiliating.' I saw that my own
+intimacy with him was still crude with the crudity of newness, and that
+only years could mellow it. Mary, the good, sentimental Mary, had wasted
+the years of their marriage--had never understood the value of the
+treasure in her keeping. Why had they always been sad in their house?
+What was the origin of that resigned and even cheerful gloom which had
+pervaded their domestic life, and which I had remarked on my first visit
+to Bloomsbury Square? Were these, too, mysteries that I must not ask my
+lover to reveal? Resentment filled me. I came near to hating Mary, not
+because she had made him unhappy--oh no!--but because she had had the
+priority in his regard, and because there was nothing about him, however
+secret and recondite, that I could be absolutely sure of the sole
+knowledge of. She had been in the depths with him. I desired fervently
+that I also might descend with him, and even deeper. Oh, that I might
+have the joy and privilege of humiliation with him!
+
+'I shall ask you nothing, dearest,' I murmured.
+
+I had risen from my seat and gone to him, and was lightly touching his
+hair with my fingers. He did not move, but sat staring into the fire.
+Somehow, I adored him because he made no response to the fondling of
+my hand. His strange acceptance of the caress as a matter of course
+gave me the illusion that I was his wife, and that the years had
+mellowed our intimacy.
+
+'Carlotta!'
+
+He spoke my name slowly and distinctly, savouring it.
+
+'Yes,' I answered softly and obediently.
+
+'Carlotta! Listen! Our two lives are in our hands at this moment--this
+moment while we talk here.'
+
+His rapt eyes had not stirred from the fire.
+
+'I feel it,' I said.
+
+'What are we to do? What shall we decide to do?'
+
+He slowly turned towards me. I lowered my glance.
+
+'I don't know,' I said.
+
+'Yes, you do, Carlotta,' he insisted. 'You do know.'
+
+His voice trembled.
+
+'Mary and I are such good friends,' I said. 'That is what makes it
+so--'
+
+'No, no, no!' he objected loudly. His nervousness had suddenly increased.
+'Don't, for God's sake, begin to argue in that way! You are above
+feminine logic. Mary is your friend. Good. You respect her; she respects
+you. Good. Is that any reason why our lives should be ruined? Will that
+benefit Mary? Do I not tell you that everything has ceased between us?'
+
+'The idea of being false to Mary--'
+
+'There's no question of being false. And if there was, would you be false
+to love rather than to friendship? Between you and me there is love;
+between Mary and me there is not love. It isn't her fault, nor mine,
+least of all yours. It is the fault of the secret essence of existence.
+Have you not yourself written that the only sacred thing is instinct? Are
+we, or are we not, to be true to ourselves?'
+
+'You see,' I said, 'your wife is so sentimental. She would be incapable
+of looking at the affair as--as we do; as I should in her place.'
+
+I knew that my protests were insincere, and that all my heart and brain
+were with him, but I could not admit this frankly. Ah! And I knew also
+that the sole avenue to peace and serenity, not to happiness, was the
+path of renunciation and of obedience to the conventions of society, and
+that this was precisely the path which we should never take. And on the
+horizon of our joy I saw a dark cloud. It had always been there, but I
+had refused to see it. I looked at it now steadily.
+
+'Of course,' he groaned, 'if we are to be governed by Mary's
+sentimentality--'
+
+'Dear love,' I whispered, 'what do you want me to do?'
+
+'The only possible, honest, just thing. I want you to go away with me, so
+that Mary can get a divorce.'
+
+He spoke sternly, as it were relentlessly.
+
+'Does she guess--about me?' I asked, biting my lip, and looking
+away from him.
+
+'Not yet. Hasn't the slightest notion, I'm sure. But I'll tell her,
+straight and fair.'
+
+'Dearest friend,' I said, after a silence. 'Perhaps I know more of the
+world than you think. Perhaps I'm a girl only in years and situation.
+Forgive me if I speak plainly. Mary may prove unfaithfulness, but she
+cannot get a decree unless she can prove other things as well.'
+
+He stroked his forehead. As for me, I shuddered with agitation. He walked
+across the room and back.
+
+'Angel!' he said, putting his white face close to mine like an actor. 'I
+will prove whether your love for me is great enough. I have struck her. I
+struck her to-night in the presence of a servant. And I did it purposely,
+in cold blood, so that she might be able to prove cruelty. Ah! Have I
+not thought it all out? Have I not?'
+
+A sob, painfully escaping, shook my whole frame.
+
+'And this was before you had--had spoken to me!' I said bitterly.
+
+Not myself, but some strange and frigid force within me uttered
+those words.
+
+'That is what love will do. That is the sort of thing love drives one
+to,' he cried despairingly. 'Oh! I was not sure of you--I was not sure of
+you. I struck her, on the off chance.'
+
+And he sank on the sofa and wept passionately, unashamed, like a child.
+
+I could not bear it. My heart would have broken if I had watched, without
+assuaging, my boy's grief an instant longer than I did. I sprang to him.
+I took him to my breast. I kissed his eyes until the tears ceased to
+flow. Whatever it was or might be, I must share his dishonour.
+
+'My poor girl!' he said at length. 'If you had refused me, if you had
+even judged me, I intended to warn you plainly that it meant my death;
+and if that failed, I should have gone to the office and shot myself.'
+
+'Do not say such things,' I entreated him.
+
+'But it is true. The revolver is in my pocket. Ah! I have made you cry!
+You're frightened! But I'm not a brute; I'm only a little beside myself.
+Pardon me, angel!'
+
+He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour. He did not understand
+me. He did not suspect the risk he had run. If I had hesitated to
+surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should
+never have surrendered. I knew myself well enough to know that. I had a
+conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have
+parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man! But I forgave him.
+Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.
+
+'Carlotta,' he said, 'we shall leave everything. You grasp
+it?--everything.'
+
+'Yes,' I replied. 'Of all the things we have now, we shall have nothing
+but ourselves.'
+
+'If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see
+you again.'
+
+Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He
+meant what he said.
+
+'It is no sacrifice for me,' I murmured. 'The sacrifice would be not to
+give up all in exchange for you.'
+
+'We shall be exiles,' he went on, 'until the divorce business is over.
+And then perhaps we shall creep back--shall we?--and try to find out how
+many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.'
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'We shall come back. They all do.'
+
+'What do you mean?' he demanded.
+
+'Thousands have done what we are going to do,' I said. 'And all of them
+have thought that their own case was different from the other cases.'
+
+'Ah!'
+
+'And a few have been happy. A few have not regretted the price. A few
+have retained the illusion.'
+
+'Illusion? Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?'
+
+I could see that my heart's treasure was ruffled. He clasped my hand
+tenaciously.
+
+'I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen,' I answered
+quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous passion. 'In me there
+are two beings--myself and the observer of myself. It is the novelist's
+disease, this duplication of personality. When I said illusion, I meant
+the supreme illusion of love. Is it not an illusion? I have seen it in
+others, and in exactly the same way I see it in myself and I see it in
+you. Will it last?--who knows? None can tell.'
+
+'Angel!' he expostulated.
+
+'No one can foresee the end of love,' I said, with an exquisite gentle
+sorrow. 'But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if
+its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of
+disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night alone would
+not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life.'
+
+He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and
+his disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely
+round my neck.
+
+'Call it illusion if you like,' he said. 'Words are nothing. I only know
+that for me it will be eternal. I only know that my one desire is to be
+with you always, never to leave you, not to miss a moment of you; to have
+you for mine, openly, securely. Carlotta, where shall we go?'
+
+'We must travel, mustn't we?'
+
+'Travel?' he repeated, with an air of discontent. 'Yes. But where to?'
+
+'Travel,' I said. 'See things. See the world.'
+
+'I had thought we might find some quiet little place,' he said wistfully,
+and as if apologetically, where we could be alone, undisturbed, some spot
+where we could have ourselves wholly to ourselves, and go walks into
+mountains and return for dinner; and then the long, calm evenings!
+Dearest, our honeymoon!'
+
+Our honeymoon! I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human
+nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I
+not talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and
+killed by a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence!
+Inexperienced as I was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the
+experience of my impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very
+thought of calculation would have been abhorrent. But I saw, I felt, I
+lived through in a few seconds the interminable and monotonous length of
+those calm days, and especially those calm evenings succeeding each other
+with a formidable sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And
+I knew that our love--miraculously sweet as it was--probably was not
+greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive
+the cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the
+survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman
+must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she
+might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme,
+devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely
+and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion, for her, is a
+campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart,
+and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the
+beautiful plant must not be exposed to hazard. Suppose it sickened, such
+a love as ours--what then? The misery of hell, the torture of the damned!
+Only its rich and ample continuance could justify us.
+
+'My dear,' I said submissively, 'I shall leave everything to you. The
+idea of travelling occurred to me; that was all. I have never travelled
+further than Cannes. Still, we have all our lives before us.'
+
+'We will travel,' he said unselfishly. 'We'll go round the world--slowly.
+I'll get the tickets at Cook's to-morrow.'
+
+'But, dearest, if you would rather--'
+
+'No, no! In any case we shall always have our evenings.'
+
+'Of course we shall. Dearest, how good you are!'
+
+'I wish I was,' he murmured.
+
+I was glad, then, that I had never allowed my portrait to appear in a
+periodical. We could not prevent the appearance in American newspapers of
+heralding paragraphs, but the likelihood of our being recognised was
+sensibly lessened.
+
+'Can you start soon?' he asked. 'Can you be ready?'
+
+'Any time. The sooner the better, now that it is decided.'
+
+'You do not regret? We have decided so quickly. Ah! you are the merest
+girl, and I have taken advantage--'
+
+I put my hand over his mouth. He seized it, and kept it there and kissed
+it, and his ardent breath ran through my fingers.
+
+'What about your business?' I said.
+
+'I shall confide it to old Tate--tell him some story--he knows quite
+as much about it as I do. To-morrow I will see to all that. The day
+after, shall we start? No; to-morrow night. To-morrow night, eh? I'll
+run in to-morrow and tell you what I've arranged. I must see you
+to-morrow, early.'
+
+'No,' I said. 'Do not come before lunch.'
+
+'Not before lunch! Why?'
+
+He was surprised. But I had been my own mistress for five years, with my
+own habits, rules, privacies. I had never seen anyone before lunch. And
+to-morrow, of all days, I should have so much to do and to arrange. Was
+this man to come like an invader and disturb my morning? So felt the
+celibate in me, instinctively, thoughtlessly. That deep-seated objection
+to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common,
+I think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a
+rich dress, and donning the _peignoir_ of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a
+way which is an eternal enigma to men.... Then I saw, in a sudden flash,
+that I had renounced my individual existence, that I had forfeited my
+habits and rules, and privacies, that I was a man's woman. And the
+passionate lover in me gloried in this.
+
+'Come as soon as you like, dearest friend,' I said.
+
+'Nobody except Mary will know anything till we are actually gone,' he
+remarked. 'And I shall not tell her till the last thing. Afterwards,
+won't they chatter! God! Let 'em.'
+
+'They are already chattering,' I said. And I told him about Mrs. Sardis.
+'When she met you on the landing,' I added, 'she drew her own
+conclusions, my poor, poor boy!'
+
+He was furious. I could see he wanted to take me in his arms and protect
+me masculinely from the rising storm.
+
+'All that is nothing,' I soothed him. 'Nothing. Against it, we have
+our self-respect. We can scorn all that.' And I gave a short,
+contemptuous laugh.
+
+'Darling!' he murmured. 'You are more than a woman.'
+
+'I hope not.' And I laughed again, but unnaturally.
+
+He had risen; I leaned back in a large cushioned chair; we looked at
+each other in silence--a silence that throbbed with the heavy pulse of an
+unutterable and complex emotion--pleasure, pain, apprehension, even
+terror. What had I done? Why had I, with a word--nay, without a word,
+with merely a gesture and a glance--thrown my whole life into the
+crucible of passion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act,
+like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as
+an infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may
+shatter? Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when I gazed into
+those eyes?
+
+'I suppose I must go,' he said disconsolately.
+
+I nodded, and the next instant the clock struck.
+
+'Yes,' he urged himself, 'I must go.'
+
+He bent down, put his hands on the arms of the chair, and kissed me
+violently, twice. The fire that consumes the world ran scorchingly
+through me. Every muscle was suddenly strained into tension, and then
+fell slack. My face flushed; I let my head slip sideways, so that my left
+cheek was against the back of the chair. Through my drooping eyelashes I
+could see the snake-like glitter of his eyes as he stood over me. I
+shuddered and sighed. I was like someone fighting in vain against the
+sweet seduction of an overwhelming and fatal drug. I wanted to entreat
+him to go away, to rid me of the exquisite and sinister enchantment. But
+I could not speak. I shut my eyes. This was love.
+
+The next moment I heard the soft sound of his feet on the carpet. I
+opened my eyes. He had stepped back. When our glances met he averted his
+face, and went briskly for his overcoat, which lay on the floor by the
+piano. I rose freed, re-established in my self-control. I arranged his
+collar, straightened his necktie with a few touches, picked up his hat,
+pushed back the crown, which flew up with a noise like a small explosion,
+and gave it into his hands.
+
+'Thank you,' he said. 'To-morrow morning, eh? I shall get to know
+everything necessary before I come. And then we will fix things up.'
+
+'Yes,' I said.
+
+'I can let myself out,' he said.
+
+I made a vague gesture, intended to signify that I could not think of
+permitting him to let himself out. We left the drawing-room, and passed,
+with precautions of silence, to the front-door, which I gently opened.
+
+'Good-night, then,' he whispered formally, almost coldly.
+
+I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.
+
+We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.
+
+'Too late for the lift,' I murmured out there with him in the vast,
+glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above
+us and below us into the mysterious unseen.
+
+He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted
+steps, firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the
+baluster. When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below
+me, he stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he
+resolutely dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I
+had glimpses of parts of his figure as he passed story after story. Then
+I heard his tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the
+distant clatter of double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.
+
+This was love, at last--the reality of love! He would have killed himself
+had he failed to win me--killed himself! With the novelist's habit, I ran
+off into a series of imagined scenes--the dead body, with the hole in the
+temples and the awkward attitude of death; the discovery, the rush for
+the police, the search for a motive, the inquest, the rapid-speaking
+coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself, cold and
+impassive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said.... But he
+lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his
+spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was
+inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my
+mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous,
+bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and
+injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense
+fact that he was mine.
+
+'How calm I am!' I thought.
+
+It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized
+the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give
+the brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind
+factitiously active. And I began at once to anticipate Frank's coming,
+and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had determined
+that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and it
+occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which had, in
+fact, wakened me. Save on special occasions, I was never wakened, and
+Emmeline and my maid had injunctions not to come to me until I rang. My
+thoughts ran instantly to Frank. He had arrived thus early, merely
+because he could not keep away.
+
+'How extremely indiscreet of him!' I thought. 'What detestable
+prevarications with Emmeline this will lead to! I cannot possibly be
+ready in time if he is to be in and out all day.'
+
+Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing him quickly, and the idea of his
+splendid impatience, drenched me with joy.
+
+'What is it?' I called out.
+
+Emmeline entered in that terrible mauve dressing-gown which I had been
+powerless to persuade her to discard.
+
+'So sorry to disturb you,' said Emmeline, feeling her loose golden hair
+with one hand, 'but Mrs. Ispenlove has called, and wants to see you at
+once. I'm afraid something has happened.'
+
+'_Mrs_. Ispenlove?'
+
+My voice shook.
+
+'Yes. Yvonne came to my room and told me that Mrs. Ispenlove was here,
+and was either mad or very unwell, and would I go to her? So I got up at
+once. What shall I do? Perhaps it's something very serious. Not
+half-past eight, and calling like this!'
+
+'Let her come in here immediately,' I said, turning my head on the
+pillow, so that Emmeline should not see the blush which had spread over
+my face and my neck.
+
+It was inevitable that a terrible and desolating scene must pass between
+Mary Ispenlove and myself. I could not foresee how I should emerge from
+it, but I desperately resolved that I would suffer the worst without a
+moment's delay, and that no conceivable appeal should induce me to
+abandon Frank. I was, as I waited for Mrs. Ispenlove to appear, nothing
+but an embodied and fierce instinct to guard what I had won. No
+consideration of mercy could have touched me.
+
+She entered with a strange, hysterical cry:
+
+'Carlotta!'
+
+I had asked her long ago to use my Christian name--long before I ever
+imagined what would come to pass between her husband and me; but I
+always called her Mrs. Ispenlove. The difference in our ages justified
+me. And that morning the difference seemed to be increased. I realized,
+with a cruel justice of perception quite new in my estimate of her,
+that she was old--an old woman. She had never been beautiful, but she
+was tall and graceful, and her face had been attractive by the
+sweetness of the mouth and the gray beneficence of the eyes; and now
+that sweetness and that beneficence appeared suddenly to have been
+swallowed up in the fatal despair of a woman who discovers that she has
+lived too long. Gray hair, wrinkles, crow's-feet, tired eyes, drawn
+mouth, and the terrible tell-tale hollow under the chin--these were
+what I saw in Mary Ispenlove. She had learnt that the only thing worth
+having in life is youth. I possessed everything that she lacked. Surely
+the struggle was unequal. Fate might have chosen a less piteous victim.
+I felt profoundly sorry for Mary Ispenlove, and this sorrow was
+stronger in me even than the uneasiness, the false shame (for it was
+not a real shame) which I experienced in her presence. I put out my
+hands towards her, as it were, involuntarily. She sprang to me, took
+them, and kissed me as I lay in bed.
+
+'How beautiful you look--like that!' she exclaimed wildly, and with a
+hopeless and acute envy in her tone.
+
+'But why--' I began to protest, astounded.
+
+'What will you think of me, disturbing you like this? What will you
+think?' she moaned. And then her voice rose: 'I could not help it; I
+couldn't, really. Oh, Carlotta! you are my friend, aren't you?'
+
+One thing grew swiftly clear to me: that she was as yet perfectly
+unaware of the relations between Frank and myself. My brain searched
+hurriedly for an explanation of the visit. I was conscious of an
+extraordinary relief.
+
+'You are my friend, aren't you?' she repeated insistently.
+
+Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her
+friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in
+the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an
+understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart
+bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness
+that I could not bring myself to reply directly, 'Yes, I am your friend.'
+
+'We have known each other a long time,' I ventured.
+
+'There was no one else I could come to,' she said.
+
+Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pass my
+dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.
+
+'What are you going to do?' she demanded fearfully.
+
+'I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and
+then we will talk.
+
+Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You'll be more
+yourself after a cup of tea.'
+
+How young I was then! I remember my naive satisfaction in this exhibition
+of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be--hard in spite of
+the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for her.
+And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I
+regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will
+read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she
+did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one
+is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one,
+defenceless as a rabbit.
+
+'You are very kind to me,' she said, putting her cup on the mantelpiece
+with a nervous rattle; 'and I need it.'
+
+'Tell me,' I murmured. 'Tell me--what I can do.'
+
+I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace. A distance between us
+seemed necessary.
+
+'You can't do anything, my dear,' she said. 'Only I was obliged to talk
+to someone, after all the night. It's about Frank.'
+
+'Mr. Ispenlove!' I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not
+very well.
+
+'Yes. He has left me.'
+
+'But why? What is the matter?'
+
+Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates
+me. But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation. Still, could I
+have behaved differently?
+
+'You won't understand unless I begin a long time ago,' said Mary
+Ispenlove. 'Carlotta, my married life has been awful--awful--a tragedy.
+It has been a tragedy both for him and for me. But no one has suspected
+it; we have hidden it.'
+
+I nodded. I, however, had suspected it.
+
+'It's just twenty years--yes, twenty--since I fell in love,' she
+proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.
+
+'With--Frank,' I assumed. I lay back in bed.
+
+'No,' she said. 'With another man. That was in Brixton, when I was a
+girl living with my father; my mother was dead. He was a barrister--I
+mean the man I was in love with. He had only just been called to the Bar.
+I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him. Certainly he
+did; he could not help seeing it. I could not conceal it. Of course I can
+understand now that it flattered him. Naturally it did. Any man is
+flattered when a woman falls in love with him. And my father was rich,
+and so on, and so on. We saw each other a lot. I hoped, and I kept on
+hoping. Some people even said it was a match, and that I was throwing
+myself away. Fancy--throwing myself away--me!--who have never been good
+for anything! My father did not care much for the man; said he was
+selfish and grasping. Possibly he was; but I was in love with him all the
+same. Then I met Frank, and Frank fell in love with me. You know how
+obstinate Frank is when he has once set his mind on a thing. Frank
+determined to have me; and my father was on his side. I would not listen.
+I didn't give him so much as a chance to propose to me. And this state of
+things lasted for quite a long time. It wasn't my fault; it wasn't
+anybody's fault.'
+
+'Just so,' I agreed, raising my head on one elbow, and listening
+intently. It was the first sincere word I had spoken, and I was glad
+to utter it.
+
+'The man I had fallen in love with came nearer. He was decidedly tempted.
+I began to feel sure of him. All I wanted was to marry him, whether he
+loved me a great deal or only a little tiny bit. I was in that state.
+Then he drew away. He scarcely ever came to the house, and I seemed never
+to be able to meet him. And then one day my father showed me something
+in the _Morning Post_. It was a paragraph saying that the man I was in
+love with was going to marry a woman of title, a widow and the daughter
+of a peer. I soon found out she was nearly twice his age. He had done it
+to get on. He was getting on very well by himself, but I suppose that
+wasn't fast enough for him. Carlotta, it nearly killed me. And I felt so
+sorry for him. You can't guess how sorry I felt for him. I felt that he
+didn't know what he had missed. Oh, how happy I should have made him! I
+should have lived for him. I should have done everything for him. I
+should have ... You don't mind me telling you all this?'
+
+I made an imploring gesture.
+
+'What a shame!' I burst out.
+
+'Ah, my dear!' she said, 'he didn't love me. One can't blame him.'
+
+'And then?' I questioned, with an eagerness that I tried to overcome.
+
+'Frank was so persevering. And--and--I _did_ admire his character. A
+woman couldn't help admiring his character, could she? And, besides, I
+honestly thought I had got over the other affair, and that I was in love
+with him. I refused him once, and then I married him. He was as mad for
+me as I had been for the other one. Yes, I married him, and we both
+imagined we were going to be happy.'
+
+'And why haven't you been?' I asked.
+
+'This is my shame,' she said. 'I could not forget the other one. We soon
+found that out.'
+
+'Did you _talk_ about it, you--and Frank?' I put in, amazed.
+
+'Oh _no_!' she said. 'It was never mentioned--never once during fifteen
+years. But he knew; and I knew that he knew. The other one was always
+between us--always, always, always! The other one was always in my heart.
+We did our best, both of us; but it was useless. The passion of my life
+was--it was invincible. I _tried_ to love Frank. I could only like him.
+Fancy his position! And we were helpless. Because, you know, Frank and I
+are not the sort of people that go and make a scandal--at least, that was
+what I thought,' she sighed. 'I know different now. Well, he died the day
+before yesterday.'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'Crettell. He had just been made a judge. He was the youngest judge on
+the bench--only forty-six.'
+
+'Was _that_ the man?' I exclaimed; for Crettell's character was well
+known in London.
+
+'That was the man. Frank came in yesterday afternoon, and after he had
+glanced at the paper, he said: "By the way, Crettell's dead." I did not
+grasp it at first. He repeated: "Crettell--he's dead." I burst into
+tears. I couldn't help it. And, besides, I forgot. Frank asked me very
+roughly what I was crying for. You know, Frank has much changed these
+last few months. He is not as nice as he used to be. Excuse me talking
+like this, my dear. Something must be worrying him. Well, I said as well
+as I could while I was crying that the news was a shock to me. I tried to
+stop crying, but I couldn't. I sobbed. Frank threw down the paper and
+stamped on it, and he swore. He said: "I know you've always been in love
+with the brute, but you needn't make such a damn fuss about it." Oh, my
+dear, how can I tell you these things? That angered me. This was the
+first time in our married life that Crettell had been even referred to,
+and it seemed to me that Frank put all the hatred of fifteen years into
+that single sentence. Why was I angry? I didn't know. We had a scene.
+Frank lost his temper, for the first time that I remember, and then he
+recovered it. He said quietly he couldn't stand living with me any more;
+and that he had long since wanted to leave me. He said he would never see
+me again. And then one of the servants came in, and--'
+
+'What?'
+
+'Nothing. I sent her out. And--and--Fran didn't come home last night.'
+
+There was a silence. I could find nothing to say, and Mary had hidden her
+face. I utterly forgot myself and my own state in this extraordinary
+hazard of matrimony. I could only think of Mary's grief--a grief which,
+nevertheless, I did not too well comprehend.
+
+'Then you love him now?' I ventured at length.
+
+She made no reply.
+
+'You love him--is that so?' I pursued. 'Tell me honestly.'
+
+I spoke as gently as it was in me to speak.
+
+'Honestly!' she cried, looking up. 'Honestly! No! If I loved him, could I
+have been so upset about Crettell? But we have been together so long. We
+are husband and wife, Carlotta. We are so used to each other. And
+generally he is so good. We've got on very well, considering. And now
+he's left me. Think of the scandal! It will be terrible! terrible! A
+separation at my age! Carlotta, it's unthinkable! He's mad--that's the
+only explanation. Haven't I tried to be a good wife to him? He's never
+found fault with me--never! And I'm sure, as regards him, I've had
+nothing to complain of.'
+
+'He will come back,' I said. 'He'll think things over and see reason.'
+
+And it was just as though I heard some other person saying these words.
+
+'But he didn't come _home_ last night,' Mary insisted. 'What the servants
+are thinking I shouldn't like to guess.'
+
+'What does it matter what the servants think?' I said brusquely.
+
+'But it _does_ matter. He didn't come _home_. He must have slept at a
+hotel. Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for him! Oh,
+Carlotta, you're too young to understand what I feel! You're very clever,
+and you're very sympathetic; but you can't see things as I see them. Wait
+till you've been married fifteen years. The scandal! The shame! And me
+only too anxious to be a good wife, and to keep our home as it should be,
+and to help him as much as I can with my stupid brains in his business!'
+
+'I can understand perfectly,' I asserted. 'I can understand perfectly.'
+
+And I could. The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her
+ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her,
+was only too plainly apparent. She was--and naturally, sincerely,
+instinctively--the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the
+conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her
+quiet resentment. But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief
+and her resentment. Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her
+resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified.
+I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must
+always be inferior to emotion. I am intensely proud of my ability to see,
+then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary
+Ispenlove's attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural, exactly as
+free from artificiality, as my own. Can you go outside Nature? Is not the
+polity of Londoners in London as much a part of Nature as the polity of
+bees in a hive?
+
+'Not a word for fifteen years, and then an explosion like that!' she
+murmured, incessantly recurring to the core of her grievance. 'I did
+wrong to marry him, I know. But I _did_ marry him--I _did_ marry him! We
+are husband and wife. And he goes off and sleeps at a hotel! Carlotta, I
+wish I had never been born! What will people say? I shall never be able
+to look anyone in the face again.'
+
+'He will come back,' I said again.
+
+'Do you think so?'
+
+This time she caught at the straw.
+
+'Yes,' I said. 'And you will settle down gradually; and everything will
+be forgotten.'
+
+I said that because it was the one thing I could say. I repeat that I had
+ceased to think of myself. I had become a spectator.
+
+'It can never be the same between us again,' Mary breathed sadly.
+
+At that moment Emmeline Palmer plunged, rather than came, into my
+bedroom.
+
+'Oh, Miss Peel--' she began, and then stopped, seeing Mrs. Ispenlove by
+the fireplace, though she knew that Mrs. Ispenlove was with me.
+
+'Anything wrong?' I asked, affecting a complete calm.
+
+It was evident that the good creature had lost her head, as she sometimes
+did, when I gave her too much to copy, or when the unusual occurred in no
+matter what form. The excellent Emmeline was one of my mistakes.
+
+'Mr. Ispenlove is here,' she whispered.
+
+None of us spoke for a few seconds. Mary Ispenlove stared at me, but
+whether in terror or astonishment, I could not guess. This was one of the
+most dramatic moments of my life.
+
+'Tell Mr. Ispenlove that I can see nobody,' I said, glancing at the wall.
+
+She turned to go.
+
+'And, Emmeline,' I stopped her. 'Do not tell him anything else.'
+
+Surely the fact that Frank had called to see me before nine o'clock in
+the morning, surely my uneasy demeanour, must at length arouse suspicion
+even in the simple, trusting mind of his wife!
+
+'How does he know that I am here?' Mary asked, lowering her voice, when
+Emmeline had shut the door; 'I said nothing to the servants.'
+
+I was saved. Her own swift explanation of his coming was, of course, the
+most natural in the world. I seized on it.
+
+'Never mind how,' I answered. 'Perhaps he was watching outside your
+house, and followed you. The important thing is that he has come. It
+proves,' I went on, inventing rapidly, 'that he has changed his mind and
+recognises his mistake. Had you not better go back home as quickly as
+you can? It would have been rather awkward for you to see him here,
+wouldn't it?'
+
+'Yes, yes,' she said, her eyes softening and gleaming with joy. 'I will
+go. Oh, Carlotta! how can I thank you? You are my best friend.'
+
+'I have done nothing,' I protested. But I had.
+
+'You are a dear!' she exclaimed, coming impulsively to the bed.
+
+I sat up. She kissed me fervently. I rang the bell.
+
+'Has Mr. Ispenlove gone?' I asked Emmeline.
+
+'Yes,' said Emmeline.
+
+In another minute his wife, too, had departed, timorously optimistic,
+already denying in her heart that it could never be the same between them
+again. She assuredly would not find Frank at home. But that was nothing.
+I had escaped! I had escaped!
+
+'Will you mind getting dressed at once?' I said to Emmeline. 'I should
+like you to go out with a letter and a manuscript as soon as possible.'
+
+I got a notebook and began to write to Frank. I told him all that had
+happened, in full detail, writing hurriedly, in gusts, and abandoning
+that regard for literary form which the professional author is apt to
+preserve even in his least formal correspondence.
+
+'After this,' I said, 'we must give up what we decided last night. I have
+no good reason to offer you. The situation itself has not been changed by
+what I have learnt from your wife. I have not even discovered that she
+loves you, though in spite of what she says, which I have faithfully told
+you, I fancy she does--at any rate, I think she is beginning to. My ideas
+about the rights of love are not changed. My feelings towards you are not
+changed. Nothing is changed. But she and I have been through that
+interview, and so, after all, everything is changed; we must give it all
+up. You will say I am illogical. I am--perhaps. It was a mere chance
+that your wife came to me. I don't know why she did. If she had not come,
+I should have given myself to you. Supposing she had written--I should
+still have given myself to you. But I have been in her presence. I have
+been with her. And then the thought that you struck her, for my sake! She
+said nothing about that. That was the one thing she concealed. I could
+have cried when she passed it over. After all, I don't know whether it is
+sympathy for your wife that makes me change, or my self-respect--say my
+self-pride; I'm a proud woman. I lied to her through all that interview.
+
+'Oh, if I had only had the courage to begin by telling her outright and
+bluntly that you and I had settled that I should take her place! That
+would have stopped her. But I hadn't. And, besides, how could I foresee
+what she would say to me and how she would affect me? No; I lied to her
+at every point. My whole attitude was a lie. Supposing you and I had
+gone off together before I had seen her, and then I had met her
+afterwards, I could have looked her in the face--sorrowfully, with a
+heart bleeding--but I could have looked her in the face. But after this
+interview--no; it would be impossible for me to face her with you at
+my side! Don't I put things crudely, horribly! I know everything that
+you will say. You could not bring a single argument that I have not
+thought of.
+
+'However, arguments are nothing. It is how I feel. Fate is against us.
+Possibly I have ruined your life and mine without having done anything to
+improve hers; and possibly I have saved us all three from terrible
+misery. Possibly fate is with us. No one can say. I don't know what will
+happen in the immediate future; I won't think about it. If you do as I
+wish, if you have any desire to show me that I have any influence over
+you, you will go back to live with your wife. Where did you sleep last
+night? Or did you walk the streets? You must not answer this letter at
+present. Write to me later. Do not try to see me. I won't see you. We
+_mustn't_ meet. I am going away at once. I don't think I could stand
+another scene with your wife, and she would be sure to come again to me.
+
+'Try to resume your old existence. You can do it if you try. Remember
+that your wife is no more to blame than you are, or than I am. Remember
+that you loved her once. And remember that I act as I am acting because
+there is no other way for me. _C'est plus fort que moi,_ I am going to
+Torquay. I let you know this--I hate concealment; and anyway you would
+find out. But I shall trust you not to follow me. I shall trust you. You
+are saying that this is a very different woman from last night. It is. I
+haven't yet realized what my feelings are. I expect I shall realize them
+in a few days. I send with this a manuscript. It is nothing. I send it
+merely to put Emmeline off the scent, so that she shall think that it is
+purely business. Now I shall _trust_ you.--C. P.'
+
+I commenced the letter without even a 'Dear Frank,' and I ended it
+without an affectionate word.
+
+'I should like you to take these down to Mr. Ispenlove's office,' I said
+to Emmeline. 'Ask for him and give them to him yourself. There's no
+answer. He's pretty sure to be in. But if he isn't, bring them back. I'm
+going to Torquay by that eleven-thirty express--isn't it?'
+
+'Eleven-thirty-five,' Emmeline corrected me coldly.
+
+When she returned, she said she had seen Mr. Ispenlove and given him the
+letter and the parcel.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+I had acquaintances in Torquay, but I soon discovered that the place was
+impossible for me. Torquay is the chosen home of the proprieties, the
+respectabilities, and all the conventions. Nothing could dislodge them
+from its beautiful hills; the very sea, as it beats primly, or with a
+violence that never forgets to be discreet, on the indented shore,
+acknowledges their sway. Aphrodite never visits there; the human race is
+not continued there. People who have always lived within the conventions
+go there to die within the conventions. The young do not flourish there;
+they escape from the soft enervation. Since everybody is rich, there are
+no poor. There are only the rich, and the servitors, who get rich. These
+two classes never mix--even in the most modest villas they live on
+opposite sides of the house. The life of the town is a vast conspiracy on
+the part of the servitors to guard against any danger of the rich taking
+all their riches to heaven. You can, if you are keen enough, detect
+portions of this conspiracy in every shop. On the hills each abode stands
+in its own undulating grounds, is approached by a winding drive of at
+least ten yards, is wrapped about by the silence of elms, is flanked by
+greenhouses, and exudes an immaculate propriety from all its windows. In
+the morning the rich descend, the servitors ascend; the bosky and
+perfectly-kept streets on the hills are trodden with apologetic celerity
+by the emissaries of the servitors. The one interminable thoroughfare of
+the town is graciously invaded by the rich, who, if they have not walked
+down for the sake of exercise, step cautiously from their carriages,
+enunciate a string of orders ending with the name of a house, and
+cautiously regain their carriages. Each house has a name, and the pride
+of the true servitor is his ability to deduce instantly from the name of
+the house the name of its owner and the name of its street. In the
+afternoon a vast and complicated game of visiting cards is played. One
+does not begin to be serious till the evening; one eats then, solemnly
+and fully, to the faint accompaniment of appropriate conversation. And
+there is no relief, no surcease from utmost conventionality. It goes on
+night and day; it hushes one to sleep, and wakes one up. On all but the
+strongest minds it casts a narcotizing spell, so that thought is
+arrested, and originality, vivacity, individuality become a crime--a
+shame that must be hidden. Into this strange organism I took my wounded
+heart, imagining that an atmosphere of coma might help to heal it. But
+no! Within a week my state had become such that I could have cried out in
+mid Union Street at noon: 'Look at me with your dead eyes, you dead who
+have omitted to get buried, I am among you, and I am an adulteress in
+spirit! And my body has sinned the sin! And I am alive as only grief can
+be alive. I suffer the torture of vultures, but I would not exchange my
+lot with yours!'
+
+And one morning, after a fortnight, I thought of Monte Carlo. And the
+vision of that place, which I had never seen, too voluptuously lovely to
+be really beautiful, where there are no commandments, where
+unconventionality and conventionality fight it out on even terms, where
+the adulteress swarms, and the sin is for ever sinned, and wounded hearts
+go about gaily, where it is impossible to distinguish between virtue and
+vice, and where Toleration in fine clothes is the supreme social
+goddess--the vision of Monte Carlo, as a place of refuge from the
+exacerbating and moribund and yet eternal demureness of Torquay, appealed
+to me so persuasively that I was on my way to the Riviera in two hours.
+In that crisis of my life my moods were excessively capricious. Let me
+say that I had not reached Exeter before I began to think kindly of
+Torquay. What was Torquay but an almost sublime example of what the
+human soul can accomplish in its unending quest of an ideal?
+
+I left England on a calm, slate-coloured sea--sea that more than any
+other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes
+wonderful the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me
+the mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters
+of the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical
+curiosity concerning each other, and then, mutually forgotten, took wing,
+and spread out into the unknown. I think that as I stood near the hot
+funnel, breasting the wind, and vacantly staring at the smooth expanse
+that continually slipped from under us, I understood myself better than I
+had done before. My soul was at peace--the peace of ruin after a
+conflagration, but peace. Sometimes a little flame would dart out--flame
+of regret, revolt, desire--and I would ruthlessly extinguish it. I felt
+that I had nothing to live for, that no energy remained to me, no
+interest, no hope. I saw the forty years of probable existence in front
+of me flat and sterile as the sea itself. I was coldly glad that I had
+finished my novel, well knowing that it would be my last. And the immense
+disaster had been caused by a chance! Why had I been born with a vein of
+overweening honesty in me? Why should I have sacrificed everything to the
+pride of my conscience, seeing that consciences were the product of
+education merely? Useless to try to answer the unanswerable! What is, is.
+And circumstances are always at the mercy of character. I might have been
+wrong, I might have been right; no ethical argument could have bent my
+instinct. I did not sympathize with myself--I was too proud and
+stern--but I sympathized with Frank. I wished ardently that he might be
+consoled--that his agony might not be too terrible. I wondered where he
+was, what he was doing. I had received no letter from him, but then I had
+instructed that letters should not be forwarded to me. My compassion went
+out after him, followed him into the dark, found him (as I hoped), and
+surrounded him like an alleviating influence. I thought pityingly of the
+ravage that had been occasioned by our love. His home was wrecked. Our
+lives were equally wrecked. Our friends were grieved; they would think
+sadly of my closed flat. Even the serio-comic figure of Emmeline touched
+me; I had paid her three months' wages and dismissed her. Where would she
+go with her mauve _peignoir_? She was over thirty, and would not easily
+fall into another such situation. Imagine Emmeline struck down by a
+splinter from our passionate explosion! Only Yvonne was content at the
+prospect of revisiting France.
+
+'_Ah! Qu'on est bien ici, madame_!' she said, when we had fixed ourselves
+in the long and glittering _train de grand luxe_ that awaited us at
+Calais. Once I had enjoyed luxury, but now the futility of all this
+luxurious cushioned arrogance, which at its best only corresponded with a
+railway director's dreams of paradise, seemed to me pathetic. Could it
+detain youth, which is for ever flying? Could it keep out sorrow? Could
+it breed hope? As the passengers, so correct in their travelling
+costumes, passed to and fro in the corridors with the subdued murmurs
+always adopted by English people when they wish to prove that they are
+not excited, I thought: 'Does it matter how you and I go southwards? The
+pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs, what can it help
+us that this should be sated? We cannot leave our souls behind.' The
+history of many of these men and women was written on their faces. I
+wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the mirrors which
+were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had always seen.
+Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response. Was I not part
+of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life is good? On
+every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh flowers that had
+been torn from the South, and would return there dead, having ministered
+to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is good. I hated
+that. I could almost have wished that I was travelling southwards in a
+slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate does not wear a
+mask. Great grief is democratic, levelling--not downwards but upwards. It
+strips away the inessential, and makes brothers. It is impatient with all
+the unavailing inventions which obscure the brotherhood of mankind.
+
+I descended from the train restlessly--there were ten minutes to elapse
+before the departure--and walked along the platform, glimpsing the faces
+in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and napery in the
+two restaurant-cars: wistful all alike, I thought--flowers and faces! How
+fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was! Opposite the door of the first car
+stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery of the
+International Sleeping Car Company. He wore white gloves, like all the
+servants on the train: it was to foster the illusion; it was part of what
+we paid for.
+
+'When is luncheon served?' I asked him idly.
+
+He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs. He
+contemplated me for an instant. He seemed to add me up, antipathetically,
+as a product of Western civilization.
+
+'Soon as the train starts, madam,' he replied suavely, in good American,
+and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the platform.
+
+'Thank you!' I said.
+
+I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the
+African bush. I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression
+that had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it
+was. 'And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like
+me,' I mused. A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker were
+busy with coal and grease. 'Five minutes hence, and our lives, and our
+correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,' I said to
+myself. Strange world, the world of the _train de grand luxe_! But a
+world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as the
+inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.
+
+Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and
+varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all
+that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself
+up and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray
+landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a
+long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon;
+and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway
+director had received their most luscious expression--and had then been
+modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern
+flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes
+as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was
+finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car
+towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.
+
+'How do you do, Miss Kate?' I accosted her.
+
+It was the younger of Vicary's two maiden sisters. I guessed that the
+other could not be far away.
+
+She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had
+done.
+
+'Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?' she said distantly, with a nervous
+simper; and she passed on.
+
+This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world
+of my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from
+Miss Kate's attitude that something must have occurred, or something must
+have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a
+time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly.
+What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I
+left without delay and went back to my coupe; it would have been a pity
+to derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet
+it might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for.
+I read a little in the _Imitation of Christ_ which Aunt Constance had
+meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even
+Christianity itself. 'Think not that thou hast made any progress,' I
+read, 'unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far off
+thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be
+angry or indignant, with any except one's self.'
+
+Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its
+invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations,
+dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks
+through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored
+everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation
+seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after
+interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside,
+rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in
+the abandoned attitudes of fatigue--here and there a compartment with
+blinds discreetly drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and
+here and there a group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves
+nothing could affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train
+and every steamer a few such are to be found.
+
+More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we
+thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their facades
+occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under
+streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to
+see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to
+a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared
+haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to
+carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial
+quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations
+we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we
+trailed slowly our disgust.
+
+We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris
+would fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony
+magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we
+were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the
+splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by
+the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a _train de grand luxe_,
+while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms,
+guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at
+which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses
+Vicary had brought several pairs of white gloves in order to have me
+dismissed from the society of the train. A hand touched me. It was
+Yvonne's. I awoke to a renewal of the maddening vibration. We had quitted
+Paris long since. It was after seven o'clock. '_On dit que le diner est
+servi, madame_ said Yvonne. I told her to go, and I collected my wits to
+follow her. As I was emerging into the corridor, Miss Kate went by. I
+smiled faintly, perhaps timidly. She cut me completely. Then I went out
+into the corridor. A man was standing at the other end twirling his
+moustaches. He turned round.
+
+It was Frank.
+
+He came towards me, uncertainly swaying with the movement of the
+swaying train.
+
+'Good God!' he muttered, and stopped within a yard of me.
+
+I clung convulsively to the framework of the doorway. Our lives paused.
+
+'Why have you followed me, Frank?' I asked gloomily, in a whisper.
+
+I had meant to be severe, offended. I had not meant to put his name at
+the end of my question, much less to utter it tenderly, like an
+endearment. But I had little control over myself. I was almost breathless
+with a fatal surprise, shaken with terrible emotion.
+
+'I've not followed you,' he said. 'I joined the train at Paris. I'd no
+idea you were on the train till I saw you in the corner asleep, through
+the window of the compartment. I've been waiting here till you came out.'
+
+'Have you seen the Vicarys?'
+
+'Yes,' he answered.
+
+'Ah! You've been away from London all this time?'
+
+'I couldn't stay. I couldn't. I've been in Belgium and Holland. Then I
+went to Paris. And now--you see me.'
+
+'I'm going to Mentone,' I said. 'I had thought of Monte Carlo first, but
+I changed my mind. Where are you going to?'
+
+'Mentone,' he said.
+
+We talked in hard, strained tones, avoiding each other's eyes. A string
+of people passed along the car on their way to dinner. I withdrew into my
+compartment, and Frank flattened himself against a window.
+
+'Come in here a minute,' I said, when they were gone.
+
+He entered the compartment and sat down opposite to me and lifted his
+hand, perhaps unconsciously, to pull the door to.
+
+'No,' I said; 'don't shut it. Leave it like that.'
+
+He was dressed in a gray tourist suit. Never before had I seen him in any
+but the formal attire of London. I thought he looked singularly graceful
+and distinguished, even romantic, in that loose, soft clothing. But no
+matter what he wore, Frank satisfied the eye. We were both extremely
+nervous and excited and timid, fearing speech.
+
+'Carlotta,' he said at last--I had perceived that he was struggling to a
+resolution--'this is the best thing that could have happened. Whatever we
+do, everybody will believe that we are running off together.'
+
+'I think they have been believing that ever since we left London,' I
+said; and I told him about Miss Kate's treatment of me at lunch. 'But how
+can that affect us?' I demanded.
+
+'Mary will believe it--does believe, I'm sure. Long before this, people
+will have enlightened her. And now the Vicarys have seen us, it's all
+over. Our hand is forced, isn't it?'
+
+'Frank,' I said, 'didn't you think my letter was right?'
+
+'I obeyed it,' he replied heavily. 'I haven't even written to you. I
+meant to when I got to Mentone.'
+
+'But didn't you think I was right?'
+
+'I don't know. Yes--I suppose it was.' His lower lip fell. 'Of course I
+don't want you to do anything that you--'
+
+'Dinner, please,' said my negro, putting his head between us.
+
+We both informed the man that we should not dine, and I asked him to tell
+Yvonne not to wait for me.
+
+'There's your maid, too,' said Frank. 'How are we going to get out of it?
+The thing's settled for us.'
+
+'My dear, dear boy!' I exclaimed. 'Are we to outrage our consciences
+simply because people think we have outraged them?'
+
+'It isn't my conscience--it's yours,' he said.
+
+'Well, then--mine.'
+
+I drew down my veil; I could scarcely keep dry eyes.
+
+'Why are you so hard, Carlotta?' he cried. 'I can't understand you. I
+never could. But you'll kill me--that's what you'll do.'
+
+Impulsively I leaned forward; and he seized my hand. Our antagonism
+melted in tears. Oh the cruel joy of that moment! Who will dare to say
+that the spirit cannot burn with pleasure while drowning in grief? Or
+that tragedy may not be the highest bliss? That instant of renunciation
+was our true marriage. I realize it now--a union that nothing can soil
+nor impair.
+
+'I love you; you are fast and fast in my heart,' I murmured. 'But you
+must go back to Mary. There is nothing else.'
+
+And I withdrew my hand.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'You've no right, my dearest, to tell me to go back to Mary. I cannot.'
+
+'Forgive me,' I said. 'I have only the right to ask you to leave me.'
+
+'Then there is no hope?'
+
+His lips trembled. Ah! those lips!
+
+I made a sign that there was no hope. And we sat in silence, overcome.
+
+A servant came to arrange the compartment for sleeping, and we were
+obliged to assume nonchalance and go into the corridor. All the
+windows of the corridor were covered with frost traceries. The train
+with its enclosed heat and its gleaming lamps was plunging through an
+ice-gripped night. I thought of the engine-driver, perched on his
+shaking, snorting, monstrous machine, facing the weather, with our
+lives and our loves in his hand.
+
+'We'll leave each other now, Frank,' I said, 'before the people begin to
+come back from dinner. Go and eat something.'
+
+'But you?'
+
+'I shall be all right. Yvonne will get me some fruit. I shall stay in our
+compartment till we arrive.'
+
+'Yes. And when we do arrive--what then? What are your wishes? You see,
+I can't leave the train before we get to Mentone because of my
+registered luggage.'
+
+He spoke appealingly.
+
+The dear thing, with his transparent pretexts!
+
+'You can ignore us at the station, and then leave Mentone again
+during the day.'
+
+'As you wish,' he said.
+
+'Good-night!' I whispered. 'Good-bye!' And I turned to my compartment.
+
+'Carlotta!' he cried despairingly.
+
+But I shut the door and drew the blinds.
+
+Yvonne was discretion itself when she returned. She had surely seen
+Frank. No doubt she anticipated piquant developments at Mentone.
+
+All night I lay on my narrow bed, with Yvonne faintly snoring above me,
+and the harsh, metallic rattle of the swinging train beneath. I could
+catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow. The lamp burnt
+delicately within its green shade. I lay almost moveless, almost dead,
+shifting only at long intervals from side to side. Sometimes my brain
+would arouse itself, and I would live again through each scene of my
+relationship with Frank and Mary. I often thought of the engine-driver,
+outside, watching over us and unflinchingly dragging us on. I hoped that
+his existence had compensations.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Early on the second morning after that interview in the train I sat on
+my balcony in the Hotel d'Ecosse, full in the tremendous sun that had
+ascended over the Mediterranean. The shore road wound along beneath me
+by the blue water that never receded nor advanced, lopping always the
+same stones. A vivid yellow electric tram, like a toy, crept forward on
+my left from the direction of Vintimille and Italy, as it were swimming
+noiselessly on the smooth surface of the road among the palms of an
+intense green, against the bright blue background of the sea; and
+another tram advanced, a spot of orange, to meet it out of the
+variegated tangle of tinted houses composing the Old Town. High upon the
+summit of the Old Town rose the slim, rose-coloured cupola of the church
+in a sapphire sky. The regular smiting sound of a cracked bell,
+viciously rung, came from it. The eastern prospect was shut in by the
+last olive-clad spurs of the Alps, that tread violently and gigantically
+into the sea. The pathways of the hotel garden were being gently swept
+by a child of the sun, who could not have sacrificed his graceful
+dignity to haste; and many peaceful morning activities proceeded on the
+road, on the shore, and on the jetty. A procession of tawny
+fishing-boats passed from the harbour one after another straight into
+the eye of the sun, and were lost there. Smoke climbed up softly into
+the soft air from the houses and hotels on the level of the road. The
+trams met and parted, silently widening the distance between them which
+previously they had narrowed. And the sun rose and rose, bathing the
+blue sea and the rich verdure and the glaring white architecture in the
+very fluid of essential life. The whole azure coast basked in it like an
+immense cat, commencing the day with a voluptuous savouring of the fact
+that it was alive. The sun is the treacherous and tyrannical god of the
+South, and when he withdraws himself, arbitrary and cruel, the land and
+the people shiver and prepare to die.
+
+It was such a morning as renders sharp and unmistakable the division
+between body and soul--if the soul suffers. The body exults; the body
+cries out that nothing on earth matters except climate. Nothing can damp
+the glorious ecstasy of the body baptized in that air, caressed by that
+incomparable sun. It laughs, and it laughs at the sorrow of the soul. It
+imperiously bids the soul to choose the path of pleasure; it shouts aloud
+that sacrifice is vain and honour an empty word, full of inconveniences,
+and that to exist amply and vehemently, to listen to the blood as it
+beats strongly through the veins, is the end of the eternal purpose. Ah!
+how easy it is to martyrize one's self by some fatal decision made
+grandly in the exultation of a supreme moment! And how difficult to
+endure the martyrdom without regret! I regretted my renunciation. My body
+rebelled against it, and even my soul rebelled. I scorned myself for a
+fool, for a sentimental weakling--yes, and for a moral coward. Every
+argument that presented itself damaged the justice of my decision. After
+all, we loved, and in my secret dreams had I not always put love first,
+as the most sacred? The reality was that I had been afraid of what Mary
+would think. True, my attitude had lied to her, but I could not have
+avoided that. Decency would have forbidden me to use any other attitude;
+and more than decency--kindness. Ought the course of lives to be changed
+at the bidding of mere hazard? It was a mere chance that Mary had called
+on me. I bled for her grief, but nothing that I could do would assuage
+it. I felt sure that, in the impossible case of me being able to state my
+position to her and argue in its defence, I could force her to see that
+in giving myself to Frank I was not being false to my own ideals. What
+else could count? What other consideration should guide the soul on its
+mysterious instinctive way? Frank and I had a right to possess each
+other. We had a right to be happy if we could. And the one thing that had
+robbed us of that right was my lack of courage, caused partly by my
+feminine mentality (do we not realize sometimes how ignobly feminine we
+are?), and partly by the painful spectacle of Mary's grief.... And her
+grief, her most intimate grief, sprang not from thwarted love, but from
+a base and narrow conventionality.
+
+Thus I declaimed to myself in my heart, under the influence of the
+seductive temptations of that intoxicating atmosphere.
+
+'Come down,' said a voice firmly and quietly underneath me in the
+orange-trees of the garden.
+
+I started violently. It was Frank's voice. He was standing in the garden,
+his legs apart, and a broad, flat straw hat, which I did not admire, on
+his head. His pale face was puckered round about the eyes as he looked up
+at me, like the face of a person trying to look directly at the sun.
+
+'Why,' I exclaimed foolishly, glancing down over the edge of the balcony,
+and shutting my white parasol with a nervous, hurried movement,
+'have--have you come here?'
+
+He had disobeyed my wish. He had not left Mentone at once.
+
+'Come down,' he repeated persuasively, and yet commandingly.
+
+I could feel my heart beating against the marble parapet of the balcony.
+I seemed to be caught, to be trapped. I could not argue with him in that
+position. I could not leave him shouting in the garden. So I nodded to
+pacify him, and disappeared quickly from the balcony, almost scurrying
+away. And in the comparative twilight of my room I stopped and gave a
+glance in the mirror, and patted my hair, and fearfully examined the
+woman that I saw in the glass, as if to discern what sort of woman she
+truly was, and what was the root of her character. I hesitated and
+snatched up my gloves. I wanted to collect my thoughts, and I could not.
+It was impossible to think clearly. I moved in the room, dazed. I stood
+by the tumbled bed, fingering the mosquito curtains. They might have been
+a veil behind which was obscured the magic word of enlightenment I
+needed. I opened the door, shut it suddenly, and held the knob tight,
+defying an imagined enemy outside. 'Oh!' I muttered at last, angry with
+myself, 'what is the use of all this? You know you must go down to him.
+He's waiting for you. Show a little common-sense and go without so much
+fuss.' And so I descended the stairs swiftly and guiltily, relieved that
+no one happened to see me. In any case, I decided, nothing could induce
+me to yield to him after my letter and after what had passed in the
+train. The affair was beyond argument. I felt that I could not yield, and
+that though it meant the ruin of happiness by obstinacy, I could not
+yield. I shrank from yielding in that moment as men shrink from public
+repentance.
+
+He had not moved from his post in the garden. We shook hands. A band
+of Italian musicians wandered into the garden and began to sing Verdi
+to a vigorous thrumming of guitars. They sang as only Italians can
+sing--as naturally as they breathed, and with a rich and overflowing
+innocent joy in the art which Nature had taught them. They sang loudly,
+swingingly, glancing full of naive hope up at the windows of the vast,
+unresponsive hotel.
+
+'So you are still in Mentone,' I ventured.
+
+'Yes,' he said. 'Come for a walk.'
+
+'But--'
+
+'Come for a walk.'
+
+'Very well,' I consented. 'As I am?'
+
+'As you are. I saw you all in white on the balcony, and I was determined
+to fetch you out.'
+
+'But could you see who it was from the road?'
+
+'Of course I could. I knew in an instant.'
+
+We descended, he a couple of paces in front of me, the narrow zigzag path
+leading down between two other hotels to the shore road.
+
+'What will happen now?' I asked myself wildly. My head swam.
+
+It seemed that nothing would happen. We turned eastwards, walking slowly,
+and I began to resume my self-control. Only the simple and the humble
+were abroad at that early hour: purveyors of food, in cheerfully rattling
+carts, or hauling barrows with the help of grave and formidable dogs;
+washers and cleaners at the doors of highly-decorated villas, amiably
+performing their tasks while the mighty slept; fishermen and fat
+fisher-girls, industriously repairing endless brown nets on the other
+side of the parapet of the road; a postman and a little policeman; a
+porcelain mender, who practised his trade under the shadow of the wall; a
+few loafers; some stable-boys exercising horses; and children with
+adorable dirty faces, shouting in their high treble as they played at
+hopscotch. I felt very closely akin to these meek ones as we walked
+along. They were so human, so wistful. They had the wonderful simplicity
+of animals, uncomplicated by the disease of self-consciousness; they were
+the vital stuff without the embroidery. They preserved the customs of
+their ancestors, rising with the sun, frankly and splendidly enjoying the
+sun, looking up to it as the most important thing in the world. They
+never attempted to understand what was beyond them; they troubled not
+with progress, ideals, righteousness, the claims of society. They
+accepted humbly and uninquiringly what they found. They lived the life of
+their instincts, sometimes violent, often kindly, and always natural.
+Why should I have felt so near to them?
+
+A calm and gentle pleasure filled me, far from intense, but yet
+satisfying. I determined to enjoy the moment, or, perhaps, without
+determination, I gave myself up, gradually, to the moment. I forgot care
+and sorrow. I was well; I was with Frank; I was in the midst of
+enchanting natural beauty; the day was fair and fresh and virgin. I knew
+not where I was going. Shorewards a snowy mountain ridge rose above the
+long, wide slopes of olives, dotted with white dwellings. A single sail
+stood up seawards on the immense sheet of blue. The white sail appeared
+and disappeared in the green palm-trees as we passed eastwards. Presently
+we left the sea, and we lost the hills, and came into a street of poor
+little shops for simple folk, that naively exposed their cheap and tawdry
+goods to no matter what mightiness should saunter that way. And then we
+came to the end of the tram-line, and it was like the end of the world.
+And we saw in the distance abodes of famous persons, fabulously rich,
+defying the sea and the hills, and condescending from afar off to the
+humble. We crossed the railway, and a woman ran out from a cabin with a
+spoon in one hand and a soiled flag in the other, and waved the flag at
+a towering black engine that breathed stertorously in a cutting. Already
+we were climbing, and the road grew steeper, and then we came to
+custom-houses--unsightly, squalid, irregular, and mean--in front of which
+officials laughed and lounged and smoked.
+
+We talked scarcely at all.
+
+'You were up early this morning,' he said.
+
+'Yes; I could not sleep.'
+
+'It was the same with me.'
+
+We recovered the sea; but now it was far below us, and the footprints of
+the wind were marked on it, and it was not one blue, but a thousand
+blues, and it faded imperceptibly into the sky. The sail, making Mentone,
+was much nearer, and had developed into a two-masted ship. It seemed to
+be pushed, rather than blown, along by the wind. It seemed to have
+rigidity in all its parts, and to be sliding unwillingly over a vast
+slate. The road lay through craggy rocks, shelving away unseen on one
+hand, and rising steeply against the burning sky on the other. We mounted
+steadily and slowly. I did not look much at Frank, but my eye was
+conscious of his figure, striding leisurely along. Now and then, when I
+turned to glance behind, I saw our shadows there diagonally on the road,
+and again I did not care for his hat. I had not seen him in a straw hat
+till that morning. We arrived at a second set of French custom-houses,
+deserted, and then we saw that the gigantic side of the mountain was
+cleft by a fissure from base to summit. And across the gorge had been
+thrown a tiny stone bridge to carry the road. At this point, by the
+bridge, the face of the rock had been carved smooth, and a great black
+triangle painted on it. And on the road was a common milestone, with
+'France' on one side and 'Italia' on the other. And a very old man was
+harmlessly spreading a stock of picture postcards on the parapet of the
+bridge. My heart went out to that poor old man, whose white curls glinted
+in the sunlight. It seemed to me so pathetic that he should be just
+there, at that natural spot which the passions and the blood of men long
+dead had made artificial, tediously selling postcards in order to keep
+his worn and creaking body out of the grave.
+
+'Do give him something,' I entreated Frank.
+
+And while Frank went to him I leaned over the other parapet and
+listened for the delicate murmur of the stream far below. The split
+flank of the hill was covered with a large red blossom, and at the
+base, on the edge of the sea, were dolls' houses, each raising a
+slanted pencil of pale smoke.
+
+Then we were in Italy, and still climbing. We saw a row of narrow,
+slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched
+to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a
+rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged about
+four years and eight years, dirty, unkempt, delicious, shrill, their
+movements full of the ravishing grace of infancy. They attacked the laced
+soldier, chattering furiously, grumbling at him, intimidating him with
+the charming gestures of spoilt and pouting children. And he bent down
+stiffly in his superb uniform, and managed his long, heavy gun, and
+talked to them in a deep, vibrating voice. He reasoned with them till we
+could hear him no more. It was so touching, so exquisitely human!
+
+We reached the top of the hill, having passed the Italian customs,
+equally vile with the French. The terraced grounds of an immense deserted
+castle came down to the roadside; and over the wall, escaped from the
+garden, there bloomed extravagantly a tangle of luscious yellow roses,
+just out of our reach. The road was still and deserted. We could see
+nothing but the road and the sea and the hills, all steeped, bewitched,
+and glorious under the sun. The ship had nearly slid to Mentone. The
+curving coastline of Italy wavered away into the shimmering horizon. And
+there were those huge roses, insolently blooming in the middle of winter,
+the symbol of the terrific forces of nature which slept quiescent under
+the universal calm. Perched as it were in a niche of the hills, we were
+part of that tremendous and ennobling scene. Long since the awkward
+self-consciousness caused by our plight had left us. We did not use
+speech, but we knew that we thought alike, and were suffering the same
+transcendent emotion. Was it joy or sadness? Rather than either, it was
+an admixture of both, originating in a poignant sense of the grandeur of
+life and of the earth.
+
+'Oh, Frank,' I murmured, my spirit bursting, 'how beautiful it is!'
+
+Our eyes met. He took me and kissed me impetuously, as though my
+utterance had broken a spell which enchained him. And as I kissed him I
+wept, blissfully. Nature had triumphed.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+We departed from Mentone that same day after lunch. I could not remove to
+his hotel; he could not remove to mine, for this was Mentone. We went to
+Monte Carlo by road, our luggage following. We chose Monte Carlo partly
+because it was the nearest place, and partly because it has some of the
+qualities--incurious, tolerant, unprovincial--of a capital city. If we
+encountered friends there, so much the better, in the end. The great
+adventure, the solemn and perilous enterprise had begun. I sent Yvonne
+for a holiday to her home in Laroche. Why? Ah, why? Perhaps for the
+simple reason that I had not the full courage of my convictions. We
+seldom have--_nous autres_. I felt that, if she had remained, Yvonne
+would have been too near me in the enterprise. I could not at first have
+been my natural self with her. I told the astonished and dissatisfied
+Yvonne that I would write to her as soon as I wanted her. Yet in other
+ways I had courage, and I found a delicious pleasure in my courage. When
+I was finally leaving the hotel I had Frank by my side. I behaved to him
+as to a husband. I publicly called him 'dear.' I asked his advice in
+trifles. He paid my bill. He even provided the money necessary for
+Yvonne. My joy in the possession of this male creature, whose part it now
+was to do for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do
+for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's
+woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal
+significance of that word--I had a protector.
+
+Frank was able to get three rooms at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. I
+had only to approve them. We met in our sitting-room at half-past three,
+ready to go out for a walk. It would be inexact to say that we were not
+nervous. But we were happy. He had not abandoned his straw hat.
+
+'Don't wear that any more,' I said to him, smiling.
+
+'But why? It's quite new.'
+
+'It doesn't suit you,' I said.
+
+'Oh, that doesn't matter,' he laughed, and he put it on.
+
+'But I don't like to see you in it,' I persisted.
+
+'Well, you'll stand it this afternoon, my angel, and I'll get another
+to-morrow.'
+
+'Haven't you got another one here?' I asked, with discontent.
+
+'No,' and he laughed again.
+
+'But, dear--' I pouted.
+
+He seemed suddenly to realize that as a fact I did not like the hat.
+
+'Come here,' he said, charmingly grave; and he led me by the hand into
+his bedroom, which was littered with clothes, small parcels, boots, and
+brushes. One chair was overturned.
+
+'Heavens!' I muttered, pretending to be shocked at the disorder.
+
+He drew, me to a leather box of medium size.
+
+'You can open it,' he said.
+
+I opened it. The thing was rather a good contrivance, for a man. It
+held a silk hat, an opera hat, a bowler hat, some caps, and a soft
+Panama straw.
+
+'And you said you had no others!' I grumbled at him.
+
+'Well, which is it to be?' he demanded.
+
+'This, of course,' I said, taking the bowler. I reached up, removed the
+straw hat from his head, and put the bowler in its place. 'There!' I
+exclaimed, satisfied, giving the bowler a pat--there!'
+
+He laughed, immensely content, enraptured, foolishly blissful. We were
+indeed happy. Before opening the door leading to the corridor we stopped
+and kissed.
+
+On the seaward terrace of the vast, pale, floriated Casino, so
+impressive in its glittering vulgarity, like the bride-cake of a
+stockbroker's wedding, we strolled about among a multifarious crowd,
+immersed in ourselves. We shared a contempt for the architecture, the
+glaring flower-beds, and the false distinction of the crowd, and an
+enthusiasm for the sunshine and the hills and the sea, and whatever else
+had escaped the hands of the Casino administration. We talked lightly
+and freely. Care seemed to be leaving us; we had no preoccupations save
+those which were connected with our passion. Then I saw, standing in an
+attitude of attention, the famous body-servant of Lord Francis Alcar,
+and I knew that Lord Francis could not be far away. We spoke to the
+valet; he pointed out his master, seated at the front of the terrace,
+and told us, in a discreet, pained, respectful voice, that our venerable
+friend had been mysteriously unwell at Monte Carlo, and was now taking
+the air for the first time in ten days. I determined that we should go
+boldly and speak to him.
+
+'Lord Francis,' I said gently, after we had stood some seconds by his
+chair, unremarked.
+
+He was staring fixedly at the distance of the sea. He looked amazingly
+older than when I had last talked with him. His figure was shrunken, and
+his face rose thin and white out of a heavy fur overcoat and a large blue
+muffler. In his eyes there was such a sadness, such an infinite regret,
+such a profound weariness as can only be seen in the eyes of the senile.
+He was utterly changed.
+
+'Lord Francis,' I repeated, 'don't you know me?'
+
+He started slightly and looked at me, and a faint gleam appeared in his
+eyes. Then he nodded, and took a thin, fragile alabaster hand out of
+the pocket of his overcoat. I shook it. It was like shaking hands with
+a dead, starved child. He carefully moved the skin and bone back into
+his pocket.
+
+'Are you pretty well?' I said.
+
+He nodded. Then the faint gleam faded out of his eyes; his head fell a
+little, and he resumed his tragic contemplation of the sea. The fact of
+my presence had dropped like a pebble into the strange depths of that
+aged mind, and the waters of the ferocious egotism of senility had closed
+over it, and it was forgotten. His rapt and yet meaningless gaze
+frightened me. It was as if there was more desolation and disillusion in
+that gaze than I had previously imagined the whole earth to contain.
+Useless for Frank to rouse him for the second time. Useless to explain
+ourselves. What was love to him, or the trivial conventions of a world
+which he was already quitting?
+
+We walked away. From the edge of the terrace I could see a number of
+boats pulling to and fro in the water.
+
+'It's the pigeon-shooting,' Frank explained. 'Come to the railings and
+you'll be able to see.'
+
+I had already heard the sharp popping of rifles. I went to the railings,
+and saw a number of boxes arranged in a semicircle on a green, which was,
+as it were, suspended between the height of the terrace and the sea.
+Suddenly one of the boxes collapsed with a rattle, and a bird flew out of
+the ruin of it. There were two reports of a gun; the bird, its curving
+flight cut short, fell fluttering to the grass; a dog trotted out from
+the direction of the gun unseen beneath us, and disappeared again with
+the mass of ruffled feathers in its mouth. Then two men showed
+themselves, ran to the collapsed box, restored it, and put in it a fresh
+victim, and disappeared after the dog. I was horrified, but I could not
+remove my eyes from the green. Another box fell flat, and another bird
+flew out; a gun sounded; the bird soared far away, wavered, and sank on
+to the surface of the sea, and the boats converged towards it in furious
+haste. So the game proceeded. I saw a dozen deaths on the green; a few
+birds fell into the sea, and one escaped, settling ultimately on the roof
+of the Casino.
+
+'So that is pigeon-shooting,' I said coldly, turning to Frank. 'I suppose
+it goes on all day?'
+
+He nodded.
+
+'It's just as cruel as plenty of other sports, and no more,' he said, as
+if apologizing for the entire male sex.
+
+'I presume so,' I answered. 'But do you know, dear, if the idea once gets
+into my head that that is going on all day, I shan't be able to stop
+here. Let us have tea somewhere.'
+
+Not until dinner did I recover from the obsession of that continual
+slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the
+Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the
+mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot
+out all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now do I
+completely perceive how violent, how capricious and contradictory were
+my emotions in those unique and unforgettable hours.
+
+We dined late, because I had deprived myself of Yvonne. Already I was
+almost in a mind to send for her. The restaurant of the hotel was full,
+but we recognised no one as we walked through the room to our table.
+
+'There is one advantage in travelling about with you,' said Frank.
+
+'What is it?' I asked.
+
+'No matter where one is, one can always be sure of being with the most
+beautiful woman in the place.'
+
+I was content. I repaid him by being more than ever a man's woman. I
+knew that I was made for that. I understood why great sopranos have of
+their own accord given up even the stage on marriage. The career of
+literature seemed to me tedious and sordid in comparison with that of
+being a man's woman. In my rich black dress and my rings and bracelets I
+felt like an Eastern Empress; I felt that I could adequately reward
+homage with smiles, and love with fervid love. And I felt like a
+cat--idle, indolently graceful, voluptuously seeking warmth and
+caresses. I enveloped Frank with soft glances, I dazed him with glances.
+He ordered a wine which he said was fit for gods, and the waiter brought
+it reverently and filled our glasses, with a ritual of precautions.
+Later during the dinner Frank asked me if I would prefer champagne. I
+said, 'No, of course not.' But he said, 'I think you would,' and ordered
+some. 'Admit,' he said, 'that you prefer champagne.' 'Well, of course,'
+I replied. But I drank very little champagne, lest I should be too
+happy. Frank's wonderful face grew delicately flushed. The room
+resounded with discreet chatter, and the tinkle of glass and silver and
+porcelain. The upper part of it remained in shadow, but every table was
+a centre of rosy light, illuminating faces and jewels and napery. And in
+my sweet illusion I thought that every face had found the secret of joy,
+and that even the old had preserved it. Pleasure reigned. Pleasure was
+the sole goddess. And how satisfying then was the worship of her! Life
+had no inconveniences, no dark spots, no pitfalls. The gratification of
+the senses, the appeasing of appetites that instantly renewed
+themselves--this was the business of the soul. And as the wine sank
+lower in the bottles, and we cooled our tongues with ices, and the room
+began to empty, expectation gleamed and glittered in our eyes. At last,
+except a group of men smoking and talking in a corner, we were the only
+diners left.
+
+'Shall we go?' Frank said, putting a veil of cigarette smoke between us.
+
+I trembled. I was once more the young and timid girl. I could not
+speak. I nodded.
+
+In the hall was Vicary, talking to the head-porter. He saw us and
+started.
+
+'What! Vicary!' I murmured, suddenly cooled.
+
+'I want to speak to you,' said Vicary. 'Where can we go?'
+
+'This way,' Frank replied.
+
+We went to our sitting-room, silent and apprehensive.
+
+'Sit down,' said Vicary, shutting the door and standing against it.
+
+He was wearing a tourist suit, with a gray overcoat, and his grizzled
+hair was tumbling over his hard, white face.
+
+'What's the matter?' Frank asked. 'Anything wrong?'
+
+'Look here, you two,' said Vicary, 'I don't want to discuss your
+position, and I'm the last person in this world to cast the first stone;
+but it falls to me to do it. I was coming down to Nice to stay with my
+sisters, and I've come a little further. My sisters wired me they had
+seen you. I've been to Mentone, and driven here from there. I hoped I
+should get here earlier than the newspapers, and I have done, it seems.'
+
+'Earlier than the newspapers?' Frank repeated, standing up.
+
+'Try to keep calm,' Vicary continued. 'Your wife's body was found in the
+Thames at seven o'clock last night. The doctors say it had been in the
+water for forty-eight hours. Your servants thought she had gone to you.
+But doubtless some thoughtful person had told her that you two were
+wandering about Europe together.'
+
+'_My wife_' cried Frank.
+
+And the strange and terrible emphasis he put on the word 'wife' proved to
+me in the fraction of a second that in his heart I was not his wife. A
+fearful tragedy had swept away the structure of argument in favour of the
+rights of love which he had built over the original conventionality of
+his mind. Poor fellow!
+
+He fell back into his chair and covered his eyes.
+
+'I thank God my mother didn't live to see this!' he cried.
+
+And then he rushed to his bedroom and banged the door.
+
+'My poor girl!' said Vicary, approaching me. 'What can I--I'm awfully--'
+
+I waved him away.
+
+'What's that?' he exclaimed, in a different voice, listening.
+
+I ran to the bedroom, and saw Frank lifting a revolver.
+
+'You've brought me to this, Carlotta!' he shouted.
+
+I sprang towards him, but it was too late.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE VICTORY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+When I came out of the house, hurried and angrily flushing, I perceived
+clearly that my reluctance to break a habit and my desire for physical
+comfort, if not my attachment to the girl, had led me too far. I was
+conscious of humiliation. I despised myself. The fact was that I had
+quarrelled with Yvonne--Yvonne, who had been with me for eight years,
+Yvonne who had remained sturdily faithful during my long exile. Now the
+woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with
+a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or
+both. Possibly I was both. I had permitted Yvonne too much liberty. I had
+spoilt her. She was fidelity itself, goodness itself; but her character
+had not borne the strain of realizing that she had acquired power over
+me, and that she had become necessary to me. So that morning we had
+differed violently; we had quarrelled as equals. The worst side of her
+had appeared suddenly, shockingly. And she had left me, demonstrating
+even as she banged the door that she was at least my mistress in
+altercation. All day I fought against the temptation to eat my pride, and
+ask her to return. It was a horrible, a deplorable, temptation. And
+towards evening, after seven hours of solitude in the hotel in the Avenue
+de Kleber, I yielded to it. I knew the address to which she had gone, and
+I took a cab and drove there, hating myself. I was received with
+excessive rudeness by a dirty and hag-like concierge, who, after refusing
+all information for some minutes, informed me at length that the young
+lady in question had quitted Paris in company with a gentleman.
+
+The insolence of the concierge, my weakness and my failure, the bitter
+sense of lost dignity, the fact that Yvonne had not hesitated even a few
+hours before finally abandoning me--all these things wounded me. But the
+sharpest stab of all was that during our stay in Paris Yvonne must have
+had secret relations with a man. I had hidden nothing from her; she,
+however, had not reciprocated my candour. I had imagined that she lived
+only for me....
+
+Well, the truth cannot be concealed that the years of wandering which had
+succeeded the fatal night at Monte Carlo had done little to improve me.
+What would you have? For months and months my ears rang with Frank's
+despairing shout: '_You've_ brought me to this, Carlotta!' And the
+profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of my
+immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my inmost
+soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem
+inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what
+it means to be broken--to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming
+calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the
+afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert
+me; I deserted them. For the second time in my career I tore myself up by
+the roots. I lived the nomad's life, in the usual European haunts of the
+nomad. And in five years I did not make a single new friend, scarcely an
+acquaintance. I lived in myself and on myself, nursing grief, nursing a
+rancour against fate, nursing an involuntary shame.... You know, the
+scandal of which I had been the centre was appalling; it touched the
+extreme. It must have nearly killed the excellent Mrs. Sardis. I did not
+dare to produce another novel. But after a year or so I turned to poetry,
+and I must admit that my poetry was accepted. But it was not enough to
+prevent me from withering--from shrivelling. I lost ground, and I was
+still losing it. I was becoming sinister, warped, peculiar, capricious,
+unaccountable. I guessed it then; I see it clearly now.
+
+The house of the odious concierge was in a small, shabby street off the
+Boulevard du Montparnasse. I looked in vain for a cab. Even on the wide,
+straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had
+been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great,
+glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession,
+but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither
+they went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car. Without a cab I was
+as helpless and as timid as a young girl, I who was thirty-one, and had
+travelled and lived and suffered! Never had I been alone in the streets
+of a large city at night. And the September night was sultry and
+forbidding. I was afraid--I was afraid of the men who passed me, staring
+at me. One man spoke to me, and I literally shook with fear as I hastened
+on. What would I have given to have had the once faithful Yvonne by my
+side! Presently I came to the crossing of the Boulevard Raspail, and this
+boulevard, equally long, uncharitable, and mournful with the other,
+endless, stretching to infinity, filled me with horror. Yes, with the
+horror of solitude in a vast city. Oh, you solitary, you who have felt
+that horror descending upon you, desolating, clutching, and chilling the
+heart, you will comprehend me!
+
+At the corner, of the two boulevards was a glowing cafe, the Cafe du
+Dome, with a row of chairs and little tables in front of its windows. And
+at one of these little tables sat a man, gazing absently at a green glass
+in a white saucer. I had almost gone past him when some instinct prompted
+me to the bravery of looking at him again. He was a stoutish man,
+apparently aged about forty-five, very fair, with a puffed face and
+melancholy eyes. And then it was as though someone had shot me in the
+breast. It was as if I must fall down and die--as if the sensations which
+I experienced were too acute--too elemental for me to support. I have
+never borne a child, but I imagine that the woman who becomes a mother
+may feel as I felt then, staggered at hitherto unsuspected possibilities
+of sensation. I stopped. I clung to the nearest table. There was ice on
+my shuddering spine, and a dew on my forehead.
+
+'Magda!' breathed the man.
+
+He had raised his eyes to mine.
+
+It was Diaz, after ten years.
+
+At first I had not recognised him. Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years
+older. I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the
+returned traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered
+landmarks. Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him.
+The magic of his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth
+reappeared.
+
+'It is I,' I murmured.
+
+He got up, and in doing so shook the table, and his glass was overturned,
+and scattered itself in fragments on the asphalte. At the noise a waiter
+ran out of the cafe, and Diaz, blushing and obviously making a great
+effort at self-control, gave him an order.
+
+'I should have known you anywhere,' said Diaz to me, taking my hand, as
+the waiter went.
+
+The ineptitude of the speech was such that I felt keenly sorry for him. I
+was not in the least hurt. My sympathy enveloped him. The position was so
+difficult, and he had seemed so pathetic, sitting there alone on the
+pavement of the vast nocturnal boulevard, so weighed down by sadness,
+that I wanted to comfort him and soothe him, and to restore him to all
+the brilliancy of his first period. It appeared to me unjust and cruel
+that the wheels of life should have crushed him too. And so I said,
+smiling as well as I could:
+
+'And I you.'
+
+'Won't you sit down here?' he suggested, avoiding my eyes.
+
+And thus I found myself seated outside a cafe, at night, conspicuous for
+all Montparnasse to see. We never know what may lie in store for us at
+the next turning of existence.
+
+'Then I am not much changed, you think?' he ventured, in an anxious tone.
+
+'No,' I lied. 'You are perhaps a little stouter. That's all.'
+
+How hard it was to talk! How lamentably self-conscious we were! How
+unequal to the situation! We did not know what to say.
+
+'You are far more beautiful than ever you were,' he said, looking at me
+for an instant. 'You are a woman; you were a girl--then.'
+
+The waiter brought another glass and saucer, and a second waiter
+followed him with a bottle, from which he poured a greenish-yellow
+liquid into the glass.
+
+'What will you have?' Diaz asked me.
+
+'Nothing, thank you,' I said quickly.
+
+To sit outside the cafe was already much. It would have been impossible
+for me to drink there.
+
+'Ah! as you please, as you please,' Diaz snapped. 'I beg your pardon.'
+
+'Poor fellow!' I reflected. 'He must be suffering from nervous
+irritability.' And aloud, 'I'm not thirsty, thank you,' as nicely
+as possible.
+
+He smiled beautifully; the irritability had passed.
+
+'It's awfully kind of you to sit down here with me,' he said, in a lower
+voice. 'I suppose you've heard about me?'
+
+He drank half the contents of the glass.
+
+'I read in the papers some years ago that you were suffering from
+neurasthenia and nervous breakdown,' I replied. 'I was very sorry.'
+
+'Yes,' he said; 'nervous breakdown--nervous breakdown.'
+
+'You haven't been playing lately, have you?'
+
+'It is more than two years since I played. And if you had heard me that
+time! My God!'
+
+'But surely you have tried some cure?'
+
+'Cure!' he repeated after me. 'There's no cure. Here I am! Me!'
+
+His glass was empty. He tapped on the window behind us, and the
+procession of waiters occurred again, and Diaz received a third glass,
+which now stood on three saucers.
+
+'You'll excuse me,' he said, sipping slowly. 'I'm not very well to-night.
+And you've--Why did you run away from me? I wanted to find you, but I
+couldn't.'
+
+'Please do not let us talk about that,' I stopped him. 'I--I must go.'
+
+'Oh, of course, if I've offended you--'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I'm not at all offended. But I think--'
+
+'Then, if you aren't offended, stop a little, and let me see you home.
+You're sure you won't have anything?'
+
+I shook my head, wishing that he would not drink so much. I thought it
+could not be good for his nerves.
+
+'Been in Paris long?' he asked me, with a slightly confused utterance.
+'Staying in this quarter? Many English and Americans here.'
+
+Then, in setting down the glass, he upset it, and it smashed on the
+pavement like the first one.
+
+'Damn!' he exclaimed, staring forlornly at the broken glass, as if in the
+presence of some irreparable misfortune. And before I could put in a
+word, he turned to me with a silly smile, and approaching his face to
+mine till his hat touched the brim of my hat, he said thickly: 'After
+all, you know, I'm the greatish pianist in the world.'
+
+The truth struck me like a blow. In my amazing ignorance of certain
+aspects of life I had not suspected it. Diaz was drunk. The ignominy of
+it! The tragedy of it! He was drunk. He had fallen to the beast. I drew
+back from that hot, reeking face.
+
+'You don't think I am?' he muttered. 'You think young What's-his-name can
+play Ch--Chopin better than me? Is that it?'
+
+I wanted to run away, to cease to exist, to hide with my shame in some
+deep abyss. And there I was on the boulevard, next to this animal,
+sharing his table and the degradation! And I could not move. There are
+people so gifted that in a dilemma they always know exactly the wisest
+course to adopt. But I did not know. This part of my story gives me
+infinite pain to write, and yet I must write it, though I cannot persuade
+myself to write it in full; the details would be too repulsive.
+Nevertheless, forget not that I lived it.
+
+He put his face to mine again, and began to stammer something, and I
+drew away.
+
+'You are ashamed of me, madam,' he said sharply.
+
+'I think you are not quite yourself--not quite well,' I replied.
+
+'You mean I am drunk.'
+
+'I mean what I say. You are not quite well. Please do not twist my
+words.'
+
+'You mean I am drunk,' he insisted, raising his voice. 'I am not drunk;
+I have never been drunk. That I can swear with my hand on my heart. But
+you are ashamed of being seen with me.'
+
+'I think you ought to go home,' I suggested.
+
+'That is only to get rid of me!' he cried.
+
+'No, no,' I appealed to him persuasively. 'Do not wound me. I will go
+with you as far as your house, if you like. You are too ill to be alone.'
+
+At that moment an empty open cab strolled by, and, without pausing for
+his answer, I signalled the driver. My heart beat wildly. My spirit was
+in an uproar. But I was determined not to desert him, not to abandon him
+to a public disgrace. I rose from my seat.
+
+'You're very good,' he said, in a new voice.
+
+The cab had stopped.
+
+'Come!' I entreated him.
+
+He rapped uncertainly on the window, and then, as the waiter did not
+immediately appear, he threw some silver on the table, and aimed himself
+in the direction of the cab. I got in. Diaz slipped on the step.
+
+'I've forgotten somethin',' he complained. 'What is it? My umbrella--yes,
+my umbrella--_pepin_ as they say here. 'Scuse me moment.'
+
+His umbrella was, in fact, lying under a chair. He stooped with
+difficulty and regained it, and then the waiter, who had at length
+arrived, helped him into the cab, and he sank like a mass of inert clay
+on my skirts.
+
+'Tell the driver the address,' I whispered.
+
+The driver, with head turned and a grin on his face, was waiting.
+
+'Rue de Douai,' said Diaz sullenly.
+
+'What number?' the driver asked.
+
+'Does that regard you?' Diaz retorted crossly in French. 'I will tell
+you later.'
+
+'Tell him now,' I pleaded.
+
+'Well, to oblige you, I will. Twenty-seven. But what I can't stand is the
+impudence of these fellows.'
+
+The driver winked at me.
+
+'Just so,' I soothed Diaz, and we drove off.
+
+I have never been happier than in unhappiness. Happiness is not joy, and
+it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more
+disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realization of one's
+secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence.
+As I crossed Paris with the drunken Diaz leaning clumsily against my
+shoulder, I was profoundly unhappy. I was desolated by the sight of this
+ruin, and yet I was happier than I had been since Frank died. I had
+glimpses and intimations of the baffling essence of our human lives here,
+strange, fleeting comprehensions of the eternal wonder and the eternal
+beauty.... In vain, professional writer as I am, do I try to express
+myself. What I want to say cannot be said; but those who have truly lived
+will understand.
+
+We passed over the Seine, lighted and asleep in the exquisite Parisian
+night, and the rattling of the cab on the cobble-stones roused Diaz from
+his stupor.
+
+'Where are we?' he asked.
+
+'Just going through the Louvre,' I replied.
+
+'I don't know how I got to the other s-side of the river,' he said.
+'Don't remember. So you're coming home with me, eh? You aren't
+'shamed of me?'
+
+'You are hurting me,' I said coldly, 'with your elbow.'
+
+'Oh, a thousand pardons! a thous' parnds, Magda! That isn't your real
+name, is it?'
+
+He sat upright and turned his face to glance at mine with a fatuous
+smile; but I would not look at him. I kept my eyes straight in
+front. Then a swerve of the carriage swung his body away from me,
+and he subsided into the corner. The intoxication was gaining on him
+every minute.
+
+'What shall I do with him?' I thought.
+
+I blushed as we drove up the Avenue de l'Opera and across the Grand
+Boulevard, for it seemed to me that all the gay loungers must observe
+Diaz' condition. We followed darker thoroughfares, and at last the cab,
+after climbing a hill, stopped before a house in a street that appeared
+rather untidy and irregular. I got out first, and Diaz stumbled after me,
+while two women on the opposite side of the road stayed curiously to
+watch us. Hastily I opened my purse and gave the driver a
+five-franc-piece, and he departed before Diaz could decide what to say. I
+had told him to go.
+
+I did not wish to tell the driver to go. I told him in spite of myself.
+
+Diaz, grumbling inarticulately, pulled the bell of the great door of the
+house. But he had to ring several times before finally the door opened;
+and each second was a year for me, waiting there with him in the street.
+And when the door opened he was leaning against it, and so pitched
+forward into the gloom of the archway. A laugh--the loud, unrestrained
+laugh of the courtesan--came from across the street.
+
+The archway was as black as night.
+
+'Shut the door, will you?' I heard Diaz' voice. 'I can't see it.
+Where are you?'
+
+But I was not going to shut the door.
+
+'Have you got a servant here?' I asked him.
+
+'She comes in the mornings,' he replied.
+
+'Then there is no one in your flat?'
+
+'Not a shoul,' said Diaz. 'Needn't be 'fraid.'
+
+I'm not afraid,' I said. 'But I wanted to know. Which floor is it?'
+
+'Third. I'll light a match.'
+
+Then I pushed to the door, whose automatic latch clicked. We were fast in
+the courtyard.
+
+Diaz dropped his matches in attempting to strike one. The metal box
+bounced on the tiles. I bent down and groped with both hands till I found
+it. And presently we began painfully to ascend the staircase, Diaz
+holding his umbrella and the rail, and I striking matches from time to
+time. We were on the second landing when I heard the bell ring again, and
+the banging of the front-door, and then voices at the foot of the
+staircase. I trembled lest we should be over-taken, and I would have
+hurried Diaz on, but he would not be hurried. Happily, as we were halfway
+between the second and third story, the man and the girl whose voices I
+heard stopped at the second. I caught sight of them momentarily through
+the banisters. The man was striking matches as I had been. '_C'est ici_,'
+the girl whispered. She was dressed in blue with a very large hat. She
+put a key in the door when they had stopped, and then our matches went
+out simultaneously. The door shut, and Diaz and I were alone on the
+staircase again. I struck another match; we struggled on.
+
+When I had taken his key from Diaz' helpless hand, and opened his door
+and guided him within, and closed the door definitely upon the outer
+world, I breathed a great sigh. Every turn of the stair had been a
+station of the cross for me. We were now in utter darkness. The classical
+effluvium of inebriety mingled with the classical odour of the furnished
+lodging. But I cared not. I had at last successfully hidden his shame. No
+one could witness it now but me. So I was glad.
+
+Neither of us said anything as, still with the aid of matches, I
+penetrated into the flat. Silently I peered about until I perceived a
+pair of candles, which I lighted. Diaz, with his hat on his head and his
+umbrella clasped tightly in his hand, fell into a chair. We glanced at
+each other.
+
+'You had better go to bed,' I suggested. 'Take your hat off. You will
+feel better without it.'
+
+He did not move, and I approached him and gently took his hat. I then
+touched the umbrella.
+
+'No, no, no!' he cried suddenly; 'I'm always losing this umbrella, and I
+won't let it out of my sight.'
+
+'As you wish,' I replied coldly.
+
+I was standing by him when he got up with a surprising lurch and put a
+hand on my shoulder. He evidently meant to kiss me. I kept him at arm's
+length, feeling a sort of icy anger.
+
+'Go to bed,' I repeated fiercely. 'It is the only place for you.'
+
+He made inarticulate noises in his throat, and ultimately achieved
+the remark:
+
+'You're very hard, Magda.'
+
+Then he bent himself towards the next room.
+
+'You will want a candle,' I said, with bitterness. 'No; I will carry it.
+Let me go first.'
+
+I preceded him through a tiny salon into the bedroom, and, leaving him
+there with one candle, came back into the first room. The whole place was
+deplorable, though not more deplorable than I had expected from the look
+of the street and the house and the stairs and the girl with the large
+hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless,
+and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel--a
+kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings
+and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with
+enormous red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once
+been a carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with
+actually a bed! It was the ready-made human kennel of commerce, which
+every large city supplies wholesale in tens of thousands to its victims.
+In that street there were hundreds such; in the house alone there were
+probably a score at least. Their sole virtue was their privacy. Ah the
+blessedness of the sacred outer door, which not even the tyrant concierge
+might violate! I thought of all the other interiors of the house, floor
+above floor, and serried one against another--vile, mean, squalid,
+cramped, unlovely, frowsy, fetid; but each lighted and intensely alive
+with the interplay of hearts; each cloistered, a secure ground where the
+instincts that move the world might show themselves naturally and in
+secret. There was something tragically beautiful in that.
+
+I had heard uncomfortable sounds from the bedroom. Then Diaz called out:
+
+'It's no use. Can't do it. Can't get into bed.' I went directly to him.
+He sat on the bed, still clasping the umbrella, one arm out of his coat.
+His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man who retires baffled
+from some tremendously complicated problem.
+
+'Put down your umbrella,' I said. 'Don't be foolish.'
+
+'I'm not foolish,' he retorted irritably. 'Don't want to loosh thish
+umbrella again.'
+
+'Well then,' I said, 'hold it in the other hand, and I will help you.'
+
+This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that
+revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He
+was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty
+centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should
+exist--there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened, shut
+in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted.
+Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his
+mother. I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed,
+clutching the umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it
+from both hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one
+clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left
+him to his inanimate companion.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was
+prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs
+alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to
+get out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a
+cab in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to
+walk even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was,
+seated in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself
+in the vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful,
+passionate city in the night--the night when the commonest noises seem to
+carry some mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth
+walks abroad naked and whispers her secrets.
+
+A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of
+the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night,
+the lamp was extinguished by a careful municipality, and I was left in
+utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and
+sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with
+difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow--as if the city had not
+been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was
+about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up,
+and I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound
+disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz' bedroom. As of old,
+he slept with the tranquillity of a child.
+
+And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished
+floor under the table. The night had passed, and it appeared to be almost
+a miracle that the night had passed, and that I had lived through it and
+was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed
+back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in
+blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom.
+She went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more
+sane, more astringent. And yet only a few hours--and it had been night,
+strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were
+warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dreaming souls. But
+that tall woman must go to bed in day, and rise to meet the first wind of
+the morning, and perhaps never have known the sweet poison of the night.
+I sank back into my chair....
+
+There was a sharp, decisive sound of a key in the lock of the
+entrance-door. I jumped up, fully awake, with beating heart and blushing
+face. Someone was invading the flat. Someone would catch me there.
+
+Of course it was his servant. I had entirely forgotten her.
+
+We met in the little passage. She was a stout creature and appeared to
+fill the flat. She did not seem very surprised at the sight of me, and
+she eyed me with the frigid disdain of one who conforms to a certain code
+for one who does not conform to it. She sat in judgment on my well-hung
+skirt and the rings on my fingers and the wickedness in my breast, and
+condemned me to everlasting obloquy.
+
+'Madame is going?' she asked coldly, holding open the door.
+
+'No, madame,' I said. 'Are you the _femme de menage_ of monsieur?'
+
+'Yes, madame.'
+
+'Monsieur is ill,' I said, deciding swiftly what to do. 'He does not wish
+to be disturbed. He would like you to return at two o'clock.'
+
+Long before two I should have departed.
+
+'Monsieur knows well that I have another _menage_ from twelve to two,'
+protested the woman.
+
+'Three o'clock, then,' I said.
+
+_Bien_, madame,' said she, and, producing the contents of a reticule:
+'Here are the bread, the butter, the milk, and the newspaper, madame.'
+
+'Thank you, madame.'
+
+I took the things, and she left, and I shut the door and bolted it.
+
+In anticipation, the circumstances of such an encounter would have caused
+me infinite trouble of spirit. 'But after all it was not so very
+dreadful,' I thought, as I fastened the door. 'Do I care for his _femme
+de menage_?'
+
+The great door of the house would be open now, and the stairs no longer
+affrighting, and I might slip unobserved away. But I could not bring
+myself to leave until I had spoken with Diaz, and I would not wake him.
+It was nearly noon when he stirred. I heard his movements, and a slight
+moaning sigh, and he called me.
+
+'Are you there, Magda?'
+
+How feeble and appealing his voice!
+
+For answer I stepped into his bedroom.
+
+The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a quiver
+of the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is is the
+ordered and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be abhorrent,
+nothing blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In
+the presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we
+maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin and of justice? We are, and
+that is all we should dare to say. And yet, when I saw Diaz stretched on
+that wretched bed my first movement was one of physical disgust. He had
+not shaved for several days. His hair was like a doormat. His face was
+unclean and puffed; his lips full and cracked; his eyes all discoloured.
+If aught can be vile, he was vile. If aught can be obscene, he was
+obscene. His limbs twitched; his features were full of woe and desolation
+and abasement.
+
+He looked at me heavily, mournfully.
+
+'Diaz, Diaz!' said my soul. 'Have you come to this?'
+
+A great and overmastering pity seized me, and I went to him, and laid my
+hand gently on his. He was so nervous and tremulous that he drew away his
+hand as if I had burnt it.
+
+'Oh, Magda,' he murmured, 'my head! There was a piece of hot brick in my
+mouth, and I tried to take it out. But it was my tongue. Can I have some
+tea? Will you give me some cold water first?'
+
+Strange that the frank and simple way in which he accepted my presence
+there, and assumed my willingness to serve him, filled me with a new joy!
+He said nothing of the night. I think that Diaz was one of the few men
+who are strong enough never to regret the past. If he was melancholy, it
+was merely because he suffered bodily in the present.
+
+I gave him water, and he thanked me.
+
+'Now I will make some tea,' I said.
+
+And I went into the tiny kitchen and looked around, lifting my skirts.
+
+'Can you find the things?' he called out.
+
+'Yes,' I said.
+
+'What's all that splashing?' he inquired.
+
+'I'm washing a saucepan,' I said.
+
+'I never have my meals here,' he called. 'Only tea. There are two taps to
+the gas-stove--one a little way up the chimney.'
+
+Yes, I was joyous, actively so. I brought the tea to the bedroom with a
+glad smile. I had put two cups on the tray, which I placed on the
+night-table; and there were some biscuits. I sat at the foot of the bed
+while we drank. And the umbrella, unperceived by Diaz, lay with its
+handle on a pillow, ludicrous and yet accusing.
+
+'You are an angel,' said Diaz.
+
+'Don't call me that,' I protested.
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'Because I wish it,' I said. 'Angel' was Ispenlove's word.
+
+'Then, what shall I call you?'
+
+'My name is Carlotta Peel,' I said. 'Not Magdalen at all.'
+
+It was astounding, incredible, that he should be learning my name then
+for the first time.
+
+'I shall always call you Magda,' he responded.
+
+'And now I must go,' I stated, when I had explained to him about
+the servant.
+
+'But you'll come back?' he cried.
+
+No question of his coming to me! I must come to him!
+
+'To a place like this?' I demanded.
+
+Unthinkingly I put into my voice some of the distaste I felt for his
+deplorable apartments, and he was genuinely hurt. I believe that in all
+honesty he deemed his apartments to be quite adequate and befitting. His
+sensibilities had been so dulled.
+
+He threw up his head.
+
+'Of course,' he said, 'if you--'
+
+'No, no!' I stopped him quickly. 'I will come here. I was only teasing
+you. Let me see. I'll come back at four, just to see how you are. Won't
+you get up in the meantime?'
+
+He smiled, placated.
+
+'I may do,' he said. 'I'll try to. But in case I don't, will you take my
+key? Where did you put it last night?'
+
+'I have it,' I said.
+
+He summoned me to him just as I was opening the door.
+
+'Magda!'
+
+'What is it?'
+
+I returned.
+
+'You are magnificent,' he replied, with charming, impulsive eagerness,
+his eyes resting upon me long. He was the old Diaz again. 'I can't thank
+you. But when you come back I shall play to you.'
+
+I smiled.
+
+'Till four o'clock,' I said.
+
+'Magda,' he called again, just as I was leaving, 'bring one of your books
+with you, will you?'
+
+I hesitated, with my hand on the door. When I gave him my name he had
+made no sign that it conveyed to him anything out of the ordinary. That
+was exactly like Diaz.
+
+'Have you read any of them?' I asked loudly, without moving from the
+door.
+
+'No,' he answered. 'But I have heard of them.'
+
+'Really!' I said, keeping my tone free from irony. 'Well, I will not
+bring you one of my books.'
+
+'Why not?'
+
+I looked hard at the door in front of me.
+
+'For you I will be nothing but a woman,' I said.
+
+And I fled down the stairs and past the concierge swiftly into the
+street, as anxious as a thief to escape notice. I got a fiacre at once,
+and drove away. I would not analyze my heart. I could not. I could but
+savour the joy, sweet and fresh, that welled up in it as from some secret
+source. I was so excited that I observed nothing outside myself, and when
+the cab stopped in front of my hotel, it seemed to me that the journey
+had occupied scarcely a few seconds. Do you imagine I was saddened by the
+painful spectacle of Diaz' collapse in life? No! I only knew that he
+needed sympathy, and that I could give it to him with both hands. I could
+give, give! And the last thing that the egotist in me told me before it
+expired was that I was worthy to give. My longing to assuage the lot of
+Diaz became almost an anguish.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I returned at about half-past five, bright and eager, with vague
+anticipations. I seemed to have become used to the house. It no longer
+offended me, and I had no shame in entering it. I put the key into the
+door of Diaz' flat with a clear, high sense of pleasure. He had entrusted
+me with his key; I could go in as I pleased; I need have no fear of
+inconveniencing him, of coming at the wrong moment. It seemed wonderful!
+And as I turned the key and pushed open the door my sole wish was to be
+of service to him, to comfort him, to render his life less forlorn.
+
+'Here I am!' I cried, shutting the door.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+In the smaller of the two tiny sitting-rooms the piano, which had
+been closed, was open, and I saw that it was a Pleyel. But both rooms
+were empty.
+
+'Are you still in bed, then?' I said.
+
+There was still no answer.
+
+I went cautiously into the bedroom. It, too, was empty. The bed was made,
+and the flat generally had a superficial air of tidiness. Evidently the
+charwoman had been and departed; and doubtless Diaz had gone out, to
+return immediately. I sat down in the chair in which I had spent most of
+the night. I took off my hat and put it by the side of a tiny satchel
+which I had brought, and began to wait for him. How delicious it would be
+to open the door to him! He would notice that I had taken off my hat, and
+he would be glad. What did the future, the immediate future, hold for me?
+
+A long time I waited, and then I yawned heavily, and remembered that for
+several days I had had scarcely any sleep. I shut my eyes to relieve the
+tedium of waiting. When I reopened them, dazed, and startled into sudden
+activity by mysterious angry noises, it was quite dark. I tried to recall
+where I was, and to decide what the noises could be. I regained my
+faculties with an effort. The noises were a beating on the door.
+
+'It is Diaz,' I said to myself; 'and he can't get in!'
+
+And I felt very guilty because I had slept. I must have slept for hours.
+Groping for a candle, I lighted it.
+
+'Coming! coming!' I called in a loud voice.
+
+And I went into the passage with the candle and opened the door.
+
+It was Diaz. The gas was lighted on the stairs. Between that and my
+candle he stood conspicuous in all his details. Swaying somewhat, he
+supported himself by the balustrade, and was thus distant about two feet
+from the door. He was drunk--viciously drunk; and in an instant I knew
+the cruel truth concerning him, and wondered that I had not perceived it
+before. He was a drunkard--simply that. He had not taken to drinking as a
+consequence of nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdown was a euphemism for
+the result of alcoholic excess. I saw his slow descent as in a vision,
+and everything was explained. My heart leapt.
+
+'I can save him,' I said to myself. 'I can restore him.'
+
+I was aware of the extreme difficulty of curing a drunkard, of the
+immense proportion of failures. But, I thought, if a woman such as I
+cannot by the lavishing of her whole soul and body deliver from no matter
+what fiend a man such as Diaz, then the world has changed, and the
+eternal Aphrodite is dead.
+
+'I can save him!' I repeated.
+
+Oh, heavenly moment!
+
+'Aren't you coming in?' I addressed him quietly. 'I've been
+waiting for you.'
+
+'Have you?' he angrily replied. 'I waited long enough for you.'
+
+'Well,' I said, 'come in.'
+
+'Who is it?' he demanded. 'I inzizt--who is it?'
+
+'It's I,' I answered; 'Magda.'
+
+'That's no' wha' I mean,' he went on. 'And wha's more--you know it. Who
+is it addrezzes you, madame?'
+
+'Why,' I humoured him, 'it's you, of course--Diaz.'
+
+There was the sound of a door opening on one of the lower storeys, and I
+hoped I had pacified him, and that he would enter; but I was mistaken. He
+stamped his foot furiously on the landing.
+
+'Diaz!' he protested, shouting. 'Who dares call me Diaz? Wha's my
+full name?'
+
+'Emilio Diaz,' I murmured meekly.
+
+'That's better,' he grumbled. 'What am I?'
+
+I hesitated.
+
+'Wha' am I?' he roared; and his voice went up and down the echoing
+staircase. 'I won't put foot ev'n on doormat till I'm told wha' I am
+here.'
+
+'You are the--the master,' I said. 'But do come in.'
+
+'The mas'r! Mas'r of wha'?'
+
+'Master of the pianoforte,' I answered at once.
+
+He smiled, suddenly appeased, and put his foot unsteadily on the
+doormat.
+
+'Good!' he said. 'But, un'stan', I wouldn't ev'n have pu' foot on
+doormat--no, not ev'n on doormat--'
+
+And he came in, and I shut the door, and I was alone with my wild beast.
+
+'Kiss me,' he commanded.
+
+I kissed him on the mouth.
+
+'You don't put your arms roun' me,' he growled.
+
+So I deposited the candle on the floor, and put my arms round his neck,
+standing on tip-toe, and kissed him again.
+
+He went past me, staggering and growling, into the sitting-room at the
+end of the passage, and furiously banged down the lid of the piano, so
+that every cord in it jangled deafeningly.
+
+'Light the lamp,' he called out.
+
+'In one second,' I said.
+
+I locked the outer door on the inside, slipped the key into my pocket,
+and picked up the candle.
+
+'What were you doing out there?' he demanded.
+
+'Nothing,' I said. 'I had to pick the candle up.'
+
+He seized my hat from the table and threw it to the floor. Then
+he sat down.
+
+'Nex' time,' he remarked, 'you'll know better'n to keep me waiting.'
+
+I lighted a lamp.
+
+'I'm very sorry,' I said. 'Won't you go to bed?'
+
+'I shall go to bed when I want,' he answered. 'I'm thirsty. In the
+cupboard you'll see a bottle. I'll trouble you to give it me, with a
+glass and some water.'
+
+'This cupboard?' I said questioningly, opening a cupboard papered to
+match the rest of the wall.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'But surely you can't be thirsty, Diaz?' I protested.
+
+'Must I repea' wha' I said?' he glared at me. 'I'm thirsty. Give me
+the bottle.'
+
+I took out the bottle nearest to hand. It was of a dark green colour, and
+labelled 'Extrait d'Absinthe. Pernod fils.'
+
+'Not this one, Diaz?'
+
+'Yes,' he insisted. 'Give it me. And get a glass and some water.'
+
+'No,' I said firmly.
+
+'Wha'? You won't give it me?'
+
+'No.'
+
+He jumped up recklessly and faced me. His hat fell off the back
+of his head.
+
+'Give me that bottle!'
+
+His breath poisoned the room.
+
+I retreated in the direction of the window, and put my hand on the knob.
+
+'No,' I said.
+
+He sprang at me, but not before I had opened the window and thrown out
+the bottle. I heard it fall in the roadway with a crash and scattering of
+glass. Happily it had harmed no one. Diaz was momentarily checked. He
+hesitated. I eyed him as steadily as I could, closing the while the
+window behind me with my right hand.
+
+'He may try to kill me,' I thought.
+
+My heart was thudding against my dress, not from fear, but from
+excitement. My situation seemed impossible to me, utterly passing belief.
+Yesterday I had been a staid spinster, attended by a maid, in a hotel of
+impeccable propriety. Today I had locked myself up alone with a riotous
+drunkard in a vile flat in a notorious Parisian street. Was I mad? What
+force, secret and powerful, had urged me on?... And there was the foul
+drunkard, with clenched hands and fiery eyes, undecided whether or not to
+murder me. And I waited.
+
+He moved away, inarticulately grumbling, and resumed with
+difficulty his hat.
+
+'Ver' well,' he hiccupped morosely, 'ver' well; I'm going. Tha's all.'
+
+He lurched into the passage, and then I heard him fumbling a long time
+with the outer door. He left the door and went into his bedroom, and
+finally returned to me. He held one hand behind his back. I had sunk into
+a chair by the small table on which the lamp stood, with my satchel
+beside it.
+
+'Now!' he said, halting in front of me. 'You've locked tha' door. I
+can't go out.'
+
+'Yes,' I admitted.
+
+'Give me the key.'
+
+I shook my head.
+
+'Give me the key,' he cried. 'I mus' have the key.'
+
+I shook my head.
+
+Then he showed his right hand, and it held a revolver. He bent slightly
+over the table, staring down at me as I stared up at him. But as his chin
+felt the heat rising from the chimney of the lamp, he shifted a little to
+one side. I might have rushed for shelter into some other room; I might
+have grappled with him; I might have attempted to soothe him. But I could
+neither stir nor speak. Least of all, could I give him the key--for him
+to go and publish his own disgrace in the thoroughfares. So I just gazed
+at him, inactive.
+
+'I s'll kill you!' he muttered, and raised the revolver.
+
+My throat became suddenly dry. I tried to make the motion of swallowing,
+and could not. And looking at the revolver, I perceived in a swift
+revelation the vast folly of my inexperience. Since he was already drunk,
+why had I not allowed him to drink more, to drink himself into a stupor?
+Drunkards can only be cured when they are sober. To commence a course of
+moral treatment at such a moment as I had chosen was indeed the act of a
+woman. However, it was too late to reclaim the bottle from the street.
+
+I saw that he meant to kill me. And I knew that previously, during our
+encounter at the window, I had only pretended to myself that I thought
+there was a risk of his killing me. I had pretended, in order to increase
+the glory of my martyrdom in my own sight. Moreover, my brain, which was
+working with singular clearness, told me that for his sake I ought to
+give up the key. His exposure as a helpless drunkard would be infinitely
+preferable to his exposure as a murderer.
+
+Yet I could not persuade myself to relinquish the key. If I did so, he
+would imagine that he had frightened me. But I had no fear, and I could
+not bear that he should think I had.
+
+He fired.
+
+My ears sang. The room was full of a new odour, and a cloud floated
+reluctantly upwards from the mouth of the revolver. I sneezed, and then I
+grew aware that, firing at a distant of two feet, he had missed me. What
+had happened to the bullet I could not guess. He put the revolver down on
+the table with a groan, and the handle rested on my satchel.
+
+'My God, Magda!' he sighed, pushing back his hair with his
+beautiful hand.
+
+He was somewhat sobered. I said nothing, but I observed that the lamp was
+smoking, and I turned down the wick. I was so self-conscious, so
+irresolute, so nonplussed, that in sheer awkwardness, like a girl at a
+party who does not know what to do with her hands, I pushed the revolver
+off the satchel, and idly unfastened the catch of the satchel. Within it,
+among other things, was my sedative. I, too, had fallen the victim of a
+habit. For five years a bad sleeper, I had latterly developed into a very
+bad sleeper, and my sedative was accordingly strong.
+
+A notion struck me.
+
+'Drink a little of this, my poor Diaz!' I murmured.
+
+'What is it?' he asked.
+
+'It will make you sleep,' I said.
+
+With a convulsive movement he clutched the bottle and uncorked it, and
+before I could interfere he had drunk nearly the whole of its contents.
+
+'Stop!' I cried. 'You will kill yourself!'
+
+'What matter!' he exclaimed; and staggered off to the darkness of
+the bedroom.
+
+I followed him with the lamp, but he had already fallen on the bed, and
+seemed to be heavily asleep. I shook him; he made no response.
+
+'At any cost he must he roused,' I said aloud. 'He must be forced to
+walk.'
+
+There was a knocking at the outer door, low, discreet, and continuous. It
+sounded to me like a deliverance. Whoever might be there must aid me to
+waken Diaz. I ran to the door, taking the key out of my pocket, and
+opened it. A tall woman stood on the doormat. It was the girl that I had
+glimpsed on the previous night in the large hat ascending the stairs with
+a man. But now her bright golden head was uncovered, and she wore a blue
+_peignoir_, such as is sold ready made, with its lace and its ribbons, at
+all the big Paris shops.
+
+We both hesitated.
+
+'Oh, pardon, madame,' she said, in a thin, sweet voice in French. 'I was
+at my door, and it seemed to me that I heard--a revolver. Nothing serious
+has passed, then? Pardon, madame.'
+
+'Nothing, thank you. You are very amiable, madame,' I replied stiffly.
+
+'All my excuses, madame,' said she, turning away.
+
+'No, no!' I exclaimed. 'I am wrong. Do not go. Someone is ill--very ill.
+If you would--'
+
+She entered.
+
+'Where? What is it?' she inquired.
+
+'He is in the bedroom--here.'
+
+We both spoke breathlessly, hurrying to the bedroom, after I had
+fetched the lamp.
+
+'Wounded? He has done himself harm? Ah!'
+
+'No,' I said, 'not that.'
+
+And I explained to her that Diaz had taken at least six doses of my
+strong solution of trional.
+
+I seized the lamp and held it aloft over the form of the sleeper, which
+lay on its side cross-wise, the feet projecting a little over the edge
+of the bed, the head bent forward and missing the pillow, the arms
+stretched out in front--the very figure of abandoned and perfect
+unconsciousness. And the girl and I stared at Diaz, our shoulders
+touching, in the kennel.
+
+'He must be made to walk about,' I said. 'You would be extremely kind
+to help me.'
+
+'No, madame,' she replied. 'He will be very well like that. When one is
+alcoholic, one cannot poison one's self; it is impossible. All the
+doctors will tell you as much. Your friend will sleep for twenty
+hours--twenty-four hours--and he will waken himself quite
+re-established.'
+
+'You are sure? You know?'
+
+'I know, madame. Be tranquil. Leave him. He could not have done better.
+It is perfect.'
+
+'Perhaps I should fetch a doctor?' I suggested.
+
+'It is not worth the pain,' she said, with conviction. 'You would have
+vexations uselessly. Leave him.'
+
+I gazed at her, studying her, and I was satisfied. With her fluffly
+locks, and her simple eyes, and her fragile face, and her long hands,
+she had, nevertheless, the air of knowing profoundly her subject. She
+was a great expert on males and all that appertained to them, especially
+their vices. I was the callow amateur. I was compelled to listen with
+respect to this professor in the professor's garb. I was impressed, in
+spite of myself.
+
+'One might arrange him more comfortably,' she said.
+
+And we lifted the senseless victim, and put him on his back, and
+straightened his limbs, as though he had been a corpse.
+
+'How handsome he is!' murmured my visitor, half closing her eyes.
+
+'You think so?' I said politely, as if she had been praising one of my
+private possessions.
+
+'Oh yes. We are neighbours, madame. I have frequently remarked him, you
+understand, on the stairs, in the street.'
+
+'Has he been here long?' I asked.
+
+'About a year, madame. You have, perhaps, not seen him since a long time.
+An old friend?'
+
+'It is ten years ago,' I replied.
+
+'Ah! Ten years! In England, without doubt?'
+
+'In England, yes.'
+
+'Ten years!' she repeated, musing.
+
+'I am certain she has a kind heart,' I said to myself, and I decided to
+question her: 'Will you not sit down, madame?' I invited her.
+
+'Ah, madame! it is you who should sit down,' she said quickly. 'You must
+have suffered.'
+
+We both sat down. There were only two chairs in the room.
+
+'I would like to ask you,' I said, leaning forward towards her, 'have
+you ever seen him--drunk--before?'
+
+'No,' she replied instantly; 'never before yesterday evening.'
+
+'Be frank,' I urged her, smiling sadly.
+
+'Why should I not be frank, madame?' she said, with a grave,
+gentle appeal.
+
+It was as if she had said: 'We are talking woman to woman. I know one of
+your secrets. You can guess mine. The male is present, but he is deaf.
+What reason, therefore, for deceit?'
+
+'I am much obliged to you,' I breathed.
+
+'Not at all,' she said. 'Decidedly he is alcoholic--that sees itself,'
+she proceeded. 'But drunk--no!... He was always alone.'
+
+'Always alone?'
+
+'Always.'
+
+Her eyes filled. I thought I had never seen a creature more gentle,
+delicate, yielding, acquiescent, and fair. She was not beautiful, but she
+had grace and distinction of movement. She was a Parisienne. She had won
+my sympathy. We met in a moment when my heart needed the companionship of
+a woman's heart, and I was drawn to her by one of those sudden impulses
+that sometimes draw women to each other. I cared not what she was.
+Moreover, she had excited my curiosity. She was a novelty in my life.
+She was something that I had heard of, and seen--yes, and perhaps envied
+in secret, but never spoken with. And she shattered all my preconceptions
+about her.
+
+'You are an old tenant of this house?' I ventured.
+
+'Yes,' she said; 'it suits me. But the great heats are terrible here.'
+
+'You do not leave Paris, then?'
+
+'Never. Except to see my little boy.'
+
+I started, envious of her, and also surprised. It seemed strange that
+this ribboned and elegant and plastic creature, whose long, thin arms
+were used only to dalliance, should be a mother.
+
+'So you have a little boy?'
+
+'Yes; he lives with my parents at Meudon. He is four years old.
+
+'Excuse me,' I said. 'Be frank with me once again. Do you love your
+child, honestly? So many women don't, it appears.'
+
+'Do I love him?' she cried, and her face glowed with her love. 'I adore
+him!' Her sincerity was touching and overwhelming. 'And he loves me, too.
+If he is naughty, one has only to tell him that he will make his _petite
+mere_ ill, and he will be good at once. When he is told to obey his
+grandfather, because his grandfather provides his food, he says bravely:
+"No, not grandpapa; it is _petite mere_!" Is it not strange he should
+know that I pay for him? He has a little engraving of the Queen of Italy,
+and he says it is his _petite mere_. Among the scores of pictures he has
+he keeps only that one. He takes it to bed with him. It is impossible to
+deprive him of it.'
+
+She smiled divinely.
+
+'How beautiful!' I said. 'And you go to see him often?'
+
+'As often as I have time. I take him out for walks. I run with him till
+we reach the woods, where I can have him to myself alone. I never stop; I
+avoid people. No one except my parents knows that he is my child. One
+supposes he is a nurse-child, received by my parents. But all the world
+will know now,' she added, after a pause. 'Last Monday I went to Meudon
+with my friend Alice, and Alice wanted to buy him some sweets at the
+grocer's. In the shop I asked him if he would like _dragees_, and he said
+"Yes." The grocer said to him, "Yes who, young man?" "Yes, _petite
+mere_," he said, very loudly and bravely. The grocer understood. We all
+lowered our heads.'
+
+There was something so affecting in the way she half whispered the last
+phrase, that I could have wept; and yet it was comical, too, and she
+appreciated that.
+
+'You have no child, madame?' she asked me.
+
+'No,' I said. 'How I envy you!'
+
+'You need not,' she observed, with a touch of hardness. 'I have been so
+unhappy, that I can never be as unhappy again. Nothing matters now. All I
+wish is to save enough money to be able to live quietly in a little
+cottage in the country.'
+
+'With your child,' I put in.
+
+'My child will grow up and leave me. He will become a man, and he will
+forget his _petite mere.'_
+
+'Do not talk like that,' I protested.
+
+She glanced at me almost savagely. I was astonished at the sudden change
+in her face.
+
+'Why not?' she inquired coldly. 'Is it not true, then? Do you still
+believe that there is any difference between one man and another?
+They are all alike--all, all, all! I know. And it is we who suffer,
+we others.'
+
+'But surely you have some tender souvenir of your child's father?' I
+said.
+
+'Do I know who my child's father is?' she demanded. 'My child has
+thirty-six fathers!'
+
+'You seem very bitter,' I said, 'for your age. You are much younger
+than I am.'
+
+She smiled and shook her honey-coloured hair, and toyed with the ribbons
+of her _peignoir_.
+
+'What I say is true,' she said gently. 'But, there, what would you have?
+We hate them, but we love them. They are beasts! beasts! but we cannot do
+without them!'
+
+Her eyes rested on Diaz for a moment. He slept without the least sound,
+the stricken and futile witness of our confidences.
+
+'You will take him away from Paris soon, perhaps?' she asked.
+
+'If I can,' I said.
+
+There was a sound of light footsteps on the stair. They stopped at the
+door, which I remembered we had not shut. I jumped up and went into the
+passage. Another girl stood in the doorway, in a _peignoir_ the exact
+counterpart of my first visitor's, but rose-coloured. And this one, too,
+was languorous and had honey-coloured locks. It was as though the
+mysterious house was full of such creatures, each with her secret lair.
+
+'Pardon, madame,' said my visitor, following and passing me; and then to
+the newcomer: 'What is it, Alice?'
+
+'It is Monsieur Duchatel who is arrived.'
+
+'Oh!' with a disdainful gesture. '_Je m'en fiche._ Let him go.'
+
+'But it is the nephew, my dear; not the uncle.'
+
+'Ah, the nephew! I come. _Bon soir, madams, et bonne nuit_.'
+
+The two _peignoirs_ fluttered down the stairs together. I returned to my
+Diaz, and seeing his dressing-gown behind the door of the bedroom, I took
+it and covered him with it.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+His first words were:
+
+'Magda, you look like a ghost. Have you been sitting there like that all
+the time?'
+
+'No,' I said; 'I lay down.'
+
+'Where?'
+
+'By your side.'
+
+'What time is it?'
+
+'Tea-time. The water is boiling.
+
+'Was I dreadful last night?'
+
+'Dreadful? How?'
+
+'I have a sort of recollection of getting angry and stamping about. I
+didn't do anything foolish?'
+
+'You took a great deal too much of my sedative,' I answered.
+
+'I feel quite well,' he said; 'but I didn't know I had taken any
+sedative at all. I'm glad I didn't do anything silly last night.'
+
+I ran away to prepare the tea. The situation was too much for me.
+
+'My poor Diaz!' I said, when we had begun to drink the tea, and he was
+sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes full of sleep, his chin rough,
+and his hair magnificently disarranged, 'you did one thing that was silly
+last night.'
+
+'Don't tell me I struck you?' he cried.
+
+'Oh no!' and I laughed. 'Can't you guess what I mean?'
+
+'You mean I got vilely drunk.'
+
+I nodded.
+
+'Magda,' he burst out passionately, seeming at this point fully to arouse
+himself, to resume acutely his consciousness, 'why were you late? You
+said four o'clock. I thought you had deceived me. I thought I had
+disgusted you, and that you didn't mean to return. I waited more than an
+hour and a quarter, and then I went out in despair.'
+
+'But I came just afterwards,' I protested. 'You had only to wait a few
+more minutes. Surely you could have waited a few more minutes?'
+
+'You said four o'clock,' he repeated obstinately.
+
+'It was barely half-past five when I came,' I said.
+
+'I had meant never to drink again,' he went on.
+
+'You were so kind to me. But then, when you didn't come--'
+
+'You doubted me, Diaz. You ought to have been sure of me.'
+
+'I was wrong.'
+
+'No, no!' I said. 'It was I who was wrong. But I never thought that an
+hour and a half would make any difference.'
+
+There was a pause.
+
+'Ah, Magda, Magda!'--he suddenly began to weep; it was
+astounding--'remember that you had deserted me once before. Remember
+that. If you had not done that, my life might have been different. It
+_would_ have been different.'
+
+'Don't say so,' I pleaded.
+
+'Yes, I must say so. You cannot imagine how solitary my life has been.
+Magda, I loved you.'
+
+And I too wept.
+
+His accent was sincerity itself. I saw the young girl hurrying secretly
+out of the Five Towns Hotel. Could it be true that she had carried away
+with her, unknowing, the heart of Diaz? Could it be true that her panic
+flight had ruined a career? The faint possibility that it was true made
+me sick with vain grief.
+
+'And now I am old and forgotten and disgraced,' he said.
+
+'How old are you, Diaz?'
+
+'Thirty-six,' he answered.
+
+'Why,' I said, 'you have thirty years to live.'
+
+'Yes; and what years?'
+
+'Famous years. Brilliant years.'
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'I am done for--' he murmured, and his head sank.
+
+'Are you so weak, then?' I took his hand. 'Are you so weak? Look at me.'
+
+He obeyed, and his wet eyes met mine. In that precious moment I lived.
+
+'I don't know,' he said.
+
+'You could not have looked at me if you had not been strong, very
+strong,' I said firmly. 'You told me once that you had a house near
+Fontainebleau. Have you still got it?'
+
+'I suppose so.'
+
+'Let us go there, and--and--see.'
+
+'But--'
+
+'I should like to go,' I insisted, with a break in my voice.
+
+'My God!' he exclaimed in a whisper, 'my God!'
+
+I was sobbing violently, and my forehead was against the rough stuff
+of his coat.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+And one morning, long afterwards, I awoke very early, and the murmuring
+of the leaves of the forest came through the open window. I had known
+that I should wake very early, in joyous anticipation of that day. And
+as I lay he lay beside me, lost in the dreamless, boyish, natural sleep
+that he never sought in vain. He lay, as always, slightly on his right
+side, with his face a little towards me--his face that was young again,
+and from which the bane had passed. It was one of the handsomest,
+fairest faces in the world, one of the most innocent, and one of the
+strongest; the face of a man who follows his instincts with the direct
+simplicity of a savage or a child, and whose instincts are sane and
+powerful. Seen close, perfectly at rest, as I saw it morning after
+morning, it was full of a special and mysterious attraction. The fine
+curves of the nostrils and of the lobe of the ear, the masterful lines
+of the mouth, the contours of the cheek and chin and temples, the tints
+of the flesh subtly varying from rose to ivory, the golden crown of
+hair, the soft moustache. I had learned every detail by heart; my eyes
+had dwelt on them till they had become my soul's inheritance, till they
+were mystically mine, drawing me ever towards them, as a treasure draws.
+Gently moving, I would put my ear close, close, and listen to the breath
+of life as it entered regularly, almost imperceptibly, vivifying that
+organism in repose. There is something terrible in the still beauty of
+sleep. It is as though the spiritual fabric hangs inexplicably over the
+precipice of death. It seems impossible, or at least miraculous, that
+the intake and the expulsion upon which existence depends should
+continue thus, minute by minute, hour by hour. It is as though one stood
+on the very confines of life, and could one trace but one step more, one
+single step, one would unveil the eternal secret. I would not listen
+long; the torture was too sweet, too exquisite, and I would gently slide
+back to my place.... His hand was on the counterpane, near to my
+breast--the broad hand of the pianist, with a wrist of incredible force,
+and the fingers tapering suddenly at the end to a point. I let my own
+descend on it as softly as snow. Ah, ravishing contact! He did not move.
+And while my small hand touched his I gazed into the spaces of the
+bedroom, with its walls of faded blue tapestry and its white curtains,
+and its marble and rosewood, and they seemed to hold peace, as the
+hollows of a field hold dew; they seemed to hold happiness as a great
+tree holds sunlight in its branches; and outside was the murmuring of
+the leaves of the forest and the virginal freshness of the morning.
+
+Surely he must wake earlier that day! I pursed my lips and blew tenderly,
+mischievously, on his cheek, lying with my cheek full on the pillow, so
+that I could watch him. The muscles of his mouth twitched, his inner
+being appeared to protest. And then began the first instinctive blind
+movement of the day with him. His arms came forward and found my neck,
+and drew me forcibly to him, and then, just before our lips touched, he
+opened his eyes and shut them again. So it occurred every morning. Ere
+even his brain had resumed activity his heart had felt its need of me.
+This it was that was so wonderful, so overpowering! And the kiss, languid
+and yet warm, heavy with a human scent, with the scent of the night,
+honest, sensuous, and long--long! As I lay thus, clasped in his arms, I
+half closed my eyes, and looked into his eyes through my lashes, smiling,
+and all was a delicious blur....
+
+It was the summit of bliss! No! I have never mounted higher! I asked
+myself, astounded, what I had done that I should receive such happiness,
+what I had done that existence should have no flaw for me. And what _had_
+I done? I know not, I know not. It passes me. I am lost in my joy. For I
+had not even cured him. I had anticipated painful scenes, interminable
+struggles, perhaps a relapse. But nothing of the kind. He had simply
+ceased at once the habit--that was all. We never left each other. And his
+magnificent constitution had perfectly recovered itself in a few months.
+I had done nothing.
+
+'Magda,' he murmured indistinctly, drawing his mouth an inch away from
+mine, 'why can't your dark hair always be loose over your shoulders like
+that? It is glorious!'
+
+'What ideas you have!' I murmured, more softly than he. 'And do you know
+what it is to-day?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'You've forgotten?' I pouted.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Guess.'
+
+'No; you must tell me. Not your birthday? Not mine?'
+
+'It's just a year since I met you,' I whispered timidly.
+
+Our mouths met again, and, so enlocked, we rested, savouring the true
+savour of life. And presently my hand stole up to his head and stroked
+his curls.
+
+Every morning he began to practise at eight o'clock, and continued till
+eleven. The piano, a Steinway in a hundred Steinways, was in the further
+of the two drawing-rooms. He would go into the room smoking a cigarette,
+and when he had thrown away the cigarette I would leave him. And as soon
+as I had closed the door the first notes would resound, slow and solemn,
+of the five-finger exercises with which he invariably commenced his
+studies. That morning, as often, I sat writing in the enclosed garden. I
+always wrote in pencil on my knee. The windows of the drawing-room were
+wide open, and Diaz' music filled the garden. The sheer beauty of his
+tone was such that to hear him strike even an isolated note gave
+pleasure. He created beauty all the time. His five-finger exercises were
+lovely patterns of sound woven with exact and awful deliberation. It
+seemed impossible that these should be the same bald and meaningless
+inventions which I had been wont to repeat. They were transformed. They
+were music. The material in which he built them was music itself,
+enchanting the ear as much by the quality of the tone as by the
+impeccable elegance of the form. To hear Diaz play a scale, to catch that
+measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal
+splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born--this was to
+perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine
+magic that is the soul of the divinest art. I used to believe that
+nothing could surpass the beauty of a scale, until Diaz, after writing
+formal patterns in the still air innumerably, and hypnotizing me with
+that sorcery, would pass suddenly to the repetition of fragments of Bach.
+And then I knew that hitherto he had only been trying to be more purely
+and severely mechanical than a machine, and that now the interpreter was
+at work. I have heard him repeat a passage fifty times--and so
+slowly!--and each rendering seemed more beautiful than the last; and it
+was more beautiful than the last. He would extract the final drop of
+beauty from the most beautiful things in the world. Washed, drenched in
+this circumambient ether of beauty, I wrote my verse. Perhaps it may
+appear almost a sacrilege that I should have used the practising of a
+Diaz as a background for my own creative activity. I often thought so.
+But when one has but gold, one must put it to lowly use. So I wrote, and
+he passed from Bach to Chopin.
+
+Usually he would come out into the garden for five minutes at half-past
+nine to smoke a cigarette, but that morning it had struck ten before the
+music ceased. I saw him. He walked absent-minded along the terrace in
+the strange silence that had succeeded. He was wearing his
+riding-breeches, for we habitually rode at eleven. And that morning I did
+not hide my work when he came. It was, in fact, finished; the time had
+arrived to disclose it. He stopped in front of me in the sunlight,
+utterly preoccupied with himself and his labours. He had the rapt look on
+his face which results from the terrible mental and spiritual strain of
+practising as he practised.
+
+'Satisfied?' I asked him.
+
+He frowned.
+
+'There are times when one gets rather inspired,' he said, looking at me,
+as it were, without seeing me. 'It's as if the whole soul gets into one's
+hands. That's what's wanted.'
+
+'You had it this morning?'
+
+'A bit.'
+
+He smiled with candid joy.
+
+'While I was listening--' I began.
+
+'Oh!' he broke in impulsively, violently, 'it isn't you that have to
+listen. It's I that have to listen. It's the player that has to listen.
+He's got to do more than listen. He's got to be _in_ the piano with his
+inmost heart. If he isn't on the full stretch of analysis the whole
+blessed time, he might just as well be turning the handle of a
+barrel-organ.'
+
+He always talked about his work during the little 'recess' which he took
+in the middle of the morning. He pretended to be talking to me, but it
+was to himself that he talked. He was impatient if I spoke.
+
+'I shall be greater than ever,' he proceeded, after a moment. And his
+attitude towards himself was so disengaged, so apart and aloof, so
+critically appreciative, that it was impossible to accuse him of egoism.
+He was, perhaps, as amazed at his own transcendent gift as any other
+person could be, and he was incapable of hiding his sensations. 'Yes,' he
+repeated; 'I think I shall be greater than ever. You see, a Chopin player
+is born; you can't make him. With Chopin it's not a question of
+intellect. It's all tone with Chopin--_tone_, my child, even in the most
+bravura passages. You've got to get it.'
+
+'Yes,' I agreed.
+
+He gazed over the tree-tops into the blue sky.
+
+'I may be ready in six months,' he said.
+
+'I think you will,' I concurred, with a judicial air. But I honestly
+deemed him to be more than ready then.
+
+Twelve months previously he had said: 'With six hours' practice a day
+for two years I shall recover what I have lost.'
+
+He had succeeded beyond his hopes.
+
+'Are you writing in that book?' he inquired carelessly as he threw down
+the cigarette and turned away.
+
+'I have just finished something,' I replied.
+
+'Oh!' he said, 'I'm glad you aren't idle. It's so boring.'
+
+He returned to the piano, perfectly incurious about what I did,
+self-absorbed as a god. And I was alone in the garden, with the
+semicircle of trees behind me, and the facade of the old house and its
+terrace in front. And lying on the lawn, just under the terrace, was
+the white end of the cigarette which he had abandoned; it breathed
+upwards a thin spiral of blue smoke through the morning sunshine, and
+then it ceased to breathe. And the music recommenced, on a different
+plane, more brilliantly than before. It was as though, till then, he
+had been laboriously building the bases of a tremendous triumphal arch,
+and that now the two wings met, dazzlingly, soaringly, in highest
+heaven, and the completed arch became a rainbow glittering in the face
+of the infinite. He played two of his great concert pieces, and their
+intricate melodies--brocaded, embroidered, festooned--poured themselves
+through the windows into the garden in a procession majestic and
+impassioned, perturbing the intent soul of the solitary listener,
+swathing her in intoxicating sound. It was the unique virtuoso born
+again, proudly displaying the ultimate sublime end of all those
+slow-moving exercises to which he had subdued his fingers. Not for ten
+years had I heard him play so.
+
+When we first came into the house I had said bravely to myself: 'His
+presence shall not deter me from practising as I have always done.' And
+one afternoon I had sat down to the piano full of determination to
+practise without fear of him, without self-consciousness. But before my
+hands had touched the keys shame took me, unreasoning, terror-struck
+shame, and I knew in an instant that while he lived I should never more
+play the piano. He laughed lightly when I told him, and I called myself
+silly. Yet now, as I sat in the garden, I saw how right I had been. And I
+wondered that I should ever have had the audacity even to dream of
+playing in his house; the idea was grotesque. And he did not ask me to
+play, save when there arrived new orchestral music arranged for four
+hands. Then I steeled myself to the ordeal of playing with him, because
+he wished to try over the music. And he would thank me, and say that
+pianoforte duets were always very enjoyable. But he did not pretend that
+I was not an amateur, and he never--thank God!--suggested that we should
+attempt _Tristan_ again....
+
+At last he finished. And I heard distantly the bell which he had rung for
+his glass of milk. And, remembering that I was not ready for the ride, I
+ran with guilty haste into the house and upstairs.
+
+The two bay horses were waiting, our English groom at their heads, when I
+came out to the porch. Diaz was impatiently tapping his boot with his
+whip. He was not in the least a sporting man, but he loved the sensation
+of riding, and the groom would admit that he rode passably; but he loved
+more to strut in breeches, and to imitate in little ways the sporting
+man. I had learnt to ride in order to please him.
+
+'Come along,' he exclaimed.
+
+His eyes said: 'You are always late.' And I was. Some people always know
+exactly what point they have reached in the maze and jungle of the day,
+just as mariners are always aware, at the back of their minds, of the
+state of the tide. But I was not born so.
+
+Diaz helped me to mount, and we departed, jingling through the gate and
+across the road into a glade of the forest, one of those long sandy
+defiles, banked on either side, and over-shadowed with tall oaks, which
+pierce the immense forest like rapiers. The sunshine slanted through the
+crimsoning leafwork and made irregular golden patches on the dark sand to
+the furthest limit of the perspective. And though we could not feel the
+autumn wind, we could hear it in the tree-tops, and it had the sound of
+the sea. The sense of well-being and of joy was exquisite. The beauty of
+horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and irrational as young
+girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange is that their vast strength
+does not seem incongruous with it. To be above that proud and lovely
+organism, listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nervous far beyond the
+human, to feel one's self almost part of it by intimate contact, to yield
+to it, and make it yield, to draw from it into one's self some of its
+exultant vitality--in a word, to ride--yes, I could comprehend Diaz' fine
+enthusiasm for that! I could share it when he was content to let the
+horses amble with noiseless hoofs over the soft ways. But when he would
+gallop, and a strong wind sprang up to meet our faces, and the earth
+shook and thundered, and the trunks of the trees raced past us, then I
+was afraid. My fancy always saw him senseless at the foot of a tree while
+his horse calmly cropped the short grass at the sides of the path, or
+with his precious hand twisted and maimed! And I was in agony till he
+reined in. I never dared to speak to him of this fear, nor even hint to
+him that the joy was worth less than the peril. He would have been angry
+in his heart, and something in him stronger than himself would have
+forced him to increase the risks. I knew him! ... Ah! but when we went
+gently, life seemed to be ideal for me, impossibly perfect! It seemed to
+contain all that I could ever have demanded of it.
+
+I looked at him sideways, so noble and sane and self-controlled. And the
+days in Paris had receded, far and dim and phantom-like. Was it
+conceivable that they had once been real, and that we had lived through
+them? And was this Diaz, the world-renowned darling of capitals, riding
+by me, a woman whom he had met by fantastic chance? Had he really hidden
+himself in my arms from the cruel stare of the world and the insufferable
+curiosity of admirers who, instead of admiring, had begun to pity? Had I
+in truth saved him? Was it I who would restore him to his glory? Oh, the
+astounding romance that my life had been! And he was with me! He shared
+my life, and I his! I wondered what would happen when he returned to his
+bright kingdom. I was selfish enough to wish that he might never return
+to his kingdom, and that we might ride and ride for ever in the forest.
+
+And then we came to a circular clearing, with an iron cross in the
+middle, where roads met, a place such as occurs magically in some ballade
+of Chopin's. And here we drew rein on the leaf-strewn grass, breathing
+quickly, with reddened cheeks, and the horses nosed each other, with long
+stretchings of the neck and rattling of bits.
+
+'So you've been writing again?' said Diaz, smiling quizzically.
+
+'Yes,' I answered. 'I've been writing a long time, but I haven't let
+_you_ know anything about it; and just to-day I've finished it.'
+
+'What is it--another novel?'
+
+'No; a little drama in verse.'
+
+'Going to publish it?'
+
+'Why, naturally.'
+
+Diaz was aware that I enjoyed fame in England and America. He was
+probably aware that my books had brought me a considerable amount of
+money. He had read some of my works, and found them excellent--indeed, he
+was quite proud of my talent. But he did not, he could not, take
+altogether seriously either my talent or my fame. I knew that he always
+regarded me as a child gracefully playing at a career. For him there was
+only one sort of fame; all the other sorts were shadows. A supreme
+violinist might, perhaps, approach the real thing, in his generous mind;
+but he was incapable of honestly believing that any fame compared with
+that of a pianist. The other fames were very well, but they were paste to
+the precious stone, gewgaws to amuse simple persons. The sums paid to
+sopranos struck him as merely ridiculous in their enormity. He could not
+be called conceited; nevertheless, he was magnificently sure that he had
+been, and still was, the most celebrated person in the civilized world.
+Certainly he had no superiors in fame, but he would not admit the
+possibility of equals. Of course, he never argued such a point; it was a
+tacit assumption, secure from argument. And with that he profoundly
+reverenced the great composers. The death of Brahms affected him for
+years. He regarded it as an occasion for universal sorrow. Had Brahms
+condescended to play the piano, Diaz would have turned the pages for him,
+and deemed himself honoured--him whom queens had flattered!
+
+'Did you imagine,' I began to tease him, after a pause, 'that while you
+are working I spend my time in merely existing?'
+
+'You exist--that is enough, my darling,' he said. 'Strange that a
+beautiful woman can't understand that in existing she is doing her
+life's work!'
+
+And he leaned over and touched my right wrist below the glove.
+
+'You dear thing!' I murmured, smiling. 'How foolish you can be!'
+
+'What's the drama about?' he asked.
+
+'About La Valliere,' I said.
+
+'La Valliere! But that's the kind of subject I want for my opera!'
+
+'Yes,' I said; 'I have thought so.'
+
+'Could you turn it into a libretto, my child?'
+
+'No, dearest.'
+
+'Why not?'
+
+'Because it already is a libretto. I have written it as such.'
+
+'For me?'
+
+'For whom else?'
+
+And I looked at him fondly, and I think tears came to my eyes.
+
+'You are a genius, Magda!' he exclaimed. 'You leave nothing undone for
+me. The subject is the very thing to suit Villedo.'
+
+'Who is Villedo?'
+
+'My jewel, you don't know who Villedo is! Villedo is the director of the
+Opera Comique in Paris, the most artistic opera-house in Europe. He used
+to beg me every time we met to write him an opera.'
+
+'And why didn't you?'
+
+'Because I had neither the subject nor the time. One doesn't write
+operas after lunch in hotel parlours; and as for a good libretto--well,
+outside Wagner, there's only one opera in the world with a good libretto,
+and that's _Carmen_.'
+
+Diaz, who had had a youthful operatic work performed at the Royal School
+of Music in London, and whose numerous light compositions for the
+pianoforte had, of course, enjoyed a tremendous vogue, was much more
+serious about his projected opera than I had imagined. He had frequently
+mentioned it to me, but I had not thought the idea was so close to his
+heart as I now perceived it to be. I had written the libretto to amuse
+myself, and perhaps him, and lo! he was going to excite himself; I well
+knew the symptoms.
+
+'You wrote it in that little book,' he said. 'You haven't got it in
+your pocket?'
+
+'No,' I answered. 'I haven't even a pocket.'
+
+He would not laugh.
+
+'Come,' he said--'come, let's see it.'
+
+He gathered up his loose rein and galloped off. He could not wait
+an instant.
+
+'Come along!' he cried imperiously, turning his head.
+
+'I am coming,' I replied; 'but wait for me. Don't leave me like
+that, Diaz.'
+
+The old fear seized me, but nothing could stop him, and I followed as
+fast as I dared.
+
+'Where is it?' he asked, when we reached home.
+
+'Upstairs,' I said.
+
+And he came upstairs behind me, pulling my habit playfully, in an effort
+to persuade us both that his impatience was a simulated one. I had to
+find my keys and unlock a drawer. I took the small, silk-bound volume
+from the back part of the drawer and gave it to him.
+
+'There!' I exclaimed. 'But remember lunch is ready.'
+
+He regarded the book.
+
+'What a pretty binding!' he said. 'Who worked it?'
+
+'I did.'
+
+'And, of course, your handwriting is so pretty, too!' he added, glancing
+at the leaves. '"La Valliere, an opera in three acts."'
+
+We exchanged a look, each of us deliciously perturbed, and then he ran
+off with the book.
+
+He had to be called three times from the garden to lunch, and he brought
+the book with him, and read it in snatches during the meal, and while
+sipping his coffee. I watched him furtively as he turned over the pages.
+
+'Oh, you've done it!' he said at length--'you've done it! You evidently
+have a gift for libretto. It is neither more nor less than perfect! And
+the subject is wonderful!'
+
+He rose, walked round the table, and, taking my head between his hands,
+kissed me.
+
+'Magda,' he said, 'you're the cleverest girl that was ever born.'
+
+'Then, do you think you will compose it?' I asked, joyous.
+
+'Do I think I will compose it! Why, what do you imagine? I've already
+begun. It composes itself. I'm now going to read it all again in the
+garden. Just see that I'm not worried, will you?'
+
+'You mean you don't want me there. You don't care for me any more.'
+
+It amused me to pretend to pout.
+
+'Yes,' he laughed; 'that's it. I don't care for you any more.'
+
+He departed.
+
+'Have no fear!' I cried after him. 'I shan't come into your horrid
+garden!'
+
+His habit was to resume his practice at three o'clock. The hour was then
+half-past one. I wondered whether he would allow himself to be seduced
+from the piano that afternoon by the desire to compose. I hoped not, for
+there could be no question as to the relative importance to him of the
+two activities. To my surprise, I heard the piano at two o'clock,
+instead of at three, and it continued without intermission till five.
+Then he came, like a sudden wind, on to the terrace where I was having
+tea. Diaz would never take afternoon tea. He seized my hand impulsively.
+
+'Come down,' he said--'down under the trees there.'
+
+'What for?'
+
+'I want you.'
+
+'But, Diaz, let me put my cup down. I shall spill the tea on my dress.'
+
+'I'll take your cup.'
+
+'And I haven't nearly finished my tea, either. And you're hurting me.'
+
+'I'll bring you a fresh cup,' he said. 'Come, come!'
+
+And he dragged me off, laughing, to the lower part of the garden, where
+were two chairs in the shade. And I allowed myself to be dragged.
+
+'There! Sit down. Don't move. I'll fetch your tea.'
+
+And presently he returned with the cup.
+
+'Now that you've nearly killed me,' I said, 'and spoilt my dress, perhaps
+you'll explain.'
+
+He produced the silk-bound book of manuscript from his pocket and put it
+in my unoccupied hand.
+
+'I want you to read it to me aloud, all of it,' he said.
+
+'Really?'
+
+'Really.'
+
+'What a strange boy you are!' I chided.
+
+Then I drank the tea, straightened my features into seriousness, and
+began to read.
+
+The reading occupied less than an hour. He made no remark when it was
+done, but held out his hand for the book, and went out for a walk. At
+dinner he was silent till the servants had gone. Then he said musingly:
+
+'That scene in the cloisters between Louise and De Montespan is a great
+idea. It will be magnificent; it will be the finest thing in the opera.
+What a subject you have found! what a subject!' His tone altered. 'Magda,
+will you do something to oblige me?'
+
+'If it isn't foolish.'
+
+'I want you to go to bed.'
+
+'Out of the way?' I smiled.
+
+'Go to bed and to sleep,' he repeated.
+
+'But why?'
+
+'I want to walk about this floor. I must be alone.'
+
+'Well,' I said, 'just to prove how humble and obedient I am, I will go.'
+
+And I held up my mouth to be kissed.
+
+Wondrous, the joy I found in playing the decorative, acquiescent,
+self-effacing woman to him, the pretty, pouting plaything! I liked him to
+dismiss me, as the soldier dismisses his charmer at the sound of the
+bugle. I liked to think upon his obvious conviction that the libretto was
+less than nothing compared to the music. I liked him to regard the whole
+artistic productivity of my life as the engaging foible of a pretty
+woman. I liked him to forget that I had brought him alive out of Paris. I
+liked him to forget to mention marriage to me. In a word, he was Diaz,
+and I was his.
+
+And as I lay in bed I even tried to go to sleep, in my obedience, because
+I knew he would wish it. But I could not easily sleep for anticipating
+his triumph of the early future. His habits of composition were extremely
+rapid. It might well occur that he would write the entire opera in a few
+months, without at all sacrificing the piano. And naturally any operatic
+manager would be loath to refuse an opera signed by Diaz. Villedo,
+apparently so famous, would be sure to accept it, and probably would
+produce it at once. And Diaz would have a double triumph, a dazzling and
+gorgeous re-entry into the world. He might give his first recital in the
+same week as the _premiere_ of the opera. And thus his shame would never
+be really known to the artistic multitude. The legend of a nervous
+collapse could be insisted on, and the opera itself would form a
+sufficient excuse for his retirement.... And I should be the secret cause
+of all this glory--I alone! And no one would ever guess what Diaz owed to
+me. Diaz himself would never appreciate it. I alone, withdrawn from the
+common gaze, like a woman of the East, Diaz' secret fountain of strength
+and balm--I alone should be aware of what I had done. And my knowledge
+would be enough for me.
+
+I imagine I must have been dreaming when I felt a hand on my cheek.
+
+'Magda, you aren't asleep, are you?'
+
+Diaz was standing over me.
+
+'No, no!' I answered, in a voice made feeble by sleep. And I looked
+up at him.
+
+'Put something on and come downstairs, will you?'
+
+'What time is it?'
+
+'Oh, I don't know. One o'clock.'
+
+'You've been working for over three hours, then!'
+
+I sat up.
+
+'Yes,' he said proudly. 'Come along. I want to play you my notion of the
+overture. It's only in the rough, but it's there.'
+
+'You've begun with the overture?'
+
+'Why not, my child? Here's your dressing-gown. Which is the top
+end of it?'
+
+I followed him downstairs, and sat close by him at the piano, with one
+limp hand on his shoulder. There was no light in the drawing-rooms, save
+one candle on the piano. My slipper escaped off my bare foot. As Diaz
+played he looked at me constantly, demanding my approval, my enthusiasm,
+which I gave him from a full heart. I thought the music charming, and, of
+course, as he played it...!
+
+'I shall only have three motives,' he said. 'That's the La Valliere
+motive. Do you see the idea?'
+
+'You mean she limps?'
+
+'Precisely. Isn't it delightful?'
+
+'She won't have to limp much, you know. She didn't.'
+
+'Just the faintest suggestion. It will be delicious. I can see Morenita
+in the part. Well, what do you think of it?'
+
+I could not speak. His appeal, suddenly wistful, moved me so. I leaned
+forward and kissed him.
+
+'Dear girl!' he murmured.
+
+Then he blew out the candle. He was beside himself with excitement.
+
+'Diaz,' I cried, 'what's the matter with you? Do have a little sense.
+And you've made me lose my slipper.'
+
+'I'll carry you upstairs,' he replied gaily.
+
+A faint illumination came from the hall, so that we could just see each
+other. He lifted me off the chair.
+
+'No!' I protested, laughing. 'And my slipper.... The servants!'
+
+'Stuff!'
+
+I was a trifle in those arms.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+The triumphal re-entry into the world has just begun, and exactly as Diaz
+foretold. And the life of the forest is over. We have come to Paris, and
+he has taken Paris, and already he is leaving it for other shores, and I
+am to follow. At this moment, while I write because I have not slept and
+cannot sleep, his train rolls out of St. Lazare.
+
+Last night! How glorious! But he is no longer wholly mine. The world has
+turned his face a little from my face....
+
+It was as if I had never before realized the dazzling significance of
+the fame of Diaz. I had only once seen him in public. And though he
+conquered in the Jubilee Hall of the Five Towns, his victory, personal
+and artistic, at the Opera Comique, before an audience as exacting,
+haughty, and experienced as any in Europe, was, of course, infinitely
+more striking--a victory worthy of a Diaz.
+
+I sat alone and hidden at the back of a _baignoire_ in the auditorium. I
+had drawn up the golden grille, by which the occupants of a _baignoire_
+may screen themselves from the curiosity of the _parterre_. I felt like
+some caged Eastern odalisque, and I liked so to feel. I liked to exist
+solely for him, to be mysterious, and to baffle the general gaze in order
+to be more precious to him. Ah, how I had changed! How he had changed me!
+
+It was Thursday, a subscription night, and, in addition, all Paris was in
+the theatre, a crowded company of celebrities, of experts, and of
+perfectly-dressed women. And no one knew who I was, nor why I was there.
+The vogue of a musician may be universal, but the vogue of an English
+writer is nothing beyond England and America. I had not been to a
+rehearsal. I had not met Villedo, nor even the translator of my verse. I
+had wished to remain in the background, and Diaz had not crossed me. Thus
+I gazed through the bars of my little cell across the rows of bald heads,
+and wonderful coiffures, and the waving arms of the conductor, and the
+restless, gliding bows of the violinists, and saw a scene which was
+absolutely strange and new to me. And it seemed amazing that these
+figures which I saw moving and chanting with such grace in a palace
+garden, authentic to the last detail of historical accuracy, were my La
+Valliere and my Louis, and that this rich and coloured music which I
+heard was the same that Diaz had sketched for me on the piano, from
+illegible scraps of ruled paper, on the edge of the forest. The full
+miracle of operatic art was revealed to me for the first time.
+
+And when the curtain fell on the opening act, the intoxicating human
+quality of an operatic success was equally revealed to me for the first
+time. How cold and distant the success of a novelist compared to this!
+The auditorium was suddenly bathed in bright light, and every listening
+face awoke to life as from an enchantment, and flushed and smiled, and
+the delicatest hands in France clapped to swell the mighty uproar that
+filled the theatre with praise. Paris, upstanding on its feet, and
+leaning over balconies and cheering, was charmed and delighted by the
+fable and the music, in which it found nothing but the sober and pretty
+elegance that it loves. And Paris applauded feverishly, and yet with a
+full sense of the value of its applause--given there in the only French
+theatre where the claque has been suppressed. And then the curtain rose,
+and La Valliere and Louis tripped mincingly forward to prove that after
+all they were Morenita and Montferiot, the darlings of their dear Paris,
+and utterly content with their exclusively Parisian reputation. Three
+times they came forward. And then the applause ceased, for Paris is not
+Naples, and it is not Madrid, and the red curtain definitely hid the
+stage, and the theatre hummed with animated chatter as elegant as Diaz'
+music, and my ear, that loves the chaste vivacity of the French tongue,
+was caressed on every side by its cadences.
+
+'This is the very heart of civilization,' I said to myself. 'And even in
+the forest I could not breathe more freely.'
+
+I stared up absently at Benjamin Constant's blue ceiling, meretricious
+and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of Paris, and
+my eyes moistened because the world is so beautiful in such various ways.
+
+Then the door of the _baignoire_ opened. It was Diaz himself who
+appeared. He had not forgotten me in the excitements of the stage and
+the dressing-rooms. He put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and I
+glanced at him.
+
+'Well?' he murmured, and gave me a box of bonbons elaborately tied with
+rich ribbons.
+
+And I murmured, 'Well?'
+
+The glory of his triumph was upon him. But he understood why my eyes were
+wet, and his fingers moved soothingly on my shoulder.
+
+'You won't come round?' he asked. 'Both Villedo and Morenita are dying to
+meet you.'
+
+I shook my head, smiling.
+
+'You're satisfied?'
+
+'More than satisfied,' I answered. 'The thing is wonderful.'
+
+'I think it's rather charming,' he said. 'By the way, I've just had an
+offer from New York for it, and another from Rome.'
+
+I nodded my appreciation.
+
+'You don't want anything?'
+
+'Nothing, thanks,' I said, opening the box of bonbons, 'except these.
+Thanks so much for thinking of them.'
+
+'Well--'
+
+And he left me again.
+
+In the second act the legend--has not the tale of La Valliere acquired
+almost the quality of a legend?--grew in persuasiveness and in
+magnificence. It was the hour of La Valliere's unwilling ascendancy, and
+it foreboded also her fall. The situations seemed to me to be poignantly
+beautiful, especially that in which La Valliere and Montespan and the
+Queen found themselves together. And Morenita had perceived my meaning
+with such a sure intuition. I might say that she showed me what I had
+meant. Diaz, too, had given to my verse a voice than which it appeared
+impossible that anything could be more appropriate. The whole effect was
+astonishing, ravishing. And within me--far, far within the recesses of my
+glowing heart--a thin, clear whisper spoke and said that I, and I alone,
+was the cause of that beauty of sight and sound. Not Morenita, and not
+Montferiot, not Diaz himself, but Magda, the self-constituted odalisque,
+was its author. I had thought of it; I had schemed it; I had fashioned
+it; I had evoked the emotion in it. The others had but exquisitely
+embroidered my theme. Without me they must have been dumb and futile. On
+my shoulders lay the burden and the glory. And though I was amazed,
+perhaps naively, to see what I had done, nevertheless I had done it--I!
+The entire opera-house, that complicated and various machine, was simply
+a means to express me. And it was to my touch on their heartstrings that
+the audience vibrated. With all my humility, how proud I was--coldly and
+arrogantly proud, as only the artist can be! I wore my humility as I wore
+my black gown. Even Diaz could not penetrate to the inviolable place in
+my heart, where the indestructible egoism defied the efforts of love to
+silence it. And yet people say there is nothing stronger than love.
+
+At the close of the act, while the ringing applause, much more
+enthusiastic than before, gave certainty of a genuine and extraordinary
+success, I could not help blushing. It was as if I was in danger of being
+discovered as the primal author of all that fleeting loveliness, as if my
+secret was bound to get about, and I to be forced from my seclusion in
+order to receive the acclamations of Paris. I played nervously and
+self-consciously with my fan, and I wrapped my humility closer round me,
+until at length the tumult died away, and the hum of charming, eager
+chatter reassured my ears again.
+
+Diaz did not come. The entr'acte stretched out long, and the chatter lost
+some of its eagerness, and he did not come. Perhaps he could not come.
+Perhaps he was too much engaged, too much preoccupied, to think of the
+gallantry which he owed to his mistress. A man cannot always be dreaming
+of his mistress. A mistress must be reconciled to occasional neglect; she
+must console herself with chocolates. And they were chocolates from
+Marquis's, in the Passage des Panoramas....
+
+Then he came, accompanied.
+
+A whirl of high-seasoned, laughing personalities invaded my privacy.
+Diaz, smiling humorously, was followed by a man and a cloaked woman.
+
+'Dear lady,' he said, with an intimate formality, 'I present Mademoiselle
+Morenita and Monsieur Villedo. They insisted on seeing you. Mademoiselle,
+Monsieur--Mademoiselle Peel.'
+
+I stood up.
+
+'All our excuses,' said Villedo, in a low, discreet voice, as he
+carefully shut the door. 'All our excuses, madame. But it was necessary
+that I should pay my respects--it was stronger than I.'
+
+And he came forward, took my hand, and raised it to his lips. He is a
+little finicking man, with a little gray beard, and the red rosette in
+his button-hole, and a most consummate ease of manner.
+
+'Monsieur,' I replied, 'you are too amiable. And you, madame. I cannot
+sufficiently thank you both.'
+
+Morenita rushed at me with a swift, surprising movement, her cloak
+dropping from her shoulders, and taking both my hands, she kissed me
+impulsively.
+
+'You have genius,' she said; 'and I am proud. I am ashamed that I cannot
+read English; but I have the intention to learn in order to read your
+books. Our Diaz says wonderful things of them.'
+
+She is a tall, splendidly-made, opulent creature, of my own age, born for
+the footlights, with an extremely sweet and thrilling voice, and that
+slight coarseness or exaggeration of gesture and beauty which is the
+penalty of the stage. She did not in the least resemble a La Valliere as
+she stood there gazing at me, with her gleaming, pencilled eyes and
+heavy, scarlet lips. It seemed impossible that she could refine herself
+to a La Valliere. But that woman is the drama itself. She would act no
+matter what. She has always the qualities necessary to a role. And the
+gods have given her green eyes, so that she may be La Valliere to the
+very life.
+
+I began to thank her for her superb performance.
+
+'It is I who should thank you,' she answered. 'It will be my greatest
+part. Never have I had so many glorious situations in a part. Do you
+like my limp?'
+
+She smiled, her head on one side. Success glittered in those orbs.
+
+'You limp adorably,' I said.
+
+'It is my profession to make compliments,' Villedo broke in; and then,
+turning to Morenita, '_N'est-ce pas, ma belle creature_? But really'--he
+turned to me again--'but very sincerely, all that there is of most
+sincerely, dear madame, your libretto is made with a virtuosity
+astonishing. It is _du theatre_. And with that a charm, an emotion...!
+One would say--'
+
+And so it continued, the flattering stream, while Diaz listened, touched,
+and full of pride.
+
+'Ah!' I said. 'It is not I who deserve praise.'
+
+An electric bell trembled in the theatre.
+
+Morenita picked up her cloak.
+
+'_Mon ami_,' she warned Villedo. 'I must go. Diaz, _mon petit_! you will
+persuade Mademoiselle Peel to come to the room of the Directeur later.
+Madame, a few of us will meet there--is it not so, Villedo? We shall
+count on you, madame. You have hidden yourself too long.'
+
+I glanced at Diaz, and he nodded. As a fact, I wished to refuse; but I
+could not withstand the seduction of Morenita. She had a physical
+influence which was unique in my experience.
+
+'I accept,' I said.
+
+'_A tout a l'heure_, then,' she twittered gaily; and they left as they
+had come, Villedo affectionately toying with Morenita's hand.
+
+Diaz remained behind a moment.
+
+'I am so glad you didn't decline,' he said. 'You see, here in this
+theatre Morenita is a queen. I wager she has never before in all her life
+put herself out of the way as she has done for you to-night.'
+
+'Really!' I faltered.
+
+And, indeed, as I pondered over it, the politeness of these people
+appeared to be marvellous, and so perfectly accomplished. Villedo, who
+has made a European reputation and rejuvenated his theatre in a dozen
+years, is doubtless, as he said, a professional maker of compliments. In
+his position a man must be. But, nevertheless, last night's triumph is
+officially and very genuinely Villedo's. While as for Morenita and Diaz,
+the mere idea of these golden stars waiting on me, the librettist,
+effacing themselves, rendering themselves subordinate at such a moment,
+was fantastic. It passed the credible.... A Diaz standing silent and
+deferential, while an idolized prima donna stepped down from her throne
+to flatter me in her own temple! All that I had previously achieved of
+renown seemed provincial, insular.
+
+But Diaz took his own right place in the spacious salon of Villedo
+afterwards, after all the applause had ceased, and the success had been
+consecrated, and the enraptured audience had gone, and the lights were
+extinguished in the silent auditorium. It is a room that seems to be
+furnished with nothing but a grand piano and a large, flat writing-table
+and a few chairs. On the walls are numberless signed portraits of singers
+and composers, and antique playbills of the Opera Comique, together with
+strange sinister souvenirs of the great fires which have destroyed the
+house and its patrons in the past. When Diaz led me in, only Villedo and
+the principal artists and Pouvillon, the conductor, were present.
+Pouvillon, astonishingly fat, was sitting on the table, idly swinging the
+electric pendant over his head; while Morenita occupied Villedo's
+armchair, and Villedo talked to Montferiot and another man in a corner.
+But a crowd of officials of the theatre ventured on Diaz' heels. And then
+came Monticelli, the _premiere danseuse_, in a coat and skirt, and then
+some of her rivals. And as the terrible Director did not protest, the
+room continued to fill until it was full to the doors, where stood a
+semicircle of soiled, ragged scene-shifters and a few fat old women, who
+were probably dressers. Who could protest on such a night? The democracy
+of a concerted triumph reigned. Everybody was joyous, madly happy.
+Everybody had done something; everybody shared the prestige, and the rank
+and file might safely take generals by the hand.
+
+Diaz was then the centre of attraction. It was recognised that he had
+entered that sphere from a wider one, bringing with him a radiance
+brighter than he found there. He was divine last night. All felt that he
+was divine. He spoke to everyone with an admirable modesty, gaily, his
+eyes laughing. Several women kissed him, including Morenita. Not that I
+minded. In the theatre the code is different, coarser, more banal. He
+alone raised this crowd above its usual level and gave it distinction.
+
+Someone suggested that, as the piano was there, he should play, and
+the demand ran from mouth to mouth. Villedo, appreciating its
+audacity, made a gesture to indicate that such a thing could not be
+asked. But Diaz instantly said that, if it would give pleasure, he
+would play with pleasure.
+
+And he sat down to the piano, and looked round, smiling, and the room was
+hushed in a moment, and each face was turned towards him.
+
+'What?' he ejaculated. And then, as no definite recommendation was
+offered, he said: 'Do you wish that I improvise?'
+
+The idea was accepted with passionate, noisy enthusiasm.
+
+A cold perspiration broke out over my whole body. I must have turned
+very pale.
+
+'You are not ill, madame?' asked that ridiculous fop, Montferiot, who
+had been presented to me, and was whispering the most fatuous
+compliments.
+
+'No, I thank you.'
+
+The fact was that Diaz, since his retirement, had not yet played to
+anyone except myself. This was his first appearance. I was afraid for
+him. I trembled for him. I need not have done. He was absolutely master
+of his powers. His fingers announced, quite simply, one of the most
+successful airs from _La Valliere_, and then he began to decorate it with
+an amazing lacework of variations, and finished with a bravura display
+such as no pianist could have surpassed. The performance, marvellous in
+itself, was precisely suited to that audience, and it electrified the
+audience; it electrified even me. Diaz fought his way through kisses and
+embraces to Villedo, who stood on his toes and wept and put his arms
+round Diaz' neck.
+
+'_Cher maitre_,' he cried, 'you overwhelm us!'
+
+'You are too kind, all of you,' said Diaz. 'I must ask permission to
+retire. I have to conduct Mademoiselle Peel to her hotel, and there is
+much for me to do during the night. You know I start very early
+to-morrow.'
+
+'_Helas!_ Morenita sighed.
+
+I had blushed. Decidedly I behaved like a girl last night. But, indeed,
+the new, swift realization, as Diaz singled me out of that multitude,
+that after all he utterly belonged to me, that he was mine alone, was
+more than I could bear with equanimity. I was the proudest woman in the
+universe. I scorned the lot of all other women.
+
+The adieux were exchanged, and there were more kisses. '_Au revoir! Bon
+voyage_! Much success over there.'
+
+The majority of these good, generous souls were in tears.
+
+Villedo opened a side-door, and we escaped into a corridor, only Morenita
+and one or two others accompanying us to the street.
+
+And on the pavement a carpet had been laid. The electric brougham was
+waiting. I gathered up my skirt and sprang in. Diaz followed, smiling at
+me. He put his head out of the window and said a few words. Morenita blew
+a kiss. Villedo bowed profoundly. The carriage moved in the direction of
+the boulevard.... I had carried him off. Oh, the exquisite dark intimacy
+of the interior of that smooth-rolling brougham! When, after the theatre,
+a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory
+in the fact that she is his? Is it not the most delicious of avowals?
+There is something in the enforced bend of one's head as one steps in.
+And when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap--
+
+I wondered idly what Morenita and Villedo thought of our relations. They
+must surely guess.
+
+We went down the boulevard and by the Rue Royale into the Place de la
+Concorde, where vehicles flitted mysteriously in a maze of lights under
+the vast dome of mysterious blue. And Paris, in her incomparable toilette
+of a June night, seemed more than ever the passionate city of love that
+she is, recognising candidly, with the fearless intellectuality of the
+Latin temperament, that one thing only makes life worth living. How soft
+was the air! How languorous the pose of the dim figures that passed us
+half hidden in other carriages! And in my heart was the lofty joy of work
+done, definitely accomplished, and a vista of years of future pleasure.
+My happiness was ardent and yet calm--a happiness beyond my hopes, beyond
+what a mortal has the right to dream of. Nothing could impair it, not
+even Diaz' continued silence as to a marriage between us, not even the
+imminent brief separation that I was to endure.
+
+'My child,' said Diaz suddenly, 'I'm very hungry. I've never been
+so hungry.'
+
+'You surely didn't forget to have your dinner?' I exclaimed.
+
+'Yes, I did,' he admitted like a child; 'I've just remembered.'
+
+'Diaz!' I pouted, and for some strange reason my bliss was intensified,
+'you are really terrible! What can I do with you? You will eat before
+you leave me. I must see to that. We can get something for you at the
+hotel, perhaps.'
+
+'Suppose we go to a supper restaurant?' he said.
+
+Without waiting for my reply, he seized the dangling end of the
+speaking-tube and spoke to the driver, and we swerved round and regained
+the boulevard.
+
+And in the private room of a great, glittering restaurant, one of a long
+row of private rooms off a corridor, I ate strawberries and cream and
+sipped champagne while Diaz went through the entire menu of a supper.
+
+'Your eyes look sad,' he murmured, with a cigar between his teeth. 'What
+is it? We shall see each other again in a fortnight.'
+
+He was to resume his career by a series of concerts in the United States.
+A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents,
+had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and
+fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played
+at no concert before he played in New York. And in order to reach New
+York in time for the first concert, it was imperative that he should
+catch the _Touraine_ at Havre. I was to follow in a few days by a
+Hamburg-American liner. Diaz had judged it more politic that we should
+not travel together. In this he was undoubtedly right.
+
+I smiled proudly.
+
+'I am both sad and happy,' I answered.
+
+He moved his chair until it touched mine, and put his arm round my neck,
+and brought my face close to his.
+
+'Look at me,' he said.
+
+And I looked into his large, splendid eyes.
+
+'You mustn't think,' he whispered, 'that, because I don't talk about it,
+I don't feel that I owe everything to you.'
+
+I let my face fall on his breast. I knew I had flushed to the ears.
+
+'My poor boy,' I sobbed, 'if you talk about that I shall never
+forgive you.'
+
+It was heaven itself. No woman has ever been more ecstatically happy than
+I was then.
+
+He rang for the bill.
+
+We parted at the door of my hotel. In the carriage we had exchanged one
+long, long kiss. At the last moment I wanted to alter the programme, go
+with him to his hotel to assist in his final arrangements, and then see
+him off at early morning at the station. But he refused. He said he could
+not bear to part from me in public. Perhaps it was best so. Just as I
+turned away he put a packet into my hand. It contained seven banknotes
+for ten thousand francs each, money that it had been my delight to lend
+him from time to time. Foolish, vain, scrupulous boy! I knew not where he
+had obtained--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is now evening. Diaz is on the sea. While writing those last lines I
+was attacked by fearful pains in the right side, and cramp, so that I
+could not finish. I can scarcely write now. I have just seen the old
+English doctor. He says I have appendicitis, perhaps caused by pips of
+strawberries. And that unless I am operated on at once--And that even
+if--He is telephoning to the hospital. Diaz! No; I shall come safely
+through the affair. Without me Diaz would fall again. I see that now. And
+I have had no child. I must have a child. Even that girl in the blue
+_peignoir_ had a--Chance is a strange--
+
+_Extract translated from 'Le Temps,' the Paris Evening Paper_.
+
+OBSEQUIES OF MISS PELL (_sic_).
+
+The obsequies of Mademoiselle Pell, the celebrated English poetess, and
+author of the libretto of _La Valliere_, were celebrated this morning at
+eleven o'clock in the Church of St. Honore d'Eylau.
+
+The chief mourners were the doctor who assisted at the last moments of
+Mademoiselle Pell, and M. Villedo, director of the Opera-Comique.
+
+Among the wreaths we may cite those of the Association of Dramatic
+Artists, of Madame Morenita, of the management of the Opera-Comique, and
+of the artists of the Opera-Comique.
+
+Mass was said by a vicar of the parish, and general absolution given by
+M. le Cure Marbeau.
+
+During the service there was given, under the direction of M. Letang,
+chapel-master, the _Funeral March_ of Beethoven, the _Kyrie_ of
+Neidermeyer, the _Pie Jesu_ of Stradella, the _Ego Sum_ of Gounod, the
+_Libera Me_ of S. Rousseau.
+
+M. Deep officiated at the organ.
+
+After the ceremony the remains were transported to the cemetery of
+Pere-Lachaise and cremated.
+
+
+
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+  <head>
+    <meta content="pg2html (binary v0.17)" name="linkgenerator" />
+    <title>
+      Sacred and Profane Love, by Arnold Bennett
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .75em; margin-bottom: .75em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .xx-small {font-size: 60%;}
+    .x-small {font-size: 75%;}
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+  <pre>
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sacred And Profane Love , by E. Arnold Bennett
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Sacred And Profane Love
+
+Author: E. Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: February 28, 2004  [eBook #11360]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE ***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      A Novel In Three Episodes
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      By Arnold Bennett
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1905
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      TO MY FRIEND EDEN PHILLPOTTS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Novelist For Whom Man And Nature Are Inseparable With Profound Respect
+      For The Classical Dignity Of His Aim And Equal Admiration For The Austere
+      Splendour Of His Performance
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> PART I &mdash; IN THE NIGHT </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> PART II &mdash; THREE HUMAN HEARTS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> PART III &mdash; THE VICTORY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> II </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> III </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> IV </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> V </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> VI </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <i>&lsquo;How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women
+        of the <br /> past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have
+        opened for the <br /> kiss, and who are dead! The kiss&mdash;it is
+        immortal! It passes from lip to <br /> lip, from century to century, from
+        age to age. Men gather it, give it <br /> back, and die.&lsquo;</i>&mdash;GUY
+        DE MAUPASSANT. <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART I &mdash; IN THE NIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love&mdash;and by love I
+      mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul,
+      fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level
+      of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of my
+      twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in amorous
+      dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the
+      piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to
+      conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me:
+      warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round
+      on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and I
+      asked myself: &lsquo;Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?&rsquo;
+      For even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and
+      the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at
+      the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of those
+      rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort of
+      beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian room,
+      large and stately and symmetrical, full&mdash;but not too full&mdash;of
+      twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes, gilt
+      tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and here and
+      there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, recalled the Empire period and
+      the deserted Napoleonic palaces of France. The expanse of yellow and green
+      carpet had been married to the floor by two generations of decorous feet,
+      and the meaning of its tints was long since explained away. Never have I
+      seen a carpet with less individuality of its own than that carpet; it was
+      so sweetly faded, amiable, and flat, that its sole mission in the world
+      seemed to be to make things smooth for the chairs. The wall-paper looked
+      like pale green silk, and the candles were reflected in it as they were
+      reflected in the crystals of the chandelier. The grand piano, a Collard
+      and Collard, made a vast mass of walnut in the chamber, incongruous,
+      perhaps, but still there was something in its mild and indecisive tone
+      that responded to the furniture. It, too, spoke of Evangelicalism, the
+      Christian Year, and a dignified reserved confidence in Christ&rsquo;s
+      blood. It, too, defied the assault of time and the invasion of ideas. It,
+      too, protested against Chopin and romance, and demanded Thalberg&rsquo;s
+      variations on &lsquo;Home, Sweet Home.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My great-grandfather, the famous potter&mdash;second in renown only to
+      Wedgwood&mdash;had built that Georgian house, and my grandfather had
+      furnished it; and my parents, long since dead, had placidly accepted it
+      and the ideal that it stood for; and it had devolved upon my Aunt
+      Constance, and ultimately it would devolve on me, the scarlet woman in a
+      dress of virginal white, the inexplicable offspring of two changeless and
+      blameless families, the secret revolutionary, the living lie! How had I
+      come there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to the window, and, pulling the curtain aside, looked vaguely out
+      into the damp, black garden, from which the last light was fading. The
+      red, rectangular house stood in the midst of the garden, and the garden
+      was surrounded by four brick walls, which preserved it from four streets
+      where dwelt artisans of the upper class. The occasional rattling of a cart
+      was all we caught of the peaceable rumour of the town; but on clear nights
+      the furnaces of Cauldon Bar Ironworks lit the valley for us, and we were
+      reminded that our refined and inviolate calm was hemmed in by rude
+      activities. On the east border of the garden was a row of poplars, and
+      from the window I could see the naked branches of the endmost. A gas-lamp
+      suddenly blazed behind it in Acre Lane, and I descried a bird in the tree.
+      And as the tree waved its plume in the night-wind, and the bird swayed on
+      the moving twig, and the gas-lamp burned meekly and patiently beyond, I
+      seemed to catch in these simple things a glimpse of the secret meaning of
+      human existence, such as one gets sometimes, startlingly, in a mood of
+      idle receptiveness. And it was so sad and so beautiful, so full of an
+      ecstatic melancholy, that I dropped the curtain. And my thought ranged
+      lovingly over our household&mdash;prim, regular, and perfect: my old aunt
+      embroidering in the breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in the
+      impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion that
+      Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in fancy
+      all over the house&mdash;the attics, my aunt&rsquo;s bedroom so
+      miraculously neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the
+      corridors where clocks ticked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had the sense of the curious compact organism of which my aunt was the
+      head, and into which my soul had strayed by some caprice of fate. What I
+      felt was that the organism was suspended in a sort of enchantment,
+      lifelessly alive, unconsciously expectant of the magic touch which would
+      break the spell, and I wondered how long I must wait before I began to
+      live. I know now that I was happy in those serene preliminary years, but
+      nevertheless I had the illusion of spiritual woe. I sighed grievously as I
+      went back to the piano, and opened the volume of Mikuli&rsquo;s Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as I was beginning to play, Rebecca came into the room. She was a
+      maid of forty years, and stout; absolutely certain of a few things, and
+      quite satisfied in her ignorance of all else; an important person in our
+      house, and therefore an important person in the created universe, of which
+      our house was for her the centre. She wore the white cap with distinction,
+      and when an apron was suspended round her immense waist it ceased to be an
+      apron, and became a symbol, like the apron of a Freemason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, Rebecca?&rsquo; I said, without turning my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I guessed urgency, otherwise Rebecca would have delegated Lucy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If you please, Miss Carlotta, your aunt is not feeling well, and she will
+      not be able to go to the concert to-night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not be able to go to the concert!&rsquo; I repeated mechanically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, miss.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will come downstairs.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I were you, I shouldn&rsquo;t, miss. She&rsquo;s dozing a bit just
+      now.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Very well.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went on playing. But Chopin, who was the chief factor in my emotional
+      life; who had taught me nearly all I knew of grace, wit, and tenderness;
+      who had discovered for me the beauty that lay in everything, in sensuous
+      exaltation as well as in asceticism, in grief as well as in joy; who had
+      shown me that each moment of life, no matter what its import, should be
+      lived intensely and fully; who had carried me with him to the dizziest
+      heights of which passion is capable; whose music I spiritually
+      comprehended to a degree which I felt to be extraordinary&mdash;Chopin had
+      almost no significance for me as I played then the most glorious of his
+      compositions. His message was only a blurred sound in my ears. And
+      gradually I perceived, as the soldier gradually perceives who has been hit
+      by a bullet, that I was wounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shock was of such severity that at first I had scarcely noticed it.
+      What? My aunt not going to the concert? That meant that I could not go.
+      But it was impossible that I should not go. I could not conceive my
+      absence from the concert&mdash;the concert which I had been anticipating
+      and preparing for during many weeks. We went out but little, Aunt
+      Constance and I. An oratorio, an amateur operatic performance, a ballad
+      concert in the Bursley Town Hall&mdash;no more than that; never the
+      Hanbridge Theatre. And now Diaz was coming down to give a pianoforte
+      recital in the Jubilee Hall at Hanbridge; Diaz, the darling of European
+      capitals; Diaz, whose name in seven years had grown legendary; Diaz, the
+      Liszt and the Rubenstein of my generation, and the greatest interpreter of
+      Chopin since Chopin died&mdash;Diaz! Diaz! No such concert had ever been
+      announced in the Five Towns, and I was to miss it! Our tickets had been
+      taken, and they were not to be used! Unthinkable! A photograph of Diaz
+      stood in a silver frame on the piano; I gazed at it fervently. I said:
+      &lsquo;I will hear you play the Fantasia this night, if I am cut in pieces
+      for it to-morrow!&rsquo; Diaz represented for me, then, all that I desired
+      of men. All my dreams of love and freedom crystallized suddenly into Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran downstairs to the breakfast-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You aren&rsquo;t going to the concert, auntie?&rsquo; I almost sobbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat in her rocking-chair, and the gray woollen shawl thrown round her
+      shoulders mingled with her gray hair. Her long, handsome face was a little
+      pale, and her dark eyes darker than usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t feel well enough,&rsquo; she replied calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not observed the tremor in my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what&rsquo;s the matter?&rsquo; I insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing in particular, my dear. I do not feel equal to the exertion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, auntie&mdash;then I can&rsquo;t go, either.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m very sorry, dear,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;We will go to the
+      next concert.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz will never come again!&rsquo; I exclaimed passionately. &lsquo;And
+      the tickets will be wasted.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear,&rsquo; my Aunt Constance repeated, &lsquo;I am not equal to it.
+      And you cannot go alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was utterly selfish in that moment. I cared nothing whatever for my aunt&rsquo;s
+      indisposition. Indeed, I secretly accused her of maliciously choosing that
+      night of all nights for her mysterious fatigue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, auntie,&rsquo; I said, controlling myself, &lsquo;I must go, really.
+      I shall send Lucy over with a note to Ethel Ryley to ask her to go with
+      me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do,&rsquo; said my aunt, after a considerable pause, &lsquo;if you are
+      bent on going.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have often thought since that during that pause, while we faced each
+      other, my aunt had for the first time fully realized how little she knew
+      of me; she must surely have detected in my glance a strangeness, a
+      contemptuous indifference, an implacable obstinacy, which she had never
+      seen in it before. And, indeed, these things were in my glance. Yet I
+      loved my aunt with a deep affection. I had only one grievance against her.
+      Although excessively proud, she would always, in conversation with men,
+      admit her mental and imaginative inferiority, and that of her sex. She
+      would admit, without being asked, that being a woman she could not see
+      far, that her feminine brain could not carry an argument to the end, and
+      that her feminine purpose was too infirm for any great enterprise. She
+      seemed to find a morbid pleasure in such confessions. As regards herself,
+      they were accurate enough; the dear creature was a singularly good judge
+      of her own character. What I objected to was her assumption, so calm and
+      gratuitous, that her individuality, with all its confessed limitations,
+      was, of course, superior&mdash;stronger, wiser, subtler than mine. She
+      never allowed me to argue with her; or if she did, she treated my remarks
+      with a high, amused tolerance. &lsquo;Wait till you grow older,&rsquo; she
+      would observe, magnificently ignorant of the fact that my soul was already
+      far older than hers. This attitude naturally made me secretive in all
+      affairs of the mind, and most affairs of the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We took in the county paper, the <i>Staffordshire Recorder,</i> and the <i>Rock</i>
+      and the <i>Quiver</i>. With the help of these organs of thought, which I
+      detested and despised, I was supposed to be able to keep discreetly and
+      sufficiently abreast of the times. But I had other aids. I went to the
+      Girls&rsquo; High School at Oldcastle till I was nearly eighteen. One of
+      the mistresses there used to read continually a red book covered with
+      brown paper. I knew it to be a red book because the paper was gone at the
+      corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in
+      the book&mdash;she would pick it up at every spare moment&mdash;excited in
+      me an ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on
+      the title-page, <i>Introduction to the Study of Sociology</i>, by Herbert
+      Spencer. Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that
+      astonished and charmed me. I said: &lsquo;Why are not our school histories
+      like this?&rsquo; The owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it
+      to me, but she would not, nor would she give me any reason for declining.
+      Soon afterwards I left school. I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free
+      Library at the Wedgwood Institution. But the book was not in the
+      catalogue. (How often, in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the
+      reading-room, where men read the daily papers and the magazines, without
+      daring to enter!) At length I audaciously decided to buy the book. I
+      ordered it, not at our regular stationer&rsquo;s in Oldcastle Street, but
+      at a little shop of the same kind in Trafalgar Road. In three days it
+      arrived. I called for it, and took it home secretly in a cardboard
+      envelope-box. I went to bed early, and I began to read. I read all night,
+      thirteen hours. O book with the misleading title&mdash;for you have
+      nothing to do with sociology, and you ought to have been called <i>How to
+      Think Honestly</i>&mdash;my face flushed again and again as I perused your
+      ugly yellowish pages! Again and again I exclaimed: &lsquo;But this is
+      marvellous!&rsquo; I had not guessed that anything so honest, and so
+      courageous, and so simple, and so convincing had ever been written. I am
+      capable now of suspecting that Spencer was not a supreme genius; but he
+      taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing is sacred that
+      will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory. The next morning after
+      breakfast I fell asleep in a chair. &lsquo;My dear!&rsquo; protested Aunt
+      Constance. &lsquo;Ah,&rsquo; I thought, &lsquo;if you knew, Aunt
+      Constance, if you had the least suspicion, of the ideas that are surging
+      and shining in my head, you would go mad&mdash;go simply mad!&rsquo; I did
+      not care much for deception, but I positively hated clumsy concealment,
+      and the red book was in the house; at any moment it might be seized. On a
+      shelf of books in my bedroom was a novel called <i>The Old Helmet</i>,
+      probably the silliest novel in the world. I tore the pages from the
+      binding and burnt them; I tore the binding from Spencer and burnt it; and
+      I put my treasure in the covers of <i>The Old Helmet</i>. Once Rebecca, a
+      person privileged, took the thing away to read; but she soon brought it
+      back. She told me she had always understood that <i>The Old Helmet</i> was
+      more, interesting than that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, I discovered <i>The Origin of Species</i> in the Free Library. It
+      finished the work of corruption. Spencer had shown me how to think; Darwin
+      told me what to think. The whole of my upbringing went for naught
+      thenceforward. I lived a double life. I said nothing to my aunt of the
+      miracle wrought within me, and she suspected nothing. Strange and uncanny,
+      is it not, that such miracles can escape the observation of a loving
+      heart? I loved her as much as ever, perhaps more than ever. Thank Heaven
+      that love can laugh at reason!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for my intellectual inner life. My emotional inner life is less
+      easy to indicate. I became a woman at fifteen&mdash;years, interminable
+      years, before I left school. I guessed even then, vaguely, that my nature
+      was extremely emotional and passionate. And I had nothing literary on
+      which to feed my dreams, save a few novels which I despised, and the Bible
+      and the plays and poems of Shakespeare. It is wonderful, though, what good
+      I managed to find in those two use-worn volumes. I knew most of the Song
+      of Solomon by heart, and many of the sonnets; and I will not mince the
+      fact that my favourite play was <i>Measure for Measure</i>. I was an
+      innocent virgin, in the restricted sense in which most girls of my class
+      and age are innocent, but I obtained from these works many a lofty pang of
+      thrilling pleasure. They illustrated Chopin for me, giving precision and
+      particularity to his messages. And I was ashamed of myself. Yes; at the
+      bottom of my heart I was ashamed of myself because my sensuous being
+      responded to the call of these masterpieces. In my ignorance I thought I
+      was lapsing from a sane and proper ideal. And then&mdash;the second
+      miracle in my career, which has been full of miracles&mdash;I came across
+      a casual reference, in the <i>Staffordshire Recorder</i>, of all places,
+      to the <i>Mademoiselle de Maupin</i> of Théophile Gautier. Something in
+      the reference, I no longer remember what, caused me to guess that the book
+      was a revelation of matters hidden from me. I bought it. With the
+      assistance of a dictionary, I read it, nightly, in about a week. Except <i>Picciola</i>,
+      it was the first French novel I had ever read. It held me throughout; it
+      revealed something on nearly every page. But the climax dazzled and
+      blinded me. It was exquisite, so high and pure, so startling, so bold,
+      that it made me ill. When I recovered I had fast in my heart&rsquo;s
+      keeping the new truth that in the body, and the instincts of the body,
+      there should be no shame, but rather a frank, joyous pride. From that
+      moment I ceased to be ashamed of anything that I honestly liked. But I
+      dared not keep the book. The knowledge of its contents would have killed
+      my aunt. I read it again; I read the last pages several times, and then I
+      burnt it and breathed freely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was I, as I forced my will on my aunt in the affair of the concert.
+      And I say that she who had never suspected the existence of the real me,
+      suspected it then, when we glanced at each other across the
+      breakfast-room. Upon these apparent trifles life swings, as upon a pivot,
+      into new directions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat with my aunt while Lucy went with the note. She returned soon with
+      the reply, and the reply was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So sorry I can&rsquo;t accept your kind invitation. I should have liked
+      to go awfully. But Fred has got the toothache, and I must not leave him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The toothache! And my very life, so it seemed to me, hung in the balance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not hesitate one second.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hurrah!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;She can go. I am to call for her in the
+      cab.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I crushed the note cruelly, and threw it in the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell him to call at Ryleys&rsquo;,&rsquo; I said to Rebecca as she was
+      putting me and my dress into the cab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she told the cabman with that sharp voice of hers, always arrogant
+      towards inferiors, to call at Ryleys.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put my head out of the cab window as soon as we were in Oldcastle
+      Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Drive straight to Hanbridge,&rsquo; I ordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing was done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He was like his photograph, but the photograph had given me only the most
+      inadequate idea of him. The photograph could not render his extraordinary
+      fairness, nor the rich gold of his hair, nor the blue of his dazzling
+      eyes. The first impression was that he was too beautiful for a man, that
+      he had a woman&rsquo;s beauty, that he had the waxen beauty of a doll; but
+      the firm, decisive lines of the mouth and chin, the overhanging brows, and
+      the luxuriance of his amber moustache, spoke more sternly. Gradually one
+      perceived that beneath the girlish mask, beneath the contours and the
+      complexion incomparably delicate, there was an individuality intensely and
+      provocatively male. His body was rather less than tall, and it was
+      muscular and springy. He walked on to the platform as an unspoilt man
+      should walk, and he bowed to the applause as if bowing chivalrously to a
+      woman whom he respected but did not love. Diaz was twenty-six that year;
+      he had recently returned from a tour round the world; he was filled full
+      of triumph, renown, and adoration. As I have said, he was already
+      legendary. He had become so great and so marvellous that those who had
+      never seen him were in danger of forgetting that he was a living human
+      being, obliged to eat and drink, and practise scales, and visit his tailor&rsquo;s.
+      Thus it had happened to me. During the first moments I found myself
+      thinking, &lsquo;This cannot be Diaz. It is not true that at last I see
+      him. There must be some mistake.&rsquo; Then he sat down leisurely to the
+      piano; his gaze ranged across the hall, and I fancied that, for a second,
+      it met mine. My two seats were in the first row of the stalls, and I could
+      see every slightest change of his face. So that at length I felt that Diaz
+      was real, and that he was really there close in front of me, a seraph and
+      yet very human. He was all alone on the great platform, and the ebonized
+      piano seemed enormous and formidable before him. And all around was the
+      careless public&mdash;ignorant, unsympathetic, exigent, impatient, even
+      inimical&mdash;two thousand persons who would get value for their money or
+      know the reason why. The electric light and the inclement gaze of society
+      rained down cruelly upon that defenceless head. I wanted to protect it.
+      The tears rose to my eyes, and I stretched out towards Diaz the hands of
+      my soul. My passionate sympathy must have reached him like a beneficent
+      influence, of which, despite the perfect self-possession and
+      self-confidence of his demeanour, it seemed to me that he had need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had risked much that night. I had committed an enormity. No one but a
+      grown woman who still vividly remembers her girlhood can appreciate my
+      feelings as I drove from Bursley to Hanbridge in the cab, and as I got out
+      of the cab in the crowd, and gave up my ticket, and entered the glittering
+      auditorium of the Jubilee Hall. I was alone, at night, in the public
+      places, under the eye of the world. And I was guiltily alone. Every fibre
+      of my body throbbed with the daring and the danger and the romance of the
+      adventure. The horror of revealing the truth to Aunt Constance, as I was
+      bound to do&mdash;of telling her that I had lied, and that I had left my
+      maiden&rsquo;s modesty behind in my bedroom, gripped me at intervals like
+      some appalling and exquisite instrument of torture. And yet, ere Diaz had
+      touched the piano with his broad white hand, I was content, I was
+      rewarded, and I was justified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The programme began with Chopin&rsquo;s first Ballade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an imperative summons, briefly sustained, which developed into
+      an appeal and an invocation, ascending, falling, and still higher
+      ascending, till it faded and expired, and then, after a little pause, was
+      revived; then silence, and two chords, defining and clarifying the
+      vagueness of the appeal and the invocation. And then, almost before I was
+      aware of it, there stole forth from under the fingers of Diaz the song of
+      the soul of man, timid, questioning, plaintive, neither sad nor joyous,
+      but simply human, seeking what it might find on earth. The song changed
+      subtly from mood to mood, expressing that which nothing but itself could
+      express; and presently there was a low and gentle menace, thrice repeated
+      under the melody of the song, and the reply of the song was a proud cry, a
+      haughty contempt of these furtive warnings, and a sudden winged leap into
+      the empyrean towards the Eternal Spirit. And then the melody was lost in a
+      depth, and the song became turgid and wild and wilder, hysteric,
+      irresolute, frantically groping, until at last it found its peace and its
+      salvation. And the treasure was veiled in a mist of arpeggios, but one by
+      one these were torn away, and there was a hush, a pause, and a
+      preparation; and the soul of man broke into a new song of what it had
+      found on earth&mdash;the magic of the tenderness of love&mdash;an air so
+      caressing and so sweet, so calmly happy and so mournfully sane, so bereft
+      of illusions and so naïve, that it seemed to reveal in a few miraculous
+      phrases the secret intentions of God. It was too beautiful; it told me too
+      much about myself; it vibrated my nerves to such an unbearable spasm of
+      pleasure that I might have died had I not willed to live.... It gave place
+      momentarily to the song of the question and the search, but only to
+      return, and to return again, with a more thrilling and glorious assurance.
+      It was drowned in doubt, but it emerged triumphantly, covered with noble
+      and delicious ornaments, and swimming strongly on mysterious waves. And
+      finally, with speed and with fire, it was transformed and caught up into
+      the last ecstasy, the ultimate passion. The soul swept madly between earth
+      and heaven, fell, rose; and there was a dreadful halt. Then a loud blast,
+      a distortion of the magic, an upward rush, another and a louder blast, and
+      a thunderous fall, followed by two massive and terrifying chords....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was standing up and bowing to his public. What did they understand?
+      Did they understand anything? I cannot tell. But I know that they felt. A
+      shudder of feeling had gone through the hall. It was in vain that people
+      tried to emancipate themselves from the spell by the violence of their
+      applause. They could not. We were all together under the enchantment. Some
+      may have seen clearly, some darkly, but we were equal before the throne of
+      that mighty enchanter. And the enchanter bowed and bowed with a grave,
+      sympathetic smile, and then disappeared. I had not clapped my hands; I had
+      not moved. Only my full eyes had followed him as he left the platform; and
+      when he returned&mdash;because the applause would not cease&mdash;my eyes
+      watched over him as he came back to the centre of the platform. He stood
+      directly in front of me, smiling more gaily now. And suddenly our glances
+      met! Yes; I could not be mistaken. They met, and mine held his for several
+      seconds.... Diaz had looked at me. Diaz had singled me out from the crowd.
+      I blushed hotly, and I was conscious of a surpassing joy. My spirit was
+      transfigured. I knew that such a man was above kings. I knew that the
+      world and everything of loveliness that it contained was his. I knew that
+      he moved like a beautiful god through the groves of delight, and that what
+      he did was right, and whom he beckoned came, and whom he touched was
+      blessed. And my eyes had held his eyes for a little space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The enchantment deepened. I had read that the secret of playing Chopin had
+      died with Chopin; but I felt sure that evening, as I have felt sure since,
+      that Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have received
+      Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a superior. For Diaz
+      had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of the keyboard that
+      Chopin could not have possessed. Diaz had come to the front in a
+      generation of pianists who had lifted technique to a plane of which
+      neither Liszt nor Rubinstein dreamed. He had succeeded primarily by his
+      gigantic and incredible technique. And then, when his technique had
+      astounded the world, he had invited the world to forget it, as the glass
+      is forgotten through which is seen beauty. And Diaz&rsquo;s gift was now
+      such that there appeared to intervene nothing between his conception of
+      the music and the strings of the piano, so perfected was the mechanism.
+      Difficulties had ceased to exist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if they
+      were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they should
+      fall off. It was not so with Diaz. When Diaz played you experienced the
+      pure emotions caused by the unblurred contemplation of that beauty which
+      the great masters had created, and which Diaz had tinted with the rare
+      dyes of his personality. You forgot all but beauty. The piano was not a
+      piano; it was an Arabian magic beyond physical laws, and it, too, had a
+      soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Diaz laid upon us the enchantment of Chopin and of himself. Mazurkas,
+      nocturnes, waltzes, scherzos, polonaises, preludes, he exhibited to us in
+      groups those manifestations of that supreme spirit&mdash;that spirit at
+      once stern and tender, not more sad than joyous, and always sane, always
+      perfectly balanced, always preoccupied with beauty. The singular myth of a
+      Chopin decadent, weary, erratic, mournful, hysterical, at odds with fate,
+      was completely dissipated; and we perceived instead the grave artist
+      nourished on Bach and studious in form, and the strong soul that had dared
+      to look on life as it is, and had found beauty everywhere. Ah! how the air
+      trembled and glittered with visions! How melody and harmony filled every
+      corner of the hall with the silver and gold of sound! How the world was
+      changed out of recognition! How that which had seemed unreal became real,
+      and that which had seemed real receded to a horizon remote and
+      fantastic!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was playing the fifteenth Prelude in D flat now, and the water was
+      dropping, dropping ceaselessly on the dead body, and the beautiful calm
+      song rose serenely in the dream, and then lost itself amid the presaging
+      chords of some sinister fate, and came again, exquisite and fresh as ever,
+      and then was interrupted by a high note like a clarion; and while Diaz
+      held that imperious, compelling note, he turned his face slightly from the
+      piano and gazed at me. Several times since the first time our eyes had
+      met, by accident as I thought. But this was a deliberate seeking on his
+      part. Again I flushed hotly. Again I had the terrible shudder of joy. I
+      feared for a moment lest all the Five Towns was staring at me, thus
+      singled out by Diaz; but it was not so: I had the wit to perceive that no
+      one could remark me as the recipient of that hurried and burning glance.
+      He had half a dozen bars to play, yet his eyes did not leave mine, and I
+      would not let mine leave his. He remained moveless while the last chord
+      expired, and then it seemed to me that his gaze had gone further, had
+      passed through me into some unknown. The applause startled him to his
+      feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My thought was: &lsquo;What can he be thinking of me?... But hundreds of
+      women must have loved him!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the interval an attendant came on to the platform and altered the
+      position of the piano. Everybody asked: &lsquo;What&rsquo;s that for?&rsquo;
+      For the new position was quite an unusual one; it brought the tail of the
+      piano nearer to the audience, and gave a better view of the keyboard to
+      the occupants of the seats in the orchestra behind the platform. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+      a question of the acoustics, that&rsquo;s what it is,&rsquo; observed a
+      man near me, and a woman replied: &lsquo;Oh, I see!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Diaz returned and seated himself to play the Berceuse, I saw that he
+      could look at me without turning his head. And now, instead of flushing, I
+      went cold. My spine gave way suddenly. I began to be afraid; but of what I
+      was afraid I had not the least idea. I fixed my eyes on my programme as he
+      launched into the Berceuse. Twice I glanced up, without, however, moving
+      my head, and each time his burning blue eyes met mine. (But why did I
+      choose moments when the playing of the piece demanded less than all his
+      attention?) The Berceuse was a favourite. In sentiment it was simpler than
+      the great pieces that had preceded it. Its excessive delicacy attracted;
+      the finesse of its embroidery swayed and enraptured the audience; and the
+      applause at the close was mad, deafening, and peremptory. But Diaz was
+      notorious as a refuser of encores. It had been said that he would see a
+      hall wrecked by an angry mob before he would enlarge his programme. Four
+      times he came forward and acknowledged the tribute, and four times he went
+      back. At the fifth response he halted directly in front of me, and in his
+      bold, grave eyes I saw a question. I saw it, and I would not answer. If he
+      had spoken aloud to me I could not have more clearly understood. But I
+      would not answer. And then some power within myself, hitherto unsuspected
+      by me, some natural force, took possession of me, and I nodded my head....
+      Diaz went to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, brushing lightly the keys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The Prelude in F sharp,&rsquo; my thought ran. &lsquo;If he would play
+      that!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And instantly he broke into that sweet air, with its fateful hushed
+      accompaniment&mdash;the trifle which Chopin threw off in a moment of his
+      highest inspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is the thirteenth Prelude,&rsquo; I reflected. I was disturbed,
+      profoundly troubled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next piece was the last, and it was the Fantasia, the masterpiece of
+      Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Fantasia there speaks the voice of a spirit which has attained all
+      that humanity may attain: of wisdom, of power, of pride and glory. And now
+      it is like the roll of an army marching slowly through terrific defiles;
+      and now it is like the quiet song of royal wanderers meditating in vast
+      garden landscapes, with mossy masonry and long pools and cypresses, and a
+      sapphire star shining in the purple sky on the shoulder of a cypress; and
+      now it is like the cry of a lost traveller, who, plunging heavily through
+      a virgin forest, comes suddenly upon a green circular sward, smooth as a
+      carpet, with an antique statue of a beautiful nude girl in the midst; and
+      now it is like the oratory of richly-gowned philosophers awaiting death in
+      gorgeous and gloomy palaces; and now it is like the upward rush of winged
+      things that are determined to achieve, knowing well the while that the
+      ecstasy of longing is better than the assuaging of desire. And though the
+      voice of this spirit speaking in the music disguises itself so variously,
+      it is always the same. For it cannot, and it would not, hide the strange
+      and rare timbre which distinguishes it from all others&mdash;that quality
+      which springs from a pure and calm vision, of life. The voice of this
+      spirit says that it has lost every illusion about life, and that life
+      seems only the more beautiful. It says that activity is but another form
+      of contemplation, pain but another form of pleasure, power but another
+      form of weakness, hate but another form of love, and that it is well these
+      things should be so. It says there is no end, only a means; and that the
+      highest joy is to suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will
+      but live, it cries, that grave but yet passionate voice&mdash;if you will
+      but live! Were there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more
+      than live. The true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and
+      lose, and weep and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to
+      live, and blind your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of
+      existence....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, no; I cannot&mdash;I cannot describe further the experiences of my
+      soul while Diaz played. When words cease, music has scarcely begun. I know
+      now&mdash;I did not know it then&mdash;that Diaz was playing as perhaps he
+      had never played before. The very air was charged with exquisite emotion,
+      which went in waves across the hall, changing and blanching faces,
+      troubling hearts, and moistening eyes.... And then he finished. It was
+      over. In every trembling breast was a pang of regret that this spell, this
+      miracle, this divine revolution, could not last into eternity.... He stood
+      bowing, one hand touching the piano. And as the revolution he had
+      accomplished in us was divine, so was he divine. I felt, and many another
+      woman in the audience felt, that no reward could be too great for the
+      beautiful and gifted creature who had entranced us and forced us to see
+      what alone in life was worth seeing: that the whole world should be his
+      absolute dominion; that his happiness should be the first concern of
+      mankind; that if a thousand suffered in order to make him happy for a
+      moment, it mattered not; that laws were not for him; that if he sinned,
+      his sin must not be called a sin, and that he must be excused from remorse
+      and from any manner of woe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The applauding multitude stood up, and moved slightly towards the exits,
+      and then stopped, as if ashamed of this readiness to desert the sacred
+      temple. Diaz came forward three times, and each time the applause
+      increased to a tempest; but he only smiled&mdash;smiled gravely. I could
+      not see distinctly whether his eyes had sought mine, for mine were full of
+      tears. No persuasions could induce him to show himself a fourth time, and
+      at length a middle-aged man appeared and stated that Diaz was extremely
+      gratified by his reception, but that he was also extremely exhausted and
+      had left the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We departed, we mortals; and I was among the last to leave the auditorium.
+      As I left the lights were being extinguished over the platform, and an
+      attendant was closing the piano. The foyer was crowded with people waiting
+      to get out. The word passed that it was raining heavily. I wondered how I
+      should find my cab. I felt very lonely and unknown; I was overcome with
+      sadness&mdash;with a sense of the futility and frustration of my life.
+      Such is the logic of the soul, and such the force of reaction. Gradually
+      the foyer emptied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ‘You think I am happy,&rsquo; said Diaz, gazing at me with a smile
+      suddenly grave; &lsquo;but I am not. I seek something which I cannot find.
+      And my playing is only a relief from the fruitless search; only that. I am
+      forlorn.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You!&rsquo; I exclaimed, and my eyes rested on his, long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, we had met. Perhaps it had been inevitable since the beginning of
+      time that we should meet; but it was none the less amazing. Perhaps I had
+      inwardly known that we should meet; but, none the less, I was astounded
+      when a coated and muffled figure came up swiftly to me in the emptying
+      foyer, and said: &lsquo;Ah! you are here! I cannot leave without thanking
+      you for your sympathy. I have never before felt such sympathy while
+      playing.&rsquo; It was a golden voice, pitched low, and the words were
+      uttered with a very slight foreign accent, which gave them piquancy. I
+      could not reply; something rose in my throat, and the caressing voice
+      continued: &lsquo;You are pale. Do you feel ill? What can I do? Come with
+      me to the artists&rsquo; room; my secretary is there.&rsquo; I put out a
+      hand gropingly, for I could not see clearly, and I thought I should reel
+      and fall. It touched his shoulder. He took my arm, and we went; no one had
+      noticed us, and I had not spoken a word. In the room to which he guided
+      me, through a long and sombre corridor, there was no sign of a secretary.
+      I drank some water. &lsquo;There, you are better!&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;Thank
+      you,&rsquo; I said, but scarcely whispering. ‘How fortunate I ventured to
+      come to you just at that moment! You might have fallen&rsquo;; and he
+      smiled again. I shook my head. I said: &lsquo;It was your coming&mdash;that&mdash;that&mdash;made
+      me dizzy!&rsquo; &lsquo;I profoundly regret&mdash;&rsquo; he began. ‘No,
+      no,&rsquo; I interrupted him; and in that instant I knew I was about to
+      say something which society would, justifiably, deem unpardonable in a
+      girl situated as I was. &lsquo;I am so glad you came&rsquo;; and I smiled,
+      courageous and encouraging. For once in my life&mdash;for the first time
+      in my adult life&mdash;I determined to be my honest self to another.
+      &lsquo;Your voice is exquisitely beautiful,&rsquo; he murmured. I
+      thrilled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of what use to chronicle the steps, now halting, now only too hasty, by
+      which our intimacy progressed in that gaunt and echoing room? He asked me
+      no questions as to my identity. He just said that he would like to play to
+      me in private if that would give me pleasure, and that possibly I could
+      spare an hour and would go with him.... Afterwards his brougham would be
+      at my disposal. His tone was the perfection of deferential courtesy. Once
+      the secretary came in&mdash;a young man rather like himself&mdash;and they
+      talked together in a foreign language that was not French nor German; then
+      the secretary bowed and retired.... We were alone.... There can be no sort
+      of doubt that unless I was prepared to flout the wisdom of the ages, I
+      ought to have refused his suggestion. But is not the wisdom of the ages a
+      medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I was prepared to flout it, as in
+      our highest and our lowest moments we often are. Moreover, how many women
+      in my place, confronted by that divine creature, wooed by that wondrous
+      personality, intoxicated by that smile and that voice, allured by the
+      appeal of those marvellous hands, would have found the strength to resist?
+      I did not resist, I yielded; I accepted. I was already in disgrace with
+      Aunt Constance&mdash;as well be drowned in twelve feet of water as in six!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we drove rapidly away in the brougham, through the miry,
+      light-reflecting streets of Hanbridge in the direction of Knype. And the
+      raindrops ran down the windows of the brougham, and in the cushioned
+      interior we could see each other darkly. He did his best to be at ease,
+      and he almost succeeded. My feeling towards him, as regards the external
+      management, the social guidance, of the affair, was as though we were at
+      sea in a dangerous storm, and he was on the bridge and I was a mere
+      passenger, and could take no responsibility. Who knew through what
+      difficult channels we might not have to steer, and from what lee-shores we
+      might not have to beat away? I saw that he perceived this. When I offered
+      him some awkward compliment about his good English, he seized the chance
+      of a narrative, and told me about his parentage: how his mother was
+      Scotch, and his father Danish, and how, after his father&rsquo;s death,
+      his mother had married Emilio Diaz, a Spanish teacher of music in
+      Edinburgh, and how he had taken, by force of early habit, the name of his
+      stepfather. The whole world was familiar with these facts, and I was
+      familiar with them; but their recital served our turn in the brougham,
+      and, of course, Diaz could add touches which had escaped the <i>Staffordshire
+      Recorder</i>, and perhaps all other papers. He was explaining to me that
+      his secretary was his stepfather&rsquo;s son by another wife, when we
+      arrived at the Five Towns Hotel, opposite Knype Railway Station. I might
+      have foreseen that that would be our destination. I hooded myself as well
+      as I could, and followed him quickly to the first-floor. I sank down into
+      a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my cloak, and
+      then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table were some
+      glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that the
+      secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly departed.
+      My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its full
+      enormity. &lsquo;Oh,&rsquo; I sighed, &lsquo;if I were a man like you!&rsquo;
+      Then it was that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was
+      not happy, that he was forlorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; &lsquo;I am
+      profoundly dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year
+      it is a homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You
+      do not know how I hate a strange piano. That one&rsquo;&mdash;he pointed
+      to a huge instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially
+      for him&mdash;&lsquo;is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only
+      yesterday, and after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across
+      the world, and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a
+      museum, and bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But have you no friends?&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who can tell?&rsquo; he replied. &lsquo;If I have, I scarcely ever see
+      them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And no home?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I loathe
+      it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you loathe it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! For what it has witnessed&mdash;for what it has witnessed.&rsquo; He
+      sighed. ‘Suppose we discuss something else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in
+      social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know
+      that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath
+      that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious, dazzling
+      haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new being,
+      excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for
+      love of you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let me guess at your history,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You have lived much
+      alone with your thoughts, and you have read a great deal of the finest
+      romantic poetry, and you have been silent, especially with men. You have
+      seen little of men.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I understand them,&rsquo; I answered boldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I believe you do,&rsquo; he admitted; and he laughed. &lsquo;So I needn&rsquo;t
+      explain to you that a thousand women dying of love for one man will not
+      help that man to happiness, unless he is dying of love for the thousand
+      and first.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And have you never loved?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words came of themselves out of my mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have deceived myself&mdash;in my quest of sympathy,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you be sure that, in your quest of sympathy, you are not deceiving
+      yourself tonight?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he cried quickly, &lsquo;I can.&rsquo; And he sprang up and
+      almost ran to the piano. &lsquo;You remember the D flat Prelude?&rsquo; he
+      said, breaking into the latter part of the air, and looking at me the
+      while. &lsquo;When I came to that note and caught your gaze&rsquo;&mdash;he
+      struck the B flat and held it&mdash;&lsquo;I knew that I had found
+      sympathy. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Do you remember?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Remember what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The way we looked at each other.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I breathed, &lsquo;I remember.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How can I thank you? How can I thank you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed to be meditating. His simplicity, his humility, his kindliness
+      were more than I could bear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Please do not speak like that,&rsquo; I entreated him, pained. &lsquo;You
+      are the greatest artist in the world, and I am nobody&mdash;nobody at all.
+      I do not know why I am here. I cannot imagine what you have seen in me.
+      Everything is a mystery. All I feel is that I am in your presence, and
+      that I am not worthy to be. No matter how long I live, I shall never
+      experience again the joy that I have now. But if you talk about thanking
+      me, I must run away, because I cannot stand it&mdash;and&mdash;and&mdash;you
+      haven&rsquo;t played for me, and you said you would.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He approached me, and bent his head towards mine, and I glanced up through
+      a mist and saw his eyes and the short, curly auburn locks on his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most
+      lasting things,&rsquo; he said softly, &lsquo;are often mysterious and
+      inexplicable and sudden. And let me tell you that you do not know how
+      lovely you are. You do not know the magic of your voice, nor the grace of
+      your gestures. But time and man will teach you. What shall I play?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was very close to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Bach,&rsquo; I ejaculated, pointing impatiently to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancied that Bach would spread peace abroad in my soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He resumed his place at the piano, and touched the keys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Another thing that makes me more sure that I am not deceiving myself
+      to-night,&rsquo; he said, taking his fingers off the keys, but staring at
+      the keyboard, &lsquo;is that you have not regretted coming here. You have
+      not called yourself a wicked woman. You have not even accused me of taking
+      advantage of your innocence.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And ere I could say a word he had begun the Chromatic Fantasia, smiling
+      faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I had hoped for peace from Bach! I had often suspected that deep
+      passion was concealed almost everywhere within the restraint and the
+      apparent calm of Bach&rsquo;s music, but the full force of it had not been
+      shown to me till this glorious night. Diaz&rsquo; playing was tenfold more
+      impressive, more effective, more revealing in the hotel parlour than in
+      the great hall. The Chromatic Fantasia seemed as full of the magnificence
+      of life as that other Fantasia which he had given an hour or so earlier.
+      Instead of peace I had the whirlwind; instead of tranquillity a riot;
+      instead of the poppy an alarming potion. The rendering was masterly to the
+      extreme of masterliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had finished I rose and passed to the fireplace in silence; he did
+      not stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you always play like that?&rsquo; I asked at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;only when you are there. I have never played
+      the Chopin Fantasia as I played it to-night. The Chopin was all right; but
+      do not be under any illusion: what you have just heard is Bach played by a
+      Chopin player.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he left the piano and went to the small table where the glasses were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You must be in need of refreshment,&rsquo; he whispered gaily. &lsquo;Nothing
+      is more exhausting than listening to the finest music.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is you who ought to be tired,&rsquo; I replied; &lsquo;after that long
+      concert, to be playing now.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have the physique of a camel,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I am never tired
+      so long as I am sure of my listeners. I would play for you till breakfast
+      to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The decanter contained a fluid of a pleasant green tint. He poured very
+      carefully this fluid to the depth of half an inch in one glass and
+      three-quarters of an inch in another glass. Then he filled both glasses to
+      the brim with water, accomplishing the feat with infinite pains and
+      enjoyment, as though it had been part of a ritual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; he said, offering me in his steady hand the glass which had
+      received the smaller quantity of the green fluid. &lsquo;Taste.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what is it?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Taste,&rsquo; he repeated, and he himself tasted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I obeyed. At the first mouthful I thought the liquid was somewhat sinister
+      and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my opinion, and
+      found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet not strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you like it?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and drank again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is wonderful,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;What do you call it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Men call it absinthe,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t be frightened,&rsquo; he soothed me. &lsquo;I know what you
+      were going to say. You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of
+      all poisons, that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most
+      terrible of all drunkards. So it is; so it does. But not as we are
+      drinking it; not as I invariably drink it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; I said, proudly confident in him. &lsquo;You would not
+      have offered it to me otherwise.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course I should not,&rsquo; he agreed. &lsquo;I give you my word that
+      a few drops of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and
+      the least harmful stimulant in the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am sure of it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But drink slowly,&rsquo; he advised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I refused the sandwiches. I had no need of them. I felt sufficient unto
+      myself. I no longer had any apprehension. My body, my brain, and my soul
+      seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency. The fear of being
+      maladroit departed from me. Ideas&mdash;delicate and subtle ideas&mdash;welled
+      up in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them. I began
+      to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric
+      interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still stood
+      by the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, he said, &lsquo;that is very interesting.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What does the Fantasia mean to you?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense.
+      You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
+      forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
+      emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it
+      can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the greatest
+      of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas. Literature
+      can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its
+      language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the
+      soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the Fantasia is that
+      it moves me profoundly. I <i>know how</i> it moves me, but I cannot tell
+      you; I cannot even tell myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, do go on,&rsquo; I entreated him. &lsquo;Tell me more about music. Do
+      you not think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do,
+      since you always play him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art.
+      When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes
+      impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No
+      one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The
+      whole last act of <i>The Twilight of the Gods</i> is not greater than a
+      little song of Grieg&rsquo;s.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I see,&rsquo; I murmured humbly. &lsquo;<i>The Twilight of the Gods</i>&mdash;that
+      is Wagner, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Don&rsquo;t you know your Wagner?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No. I&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t know <i>Tristan</i>?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He jumped up, excited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How could I know it?&rsquo; I expostulated. &lsquo;I have never seen any
+      opera. I know the marches from <i>Tannhäuser</i> and <i>Lohengrin</i>, and
+      &ldquo;O Star of Eve!&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is impossible that you don&rsquo;t know <i>Tristan</i>!&rsquo; he
+      exclaimed. &lsquo;The second act of <i>Tristan</i> is the greatest piece
+      of love-music&mdash;No, it isn&rsquo;t.&rsquo; He laughed. &lsquo;I must
+      not contradict myself. But it is marvellous&mdash;marvellous! You know the
+      story?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Play me some of it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will play the Prelude,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gulped down the remaining drops in my glass and crossed the room to a
+      chair where I could see his face. And he played the Prelude to the most
+      passionately voluptuous opera ever written. It was my first real
+      introduction to Wagner, my first glimpse of that enchanted field. I was
+      ravished, rapt away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wagner was a great artist in spite of himself,&rsquo; said Diaz, when he
+      had finished. &lsquo;He assigned definite and precise ideas to all those
+      melodies. Nothing could be more futile. I shall not label them for you.
+      But perhaps you can guess the love-motive for yourself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I can,&rsquo; I said positively. &lsquo;It is this.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried to hum the theme, but my voice refused obedience. So I came to the
+      piano, and played the theme high up in the treble, while Diaz was still
+      sitting on the piano-stool. I trembled even to touch the piano in his
+      presence; but I did it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have guessed right,&rsquo; he said; and then he asked me in a casual
+      tone: ‘Do you ever play pianoforte duets?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Often,&rsquo; I replied unsuspectingly, &lsquo;with my aunt. We play the
+      symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and overtures, and so
+      on.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Awfully good fun, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo; he smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Splendid!&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve got <i>Tristan</i> here arranged for pianoforte duet,&rsquo;
+      he said. ‘Tony, my secretary, enjoys playing it. You shall play part of
+      the second act with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Me! With you!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Certainly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Impossible! I should never dare! How do you know I can play at all?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have just proved it to me,&rsquo; said he. &lsquo;Come; you will not
+      refuse me this!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to leave the vicinity of the piano. I felt that, once out of the
+      immediate circle of his tremendous physical influence, I might manage to
+      escape the ordeal which he had suggested. But I could not go away. The
+      silken nets of his personality had been cast, and I was enmeshed. And if I
+      was happy, it was with a dreadful happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, really, I can&rsquo;t play with you,&rsquo; I said weakly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His response was merely to look up at me over his shoulder. His beautiful
+      face was so close to mine, and it expressed such a naïve and strong
+      yearning for my active and intimate sympathy, and such divine frankness,
+      and such perfect kindliness, that I had no more will to resist. I knew I
+      should suffer horribly in spoiling by my coarse amateurishness the
+      miraculous finesse of his performance, but I resigned myself to suffering.
+      I felt towards him as I had felt during the concert: that he must have his
+      way at no matter what cost, that he had already earned the infinite
+      gratitude of the entire world&mdash;in short, I raised him in my soul to a
+      god&rsquo;s throne; and I accepted humbly the great, the incredible honour
+      he did me. And I was right&mdash;a thousand times right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the same moment he was like a charming child to me: such is always
+      in some wise the relation between the creature born to enjoy and the
+      creature born to suffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll try,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;but it will be appalling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I laughed and shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We shall see how appalling it will be,&rsquo; he murmured, as he got the
+      volume of music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fetched a chair for me, and we sat down side by side, he on the stool
+      and I on the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m afraid my chair is too low,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I&rsquo;m sure this stool is too high,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Suppose
+      we exchange.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we both rose to change the positions of the chair and the stool, and
+      our garments touched and almost our faces, and at that very moment there
+      was a loud rap at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I darted away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s that?&rsquo; I cried, low in a fit of terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who&rsquo;s there?&rsquo; he called quietly; but he did not stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We gazed at each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who&rsquo;s there?&rsquo; Diaz demanded again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to the door,&rsquo; I whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor. Diaz
+      went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the corridor,
+      and looked into the darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Curious!&rsquo; he commented tranquilly. &lsquo;I see no one.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby to
+      shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of our
+      own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on the
+      small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a
+      half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other room;
+      one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ball, which
+      caught the light of the candle on the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were startled,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You must have a little more of
+      our cordial&mdash;just a spoonful.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He poured out for me an infinitesimal quantity, and the same for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling
+      incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and
+      that did not leave me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat down a second time to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You understand,&rsquo; he explained, staring absently at the double page
+      of music, &lsquo;this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is
+      dark in the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king,
+      her husband, has just gone off hunting&mdash;you will hear the horns dying
+      in the distance&mdash;and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch
+      is burning in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the
+      signal by extinguishing it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment
+      when they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that
+      you will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers.
+      Are you ready?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous. I
+      was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes. The
+      notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was the big
+      black letters at the top, &lsquo;Zweiter Aufzug.&rsquo; And furthermore,
+      on that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the bass
+      of the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and
+      closed my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can&rsquo;t,&rsquo; I whispered, &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t. I would if I
+      could.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gently took my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear companion,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;tell me your name.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason,
+      flashed through my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magdalen,&rsquo; I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and
+      sincere that he believed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see that he was taken aback.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is a holy name and a good name,&rsquo; he said, after a pause. &lsquo;Magda,
+      you are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read
+      it, won&rsquo;t you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me,
+      and play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The
+      influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had
+      resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and
+      lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and
+      dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in
+      conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing
+      out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had
+      ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I
+      abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not
+      disgrace myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Unless it was Chopin,&rsquo; whispered Diaz. &lsquo;No one could ever see
+      two things at once as well as Wagner.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the
+      page, and then the hunters&rsquo; horns were heard departing from the
+      garden of love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a
+      scarce-heard drone, out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the
+      horns died away, so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the
+      future. I surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty
+      which we were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once
+      feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of
+      modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of
+      heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I
+      might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and
+      complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam about
+      our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a
+      background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they
+      were the emotions of love&mdash;the sense of the splendour of love, the
+      headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the
+      finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the
+      universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: &lsquo;Where love is,
+      there is God also.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be
+      approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy, but
+      I held on, and the climax arrived&mdash;a climax which touched the limits
+      of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in coming
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tristan has come into the garden,&rsquo; I muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We plunged forward into the love-scene itself&mdash;the scene in which the
+      miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all
+      miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then
+      occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces,
+      what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what
+      sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what
+      dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous
+      hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common
+      lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more fully than
+      I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a supreme
+      experience, and that another such could not be contained in my life....
+      And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on the
+      music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the left
+      hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar, and
+      becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air
+      fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of
+      the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The
+      whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought gently
+      and persistently against the rhythm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hear the beating of their hearts,&rsquo; Diaz&rsquo; whisper floated over
+      the chords.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the
+      vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands
+      fell from the keyboard. He looked at me&mdash;and with what a glance!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can bear no more,&rsquo; I cried wildly. &lsquo;It is too beautiful,
+      too beautiful!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my
+      face in my hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to me, and bent over me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he whispered, &lsquo;show me your face.&rsquo; With his
+      hands he delicately persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to
+      look on him. &lsquo;How dark and splendid you are, Magda!&rsquo; he said,
+      still holding my hands. &lsquo;How humid and flashing your eyes! And those
+      eyelashes, and that hair&mdash;dark, dark! And that bosom, with its rise
+      and fall! And that low, rich voice, that is like dark wine! And that dress&mdash;dark,
+      and full of mysterious shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known
+      each other in a previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this
+      moment is the fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You
+      were to be mine. You are mine, Magda!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny
+      to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief
+      instant, to this noble and glorious creature, on whom the gods had
+      showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not
+      already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of
+      society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the resistless
+      tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable, and
+      everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we were
+      together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in contact. He
+      held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at once that
+      those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was proud and
+      glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that point I
+      ceased to have volition....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I woke up, perplexed at first, but gradually remembering where I was,
+      and what had occurred to me, the realistic and uncompromising light of
+      dawn had commenced its pitiless inquiry, and it fell on the brass knob,
+      which I had noticed a few hours before, from the other room, and on
+      another brass knob a few feet away. My eyes smarted; I had disconcerting
+      sensations at the back of my head; my hair was brittle, and as though
+      charged with a dull electricity; I was conscious of actual pain, and an
+      incubus, crushing but intangible, lay heavily, like a physical weight, on
+      my heart. After the crest of the wave the trough&mdash;it must be so; but
+      how profound the instinct which complains! I listened. I could hear his
+      faint, regular breathing. I raised myself carefully on one elbow and
+      looked at him. He was as beautiful in sleep as in consciousness; his lips
+      were slightly parted, his cheek exquisitely flushed, and nothing could
+      disarrange that short, curly hair. He slept with the calmness of the
+      natural innocent man, to whom the assuaging of desires brings only
+      content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt that I must go, and hastily, frantically. I could not face him when
+      he woke; I should not have known what to say; I should have been abashed,
+      timid, clumsy, unequal to myself. And, moreover, I had the egoist&rsquo;s
+      deep need to be alone, to examine my soul, to understand it intimately and
+      utterly. And, lastly, I wanted to pay the bill of pleasure at once. I
+      could never tolerate credit; I was like my aunt in that. Therefore, I must
+      go home and settle the account in some way. I knew not how; I knew only
+      that the thing must be done. Diaz had nothing to do with that; it was not
+      his affair, and I should have resented his interference. Ah! when I was in
+      the bill-paying mood, how hard I could be, how stony, how blind! And that
+      morning I was like a Malay running amok.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Think not that when I was ready to depart I stopped and stooped to give
+      him a final tender kiss. I did not even scribble a word of adieu or of
+      explanation. I stole away on tiptoe, without looking at him. This sounds
+      brutal, but it is a truth of my life, and I am writing my life&mdash;at
+      least, I am writing those brief hours of my existence during which I
+      lived. I had always a sort of fierce courage; and as I had proved the
+      courage of my passion in the night, so I proved the courage of my&mdash;not
+      my remorse, not my compunction, not my regret&mdash;but of my intellectual
+      honesty in the morning. Proud and vain words, perhaps. Who can tell? No
+      matter what sympathies I alienate, I am bound to say plainly that, though
+      I am passionate, I am not sentimental. I came to him out of the void, and
+      I went from him into the void. He found me, and he lost me. Between the
+      autumn sunset and the autumn sunrise he had learnt to know me well, but he
+      did not know my name nor my history; he had no clue, no cord to pull me
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I passed into the sitting-room, dimly lighted through the drawn curtains,
+      and there was the score of <i>Tristan</i> open on the piano. Yes; and if I
+      were the ordinary woman I would add that there also were the ashes in the
+      cold grate, and so symbolize the bitterness of memory and bring about a
+      pang. But I have never regretted what is past. The cinders of that fire
+      were to me cinders of a fire and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the doorway I halted. To go into the corridor was like braving the
+      blast of the world, and I hesitated. Possibly I hesitated for a very
+      little thing. Only the women among you will guess it. My dress was dark
+      and severe. I had a simple, dark cloak. But I had no hat. I had no hat,
+      and the most important fact in the universe for me then was that I had no
+      hat. My whole life was changed; my heart and mind were in the throes of a
+      revolution. I dared not imagine what would happen between my aunt and me;
+      but this deficiency in my attire distressed me more than all else. At the
+      other end of the obscure corridor was a chambermaid kneeling down and
+      washing the linoleum. Ah, maid! Would I not have exchanged fates with you,
+      then! I walked boldly up to her. She seemed to be surprised, but she
+      continued to wring out a cloth in her pail as she looked at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it, please?&rsquo; I asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Better than half-past six, ma&rsquo;am,&rsquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was young and emaciated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you got a hat you can lend me? Or I&rsquo;ll buy it from you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘A hat, ma&rsquo;am?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, a hat,&rsquo; I repeated impatiently. And I flushed. &lsquo;I must
+      go out at once, and I&rsquo;ve&mdash;I&rsquo;ve no hat And I can&rsquo;t&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is extraordinary how in a crisis one&rsquo;s organism surprises one. I
+      had thought I was calm and full of self-control, but I had almost no
+      command over my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve got a boat-shaped straw, ma&rsquo;am, if that&rsquo;s any use
+      to you,&rsquo; said the girl kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What she surmised or what she knew I could not say. But I have found out
+      since in my travels, that hotel chambermaids lose their illusions early.
+      At any rate her tone was kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Get it me, there&rsquo;s a good girl,&rsquo; I entreated her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when she brought it, I drew out the imitation pearl pins and put them
+      between my teeth, and jammed the hat on my head and skewered it savagely
+      with the pins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Is that right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It suits you better than it does me, ma&rsquo;am, I do declare,&rsquo;
+      she said. ‘Oh, ma&rsquo;am, this is too much&mdash;I really couldn&rsquo;t!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had given her five shillings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nonsense! I am very much obliged to you,&rsquo; I whispered hurriedly,
+      and ran off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a good girl. I hope she has never suffered. And yet I would not
+      like to think she had died of consumption before she knew what life meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hastened from the hotel. A man in a blue waistcoat with shining black
+      sleeves was moving a large cocoa-nut mat in the hall, and the pattern of
+      the mat was shown in dust on the tiles where the mat had been. He glanced
+      at me absently as I flitted past; I encountered no other person. The
+      square between the hotel and the station was bathed in pure sunshine&mdash;such
+      sunshine as reaches the Five Towns only after a rain-storm has washed the
+      soot out of the air. I felt, for a moment, obscene in that sunshine; but I
+      had another and a stronger feeling. Although there was not a soul in the
+      square, I felt as if I was regarding the world and mankind with different
+      eyes from those of yesterday. Then I knew nothing; to-day I knew
+      everything&mdash;so it seemed to me. It seemed to me that I understood all
+      sorts of vague, subtle things that I had not understood before; that I had
+      been blind and now saw; that I had become kinder, more sympathetic, more
+      human. What these things were that I understood, or thought I understood,
+      I could not have explained. All I felt was that a radical change of
+      attitude had occurred in me. &lsquo;Poor world!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor humanity! My heart melts for you!&rsquo; Thus spoke my soul, pouring
+      itself out. The very stone facings of the station and the hotel seemed
+      somehow to be humanized and to need my compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked with eyes downcast into the station. I had determined to take the
+      train from Knype to Shawport, a distance of three miles, and then to walk
+      up the hill from Shawport through Oldcastle Street to Bursley. I hoped
+      that by such a route at such an hour, I should be unlikely to meet
+      acquaintances, of whom, in any case, I had few. My hopes appeared to be
+      well founded, for the large booking-hall at the station was thronged with
+      a multitude entirely strange to me&mdash;workmen and workwomen and
+      workgirls crowded the place. The first-class and second-class
+      booking-windows were shut, and a long tail of muscular men, pale men,
+      stout women, and thin women pushed to take tickets at the other window. I
+      was obliged to join them, and to wait my turn amid the odour of corduroy
+      and shawl, and the strong odour of humanity; my nostrils were peculiarly
+      sensitive that morning. Some of the men had herculean arms and necks, and
+      it was these who wore pieces of string tied round their trousers below the
+      knee, disclosing the lines of their formidable calves. The women were
+      mostly pallid and quiet. All carried cans, or satchels, or baskets; here
+      and there a man swung lightly on his shoulder a huge bag of tools, which I
+      could scarcely have raised from the ground. Everybody was natural, direct,
+      and eager; and no one attempted to be genteel or refined; no one pretended
+      that he did not toil with his hands for dear life. I anticipated that I
+      should excite curiosity, but I did not. The people had a preoccupied,
+      hurried air. Only at the window itself, when the ticket-clerk, having made
+      me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of his lair to get my ticket,
+      did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and inimical interest in this
+      drone who caused delay to busy people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same
+      on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I
+      could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full
+      tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they
+      employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains
+      generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at
+      one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of
+      <i>our</i> wealth and luxury!&rsquo; I thought; for I was just beginning,
+      at that period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social
+      organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on
+      paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep
+      of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable directness.
+      They frightened me with their vivid humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a
+      compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls
+      were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her
+      dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.
+      From the young man&rsquo;s soiled white jacket under his black coat, I
+      gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and
+      left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession of
+      compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people. None of
+      my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance. It was
+      uncanny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained
+      prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn,
+      musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life.
+      ‘Ah,&rsquo; I thought, &lsquo;you little know what I know! I may appear a
+      butterfly, but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence. I am above
+      you, beyond you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by
+      the turmoil in my heart!&rsquo; And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that
+      they probably knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten
+      more than I had ever learnt. I remembered an absorbing correspondence
+      about the manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the <i>Staffordshire
+      Recorder</i>&mdash;a correspondence which had driven Aunt Constance to
+      conceal the paper after the second week. I guessed that they might smile
+      at the simplicity of my heart could they see it. Meaning of existence!
+      Why, they were reared in it! The naturalness of natural people and of
+      natural acts struck me like a blow, and I withdrew, whipped, into myself.
+      My adventure grew smaller. But I recalled its ecstasies. I dwelt on the
+      romantic perfection of Diaz. It seemed to me amazing, incredible, that
+      Diaz, the glorious and incomparable Diaz, had loved me&mdash;<i>me</i>!
+      out of all the ardent, worshipping women that the world contained. I
+      wondered if he had wakened up, and I felt sorry for him. So far, I had not
+      decided how soon, if at all, I should communicate with him. My mind was
+      incapable of reaching past the next few hours&mdash;the next hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We stopped at a station surrounded by the evidences of that tireless,
+      unceasing, and tremendous manufacturing industry which distinguishes the
+      Five Towns, and I was left alone in the compartment. The train rumbled on
+      through a landscape of fiery furnaces, and burning slag-heaps, and foul
+      canals reflecting great smoking chimneys, all steeped in the mild
+      sunshine. Could the toil-worn agents of this never-ending and gigantic
+      productiveness find time for love? Perhaps they loved quickly and forgot,
+      like animals. Thoughts such as these lurked sinister and carnal, strange
+      beasts in the jungle of my poor brain. Then the train arrived at Shawport,
+      and I was obliged to get out. I say &lsquo;obliged,&rsquo; because I
+      violently wished not to get out. I wished to travel on in that train to
+      some impossible place, where things were arranged differently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The station clock showed only five minutes to seven. I was astounded. It
+      seemed to me that all the real world had been astir and busy for hours.
+      And this extraordinary activity went on every morning while Aunt Constance
+      and I lay in our beds and thought well of ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shivered, and walked quickly up the street. I had positively not noticed
+      that I was cold. I had scarcely left the station before Fred Ryley
+      appeared in front of me. I saw that his face was swollen. My heart
+      stopped. Of course, he would tell Ethel.... He passed me sheepishly
+      without stopping, merely raising his hat, and murmuring the singular
+      words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We&rsquo;re both very, very sorry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What in the name of Heaven could they possibly know, he and Ethel? And
+      what right had he to ...? Did he smile furtively? Fred Ryley had sometimes
+      a strange smile. I reddened, angry and frightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The distance between the station and our house proved horribly short. And
+      when I arrived in front of the green gates, and put my hand on the latch,
+      I knew that I had formed no plan whatever. I opened the right-hand gate
+      and entered the garden. The blinds were still down, and the house looked
+      so decorous and innocent in its age. My poor aunt! What a night she must
+      have been through! It was inconceivable that I should tell her what had
+      happened to me. Indeed, under the windows of that house it seemed
+      inconceivable that the thing had happened which had happened.
+      Inconceivable! Grotesque! Monstrous!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But could I lie? Could I rise to the height of some sufficient and kindly
+      lie?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hand drew slightly aside the blind of the window over the porch. I
+      sighed, and went wearily, in my boat-shaped straw, up the gravelled path
+      to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rebecca met me at the door. It was so early that she had not yet put on an
+      apron. She looked tired, as if she had not slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come in, miss,&rsquo; she said weakly, holding open the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me that I did not need this invitation from a servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose you&rsquo;ve all been fearfully upset, wondering where I was,&rsquo;
+      I began, entering the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My adventure appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this
+      buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything one
+      hundredth part so dreadful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, miss; I wasn&rsquo;t upset on account of you. You&rsquo;re always so
+      sensible like. You always know what to do. I knew as you must have stopped
+      the night with friends in Hanbridge on account of the heavy rain, and
+      perhaps that there silly cabman not turning up, and them tramcars all
+      crowded; and, of course, you couldn&rsquo;t telegraph.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This view that I was specially sagacious and equal to emergencies rather
+      surprised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But auntie?&rsquo; I demanded, trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, miss!&rsquo; cried Rebecca, glancing timidly over her shoulder,
+      &lsquo;I want you to come with me into the dining-room before you go
+      upstairs.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She snuffled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the dining-room I went at once to the window to draw up the blinds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not that, not that!&rsquo; Rebecca appealed, weeping. &lsquo;For pity&rsquo;s
+      sake!&rsquo; And she caught my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I then noticed that Lucy was standing in the doorway, also weeping.
+      Rebecca noticed this too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lucy, you go to your kitchen this minute,&rsquo; she said sharply, and
+      then turned to me and began to cry again. &lsquo;Miss Peel&mdash;how can I
+      tell you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you call me Miss Peel?&rsquo; I asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I knew why. The thing flashed over me instantly. My dear aunt was
+      dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve got no aunt,&rsquo; said Rebecca. &lsquo;My poor dear! And
+      you at the concert!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dropped my head and my bosom on the bare mahogany table and cried. Never
+      before, and never since, have I spilt such tears&mdash;hot, painful drops,
+      distilled plenteously from a heart too crushed and torn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There, there!&rsquo; muttered Rebecca. &lsquo;I wish I could have told
+      you different&mdash;less cruel; but it wasn&rsquo;t in me to do it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And she&rsquo;s lying upstairs this very moment all cold and stiff,&rsquo;
+      a wailing voice broke in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Lucy, who could not keep herself away from us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Will you go to your kitchen, my girl!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rebecca drove her off. &lsquo;And the poor thing&rsquo;s not stiff either.
+      Her poor body&rsquo;s as soft as if she was only asleep, and doctor says
+      it will be for a day or two. It&rsquo;s like that when they&rsquo;re took
+      off like that, he says. Oh, Miss Carlotta&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell me all about it before I go upstairs,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had recovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Your poor aunt went to bed just as soon as you were gone, miss,&rsquo;
+      said Rebecca. &lsquo;She would have it she was quite well, only tired. I
+      took her up a cup of cocoa at ten o&rsquo;clock, and she seemed all right,
+      and then I sends Lucy to bed, and I sits up in the kitchen to wait for
+      you. Not a sound from your poor aunt. I must have dropped asleep, miss, in
+      my chair, and I woke up with a start like, and the kitchen clock was near
+      on one. Thinks I, perhaps Miss Carlotta&rsquo;s been knocking and ringing
+      all this time and me not heard, and I rushes to the front door. But of
+      course you weren&rsquo;t there. The porch was nothing but a pool o&rsquo;
+      water. I says to myself she&rsquo;s stopping somewhere, I says. And I felt
+      it was my duty to go and tell your aunt, whether she was asleep or whether
+      she wasn&rsquo;t asleep.... Well, and there she was, miss, with her eyes
+      closed, and as soft as a child. I spoke to her, loud, more than once.
+      &ldquo;Miss Carlotta a&rsquo;n&rsquo;t come,&rdquo; I says. &ldquo;Miss
+      Carlotta a&rsquo;n&rsquo;t come, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; I says. She never
+      stirred. Thinks I, this is queer this is. And I goes up to her and touches
+      her. Chilly! Then I takes the liberty of pushing back your poor aunt&rsquo;s
+      eyelids, and I could but see the whites of her eyes; the eyeballs was gone
+      up, and a bit outwards. Yes; and her poor dear chin was dropped. Thinks I,
+      here&rsquo;s trouble, and Miss Carlotta at the concert. I runs to our
+      bedroom, and I tells Lucy to put a cloak on and fetch Dr. Roycroft.
+      &ldquo;Who for?&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;Never you mind who for!&rdquo; I
+      says, says I. &ldquo;You up and quick. But you can tell the doctor it&rsquo;s
+      missis as is took.&rdquo; And in ten minutes he was here, miss. But it&rsquo;s
+      only across the garden, like. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;she&rsquo;s
+      been dead an hour or more. Failure of the heart&rsquo;s action,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;She died in her sleep,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Thank God she
+      died in her sleep if she was to die, the pure angel!&rdquo; I says. I told
+      the doctor as you were away for the night, miss. And I laid her out, miss,
+      and your poor auntie wasn&rsquo;t my first, either. I&rsquo;ve seen
+      trouble&mdash;I&rsquo;ve&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Rebecca&rsquo;s tears overcame her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll go upstairs with you, miss,&rsquo; she struggled out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thought that flew across my mind was that Doctor Roycroft was very
+      intimate with the Ryleys, and had doubtless somehow informed them of my
+      aunt&rsquo;s death. This explained Fred Ryley&rsquo;s strange words and
+      attitude to me on the way from the station. The young man had been too
+      timid to stop me. The matter was a trifle, but another idea that struck me
+      was not a trifle, though I strove to make it so. My aunt had died about
+      midnight, and it was at midnight that Diaz and I had heard the mysterious
+      knock on his sitting-room door. At the time I had remarked how it
+      resembled my aunt&rsquo;s knock. Occasionally, when the servants overslept
+      themselves, Aunt Constance would go to their rooms in her pale-blue
+      dressing-gown and knock on their door exactly like that. Could it be that
+      this was one of those psychical manifestations of which I had read? Had my
+      aunt, in passing from this existence to the next, paused a moment to warn
+      me of my terrible danger? My intellect replied that a disembodied soul
+      could not knock, and that the phenomenon had been due simply to some guest
+      or servant of the hotel who had mistaken the room, and discovered his
+      error in time. Nevertheless, the instinctive part of me&mdash;that part of
+      us which refuses to fraternize with reason, and which we call the
+      superstitious because we cannot explain it&mdash;would not let go the
+      spiritualistic theory, and during all my life has never quite surrendered
+      it to the attacks of my brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I will go upstairs alone;&rsquo; and I went,
+      leaving my cloak and hat with Rebecca.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already, to my hypersensitive nostrils, there was a slight odour in the
+      darkened bedroom. What lay on the bed, straight and long and thin,
+      resembled almost exactly my aunt as she lived. I forced myself to look on
+      it. Except that the face was paler than usual, and had a curious
+      transparent, waxy appearance, and that the cheeks were a little hollowed,
+      and the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth somewhat deepened,
+      there had been no outward change.... And <i>this</i> once was she! I
+      thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved
+      me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling,
+      sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The shaft
+      of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the same hour,
+      and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled and quailed.
+      I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul also was
+      solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not a moral
+      coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at that calm
+      and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much I had lost.
+      At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt Constance at
+      over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among men for interminable
+      years, and never <i>known</i>! It seemed impossible, shockingly against
+      Nature, that my aunt&rsquo;s existence should have been so! I pitied her
+      profoundly. I felt that essentially she was girlish compared to me. And
+      yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;that which she had kept and which I had given away
+      was precious, too&mdash;indefinably and wonderfully precious! The price of
+      knowledge and of ecstasy seemed heavy to me then. The girl that had gone
+      with Diaz into that hotel apartment had come out no more. She had expired
+      there, and her extinction was the price, Oh, innocence! Oh, divine
+      ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered
+      you! And herein is the woman&rsquo;s tragedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There in that mausoleum I decided that I must never see Diaz again. He was
+      fast in my heart, a flashing, glorious treasure, but I must never see him
+      again. I must devote myself to memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the dressing-table lay a brown-paper parcel which seemed out of place
+      there. I opened it, and it contained a magnificently-bound copy of <i>The
+      Imitation of Christ</i>. Upon the flyleaf was written: &lsquo;To dearest
+      Carlotta on attaining her majority. With fondest love. C.P.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too much; it was overwhelming. I wept again. Soul so kind and pure!
+      The sense of my loss, the sense of the simple, proud rectitude of her
+      life, laid me low.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the
+      conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or
+      flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains
+      loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy, wandering
+      about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of existence;
+      trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the air of your
+      own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night with your
+      yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave the night
+      behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that carry bread
+      and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of fresh water;
+      trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through the landscapes
+      and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting, formidable, and
+      yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your arrogance and your
+      pathos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That little journey from Knype to Shawport had implanted itself painfully
+      in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of
+      life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months had
+      elapsed&mdash;three months of growing misery and despair; three months of
+      tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the
+      exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange
+      fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs of
+      wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy, and no
+      interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there by my
+      secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of the
+      Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been so
+      minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would not.
+      Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been able
+      to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the house; I
+      sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca and the
+      clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as though I had
+      sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week, I cut myself
+      to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a sort of terrible
+      languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony, and yet tortured by
+      my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that no philosophy could
+      stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more than the strapping and
+      the labelling of my trunks that morning after I had slept, dreamfully, in
+      the bed that I should never use again&mdash;the bed that, indeed, was even
+      then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I wept at all, I should have
+      wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks: ‘Miss Peel, passenger to
+      Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,&rsquo; with two thick lines
+      drawn under the &lsquo;Euston.&rsquo; That writing of labels was the
+      climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and all
+      bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some day,
+      when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has been
+      fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved passionately
+      the disfigured hills and valleys of the Five Towns. And as I think of
+      Oldcastle Street, dropping away sleepily and respectably from the Town
+      Hall of Bursley, with the gold angel holding a gold crown on its spire, I
+      vibrate with an inexplicable emotion. What is there in Oldcastle Street to
+      disturb the dust of the soul?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must tell you here that Diaz had gone to South America on a triumphal
+      tour of concerts, lest I forget! I read it in the paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I arrived in London on a February day, about one o&rsquo;clock. And the
+      hall-porter at the Golden Cross Hotel, and the two pale girls in the
+      bureau of the hotel, were sympathetic and sweet to me, because I was young
+      and alone, and in mourning, and because I had great rings round my eyes.
+      It was a fine day, blue and mild. At half-past three I had nothing in the
+      world to do. I had come to London without a plan, without a purpose, with
+      scarcely an introduction; I wished simply to plunge myself into its
+      solitude, and to be alone with my secret fear. I walked out into the
+      street, slowly, like one whom ennui has taught to lose no chance of
+      dissipating time. I neither liked nor disliked London. I had no feelings
+      towards it save one of perplexity. I thought it noisy, dirty, and hurried.
+      Its great name roused no thrill in my bosom. On the morrow, I said, I
+      would seek a lodging, and perhaps write to Ethel Ryley. Meanwhile I
+      strolled up into Trafalgar Square, and so into Charing Cross Road. And in
+      Charing Cross Road&mdash;it was the curst accident of fate&mdash;I saw the
+      signboard of the celebrated old firm of publishers, Oakley and Dalbiac. It
+      is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in this
+      history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt&rsquo;s
+      death I had already written my first novel, <i>The Jest</i>, and sent it
+      to precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful
+      extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew
+      nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had
+      kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely
+      formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance of
+      success, and that they would be prepared to publish it on certain terms,
+      but that I must not expect, etc. By that time I had lost my original
+      sublime faith in the exceeding excellence of my story, and I replied that
+      I preferred to withdraw the book. To this letter I had received no answer.
+      When I saw the famous sign over a doorway the impulse seized me to enter
+      and get the manuscript, with the object of rewriting it. Soon, I
+      reflected, I might not be able to enter; the portals of mankind might be
+      barred to me for a space.... I saw in a flash of insight that my salvation
+      lay in work, and in nothing else. I entered, resolutely. A brougham was
+      waiting at the doors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After passing along counters furnished with ledgers and clerks, through a
+      long, lofty room lined with great pigeon-holes containing thousands of
+      books each wrapped separately in white paper, I was shown into what the
+      clerk who acted as chamberlain called the office of the principal. This
+      room, too, was spacious, but so sombre that the electric light was already
+      burning. The first thing I noticed was that the window gave on a wall of
+      white tiles. In the middle of the somewhat dingy apartment was a vast,
+      square table, and at this table sat a pale, tall man, whose youth
+      astonished me&mdash;for the firm of Oakley and Dalbiac was historic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not look up exactly at the instant of my entering, but when he did
+      look up, when he saw me, he stared for an instant, and then sprang from
+      his chair as though magically startled into activity. His age was about
+      thirty, and he had large, dark eyes, and a slight, dark moustache, and his
+      face generally was interesting; he wore a dark gray suit. I was nervous,
+      but he was even more nervous; yet in the moment of looking up he had not
+      seemed nervous. He could not do enough, apparently, to make me feel at
+      ease, and to show his appreciation of me and my work. He spoke
+      enthusiastically of <i>The Jest</i>, begging me neither to suppress it nor
+      to alter it. And, without the least suggestion from me, he offered me a
+      considerable sum of money in advance of royalties. At that time I scarcely
+      knew what royalties were. But although my ignorance of business was
+      complete, I guessed that this man was behaving in a manner highly unusual
+      among publishers. He was also patently contradicting the tenor of his firm&rsquo;s
+      letter to me. I thanked him, and said I should like, at any rate, to
+      glance through the manuscript.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t alter it, Miss Peel, I beg,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;It is
+      &ldquo;young,&rdquo; I know; but it ought to be. I remember my wife said&mdash;my
+      wife reads many of our manuscripts&mdash;by the way&mdash;&rsquo; He went
+      to a door, opened it, and called out, &lsquo;Mary!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A tall and slim woman, extremely elegant, appeared in reply to this
+      appeal. Her hair was gray above the ears, and I judged that she was four
+      or five years older than the man. She had a kind, thin face, with shining
+      gray eyes, and she was wearing a hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary, this is Miss Peel, the author of <i>The Jest</i>&mdash;you
+      remember. Miss Peel, my wife.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman welcomed me with quick, sincere gestures. Her smile was very
+      pleasant, and yet a sad smile. The husband also had an air of quiet,
+      restrained, cheerful sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My wife is frequently here in the afternoon like this,&rsquo; said the
+      principal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; she laughed; &lsquo;it&rsquo;s quite a family affair, and I&rsquo;m
+      almost on the staff. I distinctly remember your manuscript, Miss Peel, and
+      how very clever and amusing it was.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her praise was spontaneous and cordial, but it was a different thing from
+      the praise of her husband. He obviously noticed the difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was just saying to Miss Peel&mdash;&rsquo; he began, with increased
+      nervousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pardon me,&rsquo; I interrupted. &lsquo;But am I speaking to Mr. Oakley
+      or Mr. Dalbiac?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To neither,&rsquo; said he. &lsquo;My name is Ispenlove, and I am the
+      nephew of the late Mr. Dalbiac. Mr. Oakley died thirty years ago. I have
+      no partner.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You expected to see a very old gentleman, no doubt,&rsquo; Mrs. Ispenlove
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘People often do. And Frank is so very young. You live in London?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I have just come up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To stay?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To stay.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Alone?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. My aunt died a few months ago. I am all that is left of my family.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Ispenlove&rsquo;s eyes filled with tears, and she fingered a gold
+      chain that hung from her neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But have you got rooms&mdash;a house?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am at a hotel for the moment.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you have friends?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head. Mr. Ispenlove was glancing rapidly from one to the other
+      of us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear young lady!&rsquo; exclaimed his wife. Then she hesitated, and
+      said: ‘Excuse my abruptness, but do let me beg you to come and have tea
+      with us this afternoon. We live quite near&mdash;in Bloomsbury Square. The
+      carriage is waiting. Frank, you can come?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can come for an hour,&rsquo; said Mr. Ispenlove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted very much to decline, but I could not. I could not disappoint
+      that honest and generous kindliness, with its touch of melancholy. I could
+      not refuse those shining gray eyes. I saw that my situation and my youth
+      had lacerated Mrs. Ispenlove&rsquo;s sensitive heart, and that she wished
+      to give it balm by being humane to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We seemed, so rapid was our passage, to be whisked on an Arabian carpet to
+      a spacious drawing-room, richly furnished, with thick rugs and ample
+      cushions and countless knicknacks and photographs and delicately-tinted
+      lampshades. There was a grand piano by Steinway, and on it Mendelssohn&rsquo;s
+      ‘Songs without Words.&rsquo; The fire slumbered in a curious grate that
+      projected several feet into the room&mdash;such a contrivance I had never
+      seen before. Near it sat Mrs. Ispenlove, entrenched behind a vast copper
+      disc on a low wicker stand, pouring out tea. Mr. Ispenlove hovered about.
+      He and his wife called each other &lsquo;dearest.&rsquo; &lsquo;Ring the
+      bell for me, dearest.&rsquo; &lsquo;Yes, dearest.&rsquo; I felt sure that
+      they had no children. They were very intimate, very kind, and always
+      gently sad. The atmosphere was charmingly domestic, even cosy, despite the
+      size of the room&mdash;a most pleasing contrast to the offices which we
+      had just left. Mrs. Ispenlove told her husband to look after me well, and
+      he devoted himself to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you know,&rsquo; said Mrs. Ispenlove, &lsquo;I am gradually recalling
+      the details of your book, and you are not at all the sort of person that I
+      should have expected to see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But that poor little book isn&rsquo;t <i>me</i>,&rsquo; I answered.
+      &lsquo;I shall never write another like it. I only&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shall you not?&rsquo; Mr. Ispenlove interjected. &lsquo;I hope you will,
+      though.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I only did it to see what I could do. I am going to begin something quite
+      different.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It appears to me,&rsquo; said Mrs. Ispenlove&mdash;&lsquo;and I must
+      again ask you to excuse my freedom, but I feel as if I had known you a
+      long time&mdash;it appears to me that what you want immediately is a
+      complete rest.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why do you say that?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not look well. You look exhausted and worn out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I blushed as she gazed at me. Could she&mdash;? No. Those simple gray eyes
+      could not imagine evil. Nevertheless, I saw too plainly how foolish I had
+      been. I, with my secret fear, that was becoming less a fear than a
+      dreadful certainty, to permit myself to venture into that house! I might
+      have to fly ignominiously before long, to practise elaborate falsehood, to
+      disappear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Perhaps you are right,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation grew fragmentary, and less and less formal. Mrs.
+      Ispenlove was the chief talker. I remember she said that she was always
+      being thrown among clever people, people who could do things, and that her
+      own inability to do anything at all was getting to be an obsession with
+      her; and that people like me could have no idea of the tortures of
+      self-depreciation which she suffered. Her voice was strangely wistful
+      during this confession. She also spoke&mdash;once only, and quite shortly,
+      but with what naïve enthusiasm!&mdash;of the high mission and influence of
+      the novelist who wrote purely and conscientiously. After this, though my
+      liking for her was undiminished, I had summed her up. Mr. Ispenlove
+      offered no commentary on his wife&rsquo;s sentiments. He struck me as
+      being a reserved man, whose inner life was intense and sufficient to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; I reflected, as Mrs. Ispenlove, with an almost motherly
+      accent, urged me to have another cup of tea, &lsquo;if you knew me, if you
+      knew me, what would you say to me? Would your charity be strong enough to
+      overcome your instincts?&rsquo; And as I had felt older than my aunt, so I
+      felt older than Mrs. Ispenlove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I left, but I had to promise to come again on the morrow, after I had seen
+      Mr. Ispenlove on business. The publisher took me down to my hotel in the
+      brougham (and I thought of the drive with Diaz, but the water was not
+      streaming down the windows), and then he returned to his office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without troubling to turn on the light in my bedroom, I sank sighing on to
+      the bed. The events of the afternoon had roused me from my terrible
+      lethargy, but now it overcame me again. I tried to think clearly about the
+      Ispenloves and what the new acquaintance meant for me; but I could not
+      think clearly. I had not been able to think clearly for two months. I
+      wished only to die. For a moment I meditated vaguely on suicide, but
+      suicide seemed to involve an amount of complicated enterprise far beyond
+      my capacity. It amazed me how I had managed to reach London. I must have
+      come mechanically, in a heavy dream; for I had no hope, no energy, no
+      vivacity, no interest. For many weeks my mind had revolved round an awful
+      possibility, as if hypnotized by it, and that monotonous revolution seemed
+      alone to constitute my real life. Moreover, I was subject to recurring
+      nausea, and to disconcerting bodily pains and another symptom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This must end!&rsquo; I said, struggling to my feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I summoned the courage of an absolute disgust. I felt that the power which
+      had triumphed over my dejection and my irresolution and brought me to
+      London might carry me a little further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving the hotel, I crossed the Strand. Innumerable omnibuses were
+      crawling past. I jumped into one at hazard, and the conductor put his arm
+      behind my back to support me. He was shouting, &lsquo;Putney, Putney,
+      Putney!&rsquo; in an absent-minded manner: he had assisted me to mount
+      without even looking at me. I climbed to the top of the omnibus and sat
+      down, and the omnibus moved off. I knew not where I was going; Putney was
+      nothing but a name to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where to, lady?&rsquo; snapped the conductor, coming upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Putney,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little bell rang and he gave me a ticket. The omnibus was soon full. A
+      woman with a young child shared my seat. But the population of the roof
+      was always changing. I alone remained&mdash;so it appeared to me. And we
+      moved interminably forward through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under
+      the mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an
+      arc-lamp, I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they
+      were nothing but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were
+      changed. A score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he
+      never looked at me again. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve done with you,&rsquo; his back
+      seemed to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly
+      succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark;
+      and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary
+      window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the tragic
+      romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to be
+      almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London.
+      Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction
+      with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations,
+      elbowing each other&mdash;No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I
+      felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth, my
+      inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the very
+      things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in that
+      despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of life,
+      the beauty of life&rsquo;s exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like a
+      red-hot iron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We crossed a great river by a great bridge&mdash;a mysterious and mighty
+      stream; and then the streets closed in on us again. And at last, after
+      hours and hours, the omnibus swerved into a dark road and stopped&mdash;stopped
+      finally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Putney!&rsquo; cried the conductor, like fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I descended. Far off, at the end of the vista of the dark road, I saw a
+      red lamp. I knew that in large cities a red lamp indicated a doctor: it
+      was the one useful thing that I did know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I approached the red lamp, cautiously, on the other side of the street.
+      Then some power forced me to cross the street and open a wicket. And in
+      the red glow of the lamp I saw an ivory button which I pushed. I could
+      plainly hear the result; it made me tremble. I had a narrow escape of
+      running away. The door was flung wide, and a middle-aged woman appeared in
+      the bright light of the interior of the house. She had a kind face. It is
+      astounding, the number of kind faces one meets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Is the doctor in?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would have given a year of my life to hear her say &lsquo;No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, miss,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Will you step in?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Events seemed to be moving all too rapidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I passed into a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the
+      surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano&mdash;scales,
+      played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters
+      of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano
+      ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall man
+      in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into the surgery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-evening, madam,&rsquo; he said gruffly. &lsquo;Won&rsquo;t you sit
+      down?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&mdash;I&mdash;I want to ask you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put a chair for me, and I dropped into it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; he said, after a moment. &lsquo;You felt as if you might
+      faint, didn&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. The tears came into my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I thought so,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll just give you a draught,
+      if you don&rsquo;t mind.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He busied himself behind me, and presently I was drinking something out of
+      a conical-shaped glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My heart beat furiously, but I felt strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to tell me, doctor,&rsquo; I spoke firmly, &lsquo;whether I am
+      about to become a mother.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah?&rsquo; he answered interrogatively, and then he hummed a fragment of
+      an air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have lost my husband,&rsquo; I was about to add; but suddenly I scorned
+      such a weakness and shut my lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Since when&mdash;&rsquo; the doctor began.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I heard him saying. &lsquo;You have been quite mistaken. But I
+      am not surprised. Such mistakes are frequently made&mdash;a kind of
+      auto-suggestion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mistaken!&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not prevent the room running round me as I reclined on the sofa;
+      and I fainted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the night, safely in my room again at the hotel, I wondered whether
+      that secret fear, now exorcised, had not also been a hope. I wondered....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART II &mdash; THREE HUMAN HEARTS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And now I was twenty-six.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the
+      lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of
+      avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary
+      narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as
+      for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire,
+      and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder
+      magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star; it
+      held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so that if
+      my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night in my
+      drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy world.
+      This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have loved I
+      have loved much....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama of
+      my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I had
+      achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had gradually
+      passed away, and a new creature had replaced her&mdash;a creature rapidly
+      developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of an
+      extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my face
+      had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given me
+      fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the
+      woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have
+      prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no
+      merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the
+      accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy,
+      and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage is
+      reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a
+      caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in
+      the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone
+      lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants
+      to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once
+      aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of
+      another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her
+      from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is a
+      form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which
+      will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule which I
+      made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I lost
+      much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And since
+      elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a
+      convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I surrounded
+      myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is the business
+      of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some persons after
+      knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others after reading
+      my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these persons lacked
+      perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself, I had naturally
+      sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest thinking, kindness of
+      heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search had not been
+      unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes
+      and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which Vicary,
+      the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were perhaps a
+      dozen guests assembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent
+      visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the
+      usual quaint Vicary details&mdash;such as the solemn warning whisper of an
+      equerry in Vicary&rsquo;s ear as he walked backwards, &lsquo;<i>Mind the
+      edge of the carpet&rsquo;;</i> and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a
+      little hysterically&mdash;all save Vicary, whose foible was never to
+      laugh. But immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those
+      disconcerting, involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a
+      chill hint of autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was
+      over in an instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended
+      that everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the
+      beginning of the downfall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be
+      interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from
+      a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality
+      in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since. I
+      joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and her
+      daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance. The
+      rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis Alcar,
+      who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano. Here was
+      another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what negligence had I
+      allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across to him, penitent,
+      and glad to leave the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are only two fundamental differences in the world&mdash;the
+      difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age.
+      Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before
+      mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of
+      my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy,
+      men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are
+      like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling
+      and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They
+      gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their
+      folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties enfeebled
+      but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of all luxuries&mdash;pretty
+      women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare man, quietly proud of
+      his age, his ability to go out in the evening unattended, his amorous
+      past, and his contributions to the history of English printing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows
+      on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me. And his
+      eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out. He
+      opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of
+      rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and
+      what they say becomes accordingly oracular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pallor suits you,&rsquo; he piped gallantly, and then added: &lsquo;But
+      do not carry it to extremes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Am I so pale, then?&rsquo; I faltered, trying to smile naturally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined
+      it like a connoisseur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said at length. &lsquo;What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naïve question with a
+      strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living
+      as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, &lsquo;Does she
+      really live without love? What does she conceal?&rsquo; I have read this
+      interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis,
+      would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so
+      mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that
+      he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted
+      to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor&rsquo;s freedom. Moreover,
+      we had an affectionate regard for each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Love is the matter!&rsquo; I might have passionately cried out to him,
+      had we been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I
+      thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile,
+      but thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was my sixth novel in five years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With you,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;work is simply a drug.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I expostulated, &lsquo;how do you know that?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,&rsquo;
+      he proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. &lsquo;Some women take to
+      morphia, others take to work.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘On the contrary,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;I have quite determined to do no
+      more work for twelve months.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Seriously?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Seriously.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then you mean to give yourself time to love?&rsquo; he murmured, as it
+      were with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow
+      features was intensified by an enigmatic smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo; I laughed encouragingly. &lsquo;Why not? What do you
+      advise?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I advise it,&rsquo; he said positively. &lsquo;I advise it. You have
+      already wasted the best years.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The best?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You have
+      nothing to learn about love!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated
+      their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the ordeal;
+      I tried to clutch my clothes about me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing
+      critically at his chandeliers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does love bring happiness?&rsquo; I asked Lord Francis, carefully
+      ignoring his remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For forty years,&rsquo; he quavered, &lsquo;I made love to every pretty
+      woman I met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent.
+      return on my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I
+      certainly did not get even that in happiness. I got it in&mdash;other
+      ways.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And if you had to begin afresh?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his
+      bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I would do the same again,&rsquo; he whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Would you?&rsquo; I said, looking up at him. &lsquo;Truly?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely
+      hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through
+      this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one
+      involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last
+      spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted
+      confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive
+      meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the
+      eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with
+      admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is the title of the new book?&rsquo; he demanded casually, sinking
+      into a chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Burning Sappho</i>,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;But the title is very
+      misleading.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Bright star!&rsquo; he exclaimed, taking my hand. &lsquo;With such a
+      title you will surely beat the record of the Good Dame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Hsh!&rsquo; I enjoined him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal&mdash;or
+      to display&mdash;his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs.
+      Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that
+      impeccable <i>doyenne</i> of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had
+      captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound
+      problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of
+      them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her
+      dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen
+      thousand pounds a year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother&rsquo;s world, and she had
+      apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she
+      was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply
+      sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in
+      her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so
+      anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just
+      be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how
+      much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I remember,&rsquo; Lord Francis was saying. &lsquo;It was at St.
+      Malo. And what did you think of the Breton peasant?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh,&rsquo; said Jocelyn, &lsquo;mamma has not yet allowed us to study the
+      condition of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new
+      Settlement.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It must be very exhausting, my dear child,&rsquo; said Lord Francis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I came to ask you to play something,&rsquo; the child appealed to me.
+      &lsquo;I have never heard you play, and everyone says&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Jocelyn, my pet,&rsquo; the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis
+      floated across the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What, mamma?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal to
+      playing.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I
+      resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I
+      was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became violently
+      active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt murderous
+      towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I said, with
+      sugar in my voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the
+      mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening
+      phrase of Chopin&rsquo;s first Ballade, that composition so laden with
+      formidable memories&mdash;begun it without thinking and without
+      apprehension&mdash;showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the
+      silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands
+      filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I
+      saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one
+      of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind
+      and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed
+      unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and
+      vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess. And
+      then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in a
+      truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience, my
+      trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were
+      stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love, to
+      whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman expecting
+      her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous; a woman
+      with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who was at
+      once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I called my
+      dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and say that he,
+      too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the instrument of the god?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and
+      smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my
+      gaze suddenly to the keyboard. &lsquo;You too!&rsquo; I thought sadly,
+      &lsquo;You too!... One day! One day even you will know what life is, and
+      the look in those innocent eyes will never be innocent again!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of
+      the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and stopped.
+      It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my longing
+      for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My fingers
+      stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey me; my
+      pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting. And then I
+      became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed and anxious
+      faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my hands. It was
+      useless to fight further; the battle was lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I will not play any more,&rsquo; I said quickly. &lsquo;I ought not to
+      have tried to play from memory. Excuse me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I
+      could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and
+      the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Poor thing!&rsquo; murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. &lsquo;Do sit
+      down, dear.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Won&rsquo;t you have something to drink?&rsquo; said Vicary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am perfectly all right,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m only sorry that
+      my memory is not what it used to be.&rsquo; And I persisted in standing
+      for a few moments by the mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of
+      a face as white as milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano,
+      frightened by she knew not what, like a young child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,&rsquo; said Lord Francis
+      shakily. He had followed me. &lsquo;She has wisely decided to take a long
+      holiday. Good-bye, my dear.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We
+      shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had
+      ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even
+      Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not come!
+      My secret was my own&mdash;and his. And no one should surprise it unless
+      we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as they
+      filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the right to
+      be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently woman of the
+      world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some
+      lustre ware in the further drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,&rsquo; I said,
+      approaching her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,&rsquo; replied Mrs. Sardis. &lsquo;The
+      carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk
+      with you. Do you permit?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be delighted,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are sure you are well enough?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There is nothing whatever the matter with me,&rsquo; I answered slowly
+      and distinctly. &lsquo;Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I
+      told Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared,
+      that she might retire to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis,
+      naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still
+      furtively wandered to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear co-worker,&rsquo; she began, and hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I encouraged her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her matron&rsquo;s lips together:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its
+      honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists
+      have in the work of regenerating the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing
+      to be said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I wonder,&rsquo; Mrs. Sardis continued, &lsquo;if you have ever realized
+      what a power <i>you</i> are in England and America to-day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Power!&rsquo; I echoed. &lsquo;I have done nothing but try to write as
+      honestly and as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,&rsquo; Mrs. Sardis said.
+      &lsquo;And I needn&rsquo;t tell you that I am a warm admirer of your
+      talent, and that I rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Surely,&rsquo; I interrupted her coldly, &lsquo;you are not taking the
+      trouble to tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous
+      Anglo-Saxon public!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,&rsquo; she protested.
+      &lsquo;I personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though
+      their originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but
+      there exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly
+      objects to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion,
+      ignorant opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to
+      employ the word &ldquo;immoral.&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What, then?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a
+      motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of
+      the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal
+      life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find in
+      it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mrs. Sardis!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;What do you mean?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this
+      incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth;
+      and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had
+      received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and
+      detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the
+      conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive
+      that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then, as
+      suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the painful
+      earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I&mdash;what were we but two
+      groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one mystery
+      into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our characters? Mrs.
+      Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a natural force, as I
+      was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat of the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What do you mean?&rsquo; I repeated quietly. &lsquo;Tell me exactly what
+      you mean.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the
+      freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles
+      were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours,
+      I should find myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To put it in as few words as possible,&rsquo; said she, &lsquo;I mean
+      your relations with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We
+      had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself
+      a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque of
+      existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a
+      moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked
+      steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t affect not to understand?&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I assented with a motion of the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Many persons say there is a&mdash;a liaison between you,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And do you think that?&rsquo; I asked quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,&rsquo;
+      she said solemnly. &lsquo;No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and
+      I brought Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only
+      heard the gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne
+      in upon me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not
+      everyone would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content
+      to talk among themselves.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About me? Oh!&rsquo; It was the expression of an almost physical pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What can you expect them to do?&rsquo; asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘True,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship
+      with her&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let me tell you&rsquo;&mdash;I stopped her&mdash;&lsquo;that not a single
+      word has ever passed between me and&mdash;and the man you mean, that
+      everybody might not hear. Not a single word!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dearest girl,&rsquo; she exclaimed; &lsquo;how glad I am! How glad I am!
+      Now I can take measures to&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo; I resumed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like
+      Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her own
+      code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply to every
+      conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast stolid
+      London that hemmed me in&mdash;of attempting to explain to such an
+      excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would not
+      answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a church
+      steeple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; I said, rising, &lsquo;except that I thank you. Be sure
+      that I am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very
+      unpleasant to you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, virtuously happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You made it easy,&rsquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I
+      hated kissing women!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No more need be said,&rsquo; she almost whispered, as I put my hand on
+      the knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair
+      fame of our calling.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and
+      I opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove,
+      haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief
+      stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified silence
+      down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,&rsquo; I reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of
+      sensations caused by Ispenlove&rsquo;s presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Without a word, we passed together into the drawing-room, and I closed the
+      door. Ispenlove stood leaning against the piano, as though intensely
+      fatigued; he crushed his gibus with an almost savage movement, and then
+      bent his large, lustrous black eyes absently on the flat top of it. His
+      thin face was whiter even than usual, and his black hair, beard, and
+      moustache all dishevelled; the collar of his overcoat was twisted, and his
+      dinner-jacket rose an inch above it at the back of the neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to greet him, but I could not trust my lips. And I saw that he,
+      too, was trying in vain to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length I said, with that banality which too often surprises us in
+      supreme moments:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it? Do you know that your tie is under your ear?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as I uttered these words, my voice, breaking of itself and in defiance
+      of me, descended into a tone which sounded harsh and inimical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; he murmured, lifting his eyes to mine, &lsquo;if you turn
+      against me to-night, I shall&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Turn against you!&rsquo; I cried, shocked. &lsquo;Let me help you with
+      your overcoat!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went near him, meaning to take his overcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s finished between Mary and me,&rsquo; he said, holding me with
+      his gaze. ‘It&rsquo;s finished. I&rsquo;ve no one but you now; and I&rsquo;ve
+      come&mdash;I&rsquo;ve come&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped. We read one another&rsquo;s eyes at arm&rsquo;s length, and
+      all the sorrow and pity and love that were in each of us rose to our eyes
+      and shone there. I shivered with pleasure when I saw his arms move, and
+      then he clutched and dragged me to him, and I hid my glowing face on his
+      shoulder, in the dear folds of his overcoat, and I felt his lips on my
+      neck. And then, since neither of us was a coward, we lifted our heads, and
+      our mouths met honestly and fairly, and, so united, we shut our eyes for
+      an eternal moment, and the world was not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the avowal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave up my soul to him in that long kiss; all that was me, all that was
+      most secret and precious in me, ascended and poured itself out through my
+      tense lips, and was received by him. I kissed him with myself, with the
+      entire passionate energy of my being&mdash;not merely with my mouth. And
+      if I sighed, it was because I tried to give him more&mdash;more than I had&mdash;and
+      failed. Ah! The sensation of his nearness, the warmth of his face, the
+      titillation of his hair, the slow, luxurious intake of our breaths, the
+      sweet cruelty of his desperate clutch on my shoulders, the glimpses of his
+      skin through my eyelashes when I raised ever so little my eyelids! Pain
+      and joy of life, you were mingled then!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remembered that I was a woman, and disengaged myself and withdrew from
+      him. I hated to do it; but I did it. We became self-conscious. The
+      brilliant and empty drawing-room scanned us unfavourably with all its
+      globes and mirrors. How difficult it is to be natural in a great crisis!
+      Our spirits clamoured for expression, beating vainly against a thousand
+      barred doors of speech. There was so much to say, to explain, to define,
+      and everything was so confused and dizzily revolving, that we knew not
+      which door to open first. And then I think we both felt, but I more than
+      he, that explanations and statements were futile, that even if all the
+      doors were thrown open together, they would be inadequate. The
+      deliciousness of silence, of wonder, of timidity, of things guessed at and
+      hidden....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It makes me afraid,&rsquo; he murmured at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To be loved like that.... Your kiss ... you don&rsquo;t know.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled almost sadly. As if I did not know what my kiss had done! As if I
+      did not know that my kiss had created between us the happiness which
+      brings ruin!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You <i>do</i> love me?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Say it, say it!&rsquo; he pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘More than I can ever show you,&rsquo; I said proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Honestly,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t imagine what you have been
+      able to see in me. I&rsquo;m nothing&mdash;I&rsquo;m nobody&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Foolish boy!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;You are you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The profound significance of that age-worn phrase struck me for the first
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rushed to me at the word &lsquo;boy,&rsquo; and, standing over me, took
+      my hand in his hot hand. I let it lie, inert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you haven&rsquo;t always loved me. I have always loved <i>you</i>,
+      from the moment when I drove with you, that first day, from the office to
+      your hotel. But you haven&rsquo;t always loved me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then when did you&mdash;? Tell me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was dull at first&mdash;I could not see. But when you told me that the
+      end of <i>Fate and Friendship</i> was not as good as I could make it&mdash;do
+      you remember, that afternoon in the office?&mdash;and how reluctant you
+      were to tell me, how afraid you were to tell me?&mdash;your throat went
+      dry, and you stroked your forehead as you always do when you are nervous&mdash;There!
+      you are doing it now, foolish boy!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I seized his left arm, and gently pulled it down from his face. Oh,
+      exquisite moment!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was brave of you to tell me&mdash;very brave! I loved you for telling
+      me. You were quite wrong about the end of that book. You didn&rsquo;t see
+      the fine point of it, and you never would have seen it&mdash;and I liked
+      you, somehow, for not seeing it, because it was so feminine&mdash;but I
+      altered the book to please you, and when I had altered it, against my
+      conscience, I loved you more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s incredible! incredible!&rsquo; he muttered, half to himself.
+      &lsquo;I never hoped till lately that you would care for me. I never dared
+      to think of such a thing. I knew you oughtn&rsquo;t to! It passes
+      comprehension.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is just what love does,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no,&rsquo; he went on quickly; &lsquo;you don&rsquo;t understand; you
+      can&rsquo;t understand my feelings when I began to suspect, about two
+      months ago, that, after all, the incredible had happened. I&rsquo;m
+      nothing but your publisher. I can&rsquo;t talk. I can&rsquo;t write. I can&rsquo;t
+      play. I can&rsquo;t do anything. And look at the men you have here! I&rsquo;ve
+      sometimes wondered how often you&rsquo;ve been besieged&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘None of them was like you,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Perhaps that is why I
+      have always kept them off.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I raised my eyes and lips, and he stooped and kissed me. He wanted to take
+      me in his arms again, but I would not yield myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Be reasonable,&rsquo; I urged him. &lsquo;Ought we not to think of our
+      situation?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He loosed me, stammering apologies, abasing himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I ought to leave you, I ought never to see you again.&rsquo; He spoke
+      roughly. ‘What am I doing to you? You who are so innocent and pure!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I entreat you not to talk like that,&rsquo; I gasped, reddening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I must talk like that,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;I must talk like
+      that. You had everything that a woman can desire, and I come into your
+      life and offer you&mdash;what?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I <i>have</i> everything a woman can desire,&rsquo; I corrected him
+      softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he breathed. &lsquo;If I bring you disaster, you will
+      forgive me, won&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My happiness will only cease with your love,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Happiness!&rsquo; he repeated. &lsquo;I have never been so happy as I am
+      now; but such happiness is terrible. It seems to me impossible that such
+      happiness can last.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Faint heart!&rsquo; I chided him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is for you I tremble,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;If&mdash;if&mdash;&rsquo;
+      He stopped. &lsquo;My darling, forgive me!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How I pitied him! How I enveloped him in an effluent sympathy that rushed
+      warm from my heart! He accused himself of having disturbed my existence.
+      Whereas, was it not I who had disturbed his? He had fought against me, I
+      knew well, but fate had ordained his defeat. He had been swept away; he
+      had been captured; he had been caught in a snare of the high gods. And he
+      was begging forgiveness, he who alone had made my life worth living! I
+      wanted to kneel before him, to worship him, to dry his tears with my hair.
+      I swear that my feelings were as much those of a mother as of a lover. He
+      was ten years older than me, and yet he seemed boyish, and I an aged woman
+      full of experience, as he sat there opposite to me with his wide,
+      melancholy eyes and restless mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wonderful, is it not,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that we should be talking
+      like this to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wonderful!&rsquo; I responded. &lsquo;But yesterday we talked with our
+      eyes, and our eyes did not say Mr. or Miss. Our eyes said&mdash;Ah, what
+      they said can never be translated into words!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable
+      curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun. Could it be true that
+      Heaven had made that fine creature&mdash;noble and modest, nervous and
+      full of courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things,
+      fine and delicate&mdash;could it be true that Heaven had made him and then
+      given him to me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves
+      constituted perfection? Oh, wonder, wonder! Oh, miraculous bounty which I
+      had not deserved! This thing had happened to me, of all women! How it
+      showed, by comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my
+      worldly splendour! I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled
+      interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had
+      almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water
+      and the palm. And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade.
+      Wonderful!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why were you so late to-night?&rsquo; I asked abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Late?&rsquo; he replied absently. &lsquo;Is it late?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both looked at the clock. It was yet half an hour from midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course it isn&rsquo;t&mdash;not <i>very</i>,&rsquo; I said. I was
+      forgetting that. Everybody left so early.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why was that?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by
+      reason of his failure to appear. He glanced at me with tender amaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I am fortunate to-day,&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;Was it not lucky
+      they left when they did? Suppose you had arrived, in that state, dearest
+      man, and burst into a room full of people? What would they have thought?
+      Where should I have looked?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m so sorry. I forgot it was your
+      evening. I must have forgotten. I forgot everything, except that I was
+      bound to see you at once, instantly, with all speed.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor boy! He was like a bird fluttering in my hand. Millions of women must
+      have so pictured to themselves the men who loved them, and whom they
+      loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But still, you <i>were</i> rather late, you know,&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not ask me why,&rsquo; he begged, with an expression of deep pain on
+      his face. &lsquo;I have had a scene with Mary. It would humiliate me to
+      tell you&mdash;to tell even you&mdash;what passed between us. But it is
+      over. Our relations in the future can never, in any case, be more than
+      formal.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A spasm of fierce jealousy shot through me&mdash;jealousy of Mary, my
+      friend Mary, who knew him with such profound intimacy that they could go
+      through a scene together which was &lsquo;humiliating.&rsquo; I saw that
+      my own intimacy with him was still crude with the crudity of newness, and
+      that only years could mellow it. Mary, the good, sentimental Mary, had
+      wasted the years of their marriage&mdash;had never understood the value of
+      the treasure in her keeping. Why had they always been sad in their house?
+      What was the origin of that resigned and even cheerful gloom which had
+      pervaded their domestic life, and which I had remarked on my first visit
+      to Bloomsbury Square? Were these, too, mysteries that I must not ask my
+      lover to reveal? Resentment filled me. I came near to hating Mary, not
+      because she had made him unhappy&mdash;oh no!&mdash;but because she had
+      had the priority in his regard, and because there was nothing about him,
+      however secret and recondite, that I could be absolutely sure of the sole
+      knowledge of. She had been in the depths with him. I desired fervently
+      that I also might descend with him, and even deeper. Oh, that I might have
+      the joy and privilege of humiliation with him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall ask you nothing, dearest,&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had risen from my seat and gone to him, and was lightly touching his
+      hair with my fingers. He did not move, but sat staring into the fire.
+      Somehow, I adored him because he made no response to the fondling of my
+      hand. His strange acceptance of the caress as a matter of course gave me
+      the illusion that I was his wife, and that the years had mellowed our
+      intimacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke my name slowly and distinctly, savouring it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I answered softly and obediently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta! Listen! Our two lives are in our hands at this moment&mdash;this
+      moment while we talk here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His rapt eyes had not stirred from the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I feel it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What are we to do? What shall we decide to do?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He slowly turned towards me. I lowered my glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, you do, Carlotta,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;You do know.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice trembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary and I are such good friends,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;That is what
+      makes it so&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no, no!&rsquo; he objected loudly. His nervousness had suddenly
+      increased. ‘Don&rsquo;t, for God&rsquo;s sake, begin to argue in that way!
+      You are above feminine logic. Mary is your friend. Good. You respect her;
+      she respects you. Good. Is that any reason why our lives should be ruined?
+      Will that benefit Mary? Do I not tell you that everything has ceased
+      between us?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The idea of being false to Mary&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There&rsquo;s no question of being false. And if there was, would you be
+      false to love rather than to friendship? Between you and me there is love;
+      between Mary and me there is not love. It isn&rsquo;t her fault, nor mine,
+      least of all yours. It is the fault of the secret essence of existence.
+      Have you not yourself written that the only sacred thing is instinct? Are
+      we, or are we not, to be true to ourselves?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You see,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;your wife is so sentimental. She would be
+      incapable of looking at the affair as&mdash;as we do; as I should in her
+      place.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that my protests were insincere, and that all my heart and brain
+      were with him, but I could not admit this frankly. Ah! And I knew also
+      that the sole avenue to peace and serenity, not to happiness, was the path
+      of renunciation and of obedience to the conventions of society, and that
+      this was precisely the path which we should never take. And on the horizon
+      of our joy I saw a dark cloud. It had always been there, but I had refused
+      to see it. I looked at it now steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; he groaned, &lsquo;if we are to be governed by Mary&rsquo;s
+      sentimentality&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear love,&rsquo; I whispered, &lsquo;what do you want me to do?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The only possible, honest, just thing. I want you to go away with me, so
+      that Mary can get a divorce.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke sternly, as it were relentlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does she guess&mdash;about me?&rsquo; I asked, biting my lip, and looking
+      away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not yet. Hasn&rsquo;t the slightest notion, I&rsquo;m sure. But I&rsquo;ll
+      tell her, straight and fair.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dearest friend,&rsquo; I said, after a silence. &lsquo;Perhaps I know
+      more of the world than you think. Perhaps I&rsquo;m a girl only in years
+      and situation. Forgive me if I speak plainly. Mary may prove
+      unfaithfulness, but she cannot get a decree unless she can prove other
+      things as well.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stroked his forehead. As for me, I shuddered with agitation. He walked
+      across the room and back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he said, putting his white face close to mine like an
+      actor. &lsquo;I will prove whether your love for me is great enough. I
+      have struck her. I struck her to-night in the presence of a servant. And I
+      did it purposely, in cold blood, so that she might be able to prove
+      cruelty. Ah! Have I not thought it all out? Have I not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sob, painfully escaping, shook my whole frame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And this was before you had&mdash;had spoken to me!&rsquo; I said
+      bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not myself, but some strange and frigid force within me uttered those
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is what love will do. That is the sort of thing love drives one to,&rsquo;
+      he cried despairingly. &lsquo;Oh! I was not sure of you&mdash;I was not
+      sure of you. I struck her, on the off chance.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sank on the sofa and wept passionately, unashamed, like a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not bear it. My heart would have broken if I had watched, without
+      assuaging, my boy&rsquo;s grief an instant longer than I did. I sprang to
+      him. I took him to my breast. I kissed his eyes until the tears ceased to
+      flow. Whatever it was or might be, I must share his dishonour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor girl!&rsquo; he said at length. &lsquo;If you had refused me, if
+      you had even judged me, I intended to warn you plainly that it meant my
+      death; and if that failed, I should have gone to the office and shot
+      myself.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not say such things,&rsquo; I entreated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is true. The revolver is in my pocket. Ah! I have made you cry!
+      You&rsquo;re frightened! But I&rsquo;m not a brute; I&rsquo;m only a
+      little beside myself. Pardon me, angel!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour. He did not understand
+      me. He did not suspect the risk he had run. If I had hesitated to
+      surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should
+      never have surrendered. I knew myself well enough to know that. I had a
+      conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have
+      parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man! But I forgave him.
+      Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;we shall leave everything. You grasp it?&mdash;everything.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I replied. &lsquo;Of all the things we have now, we shall
+      have nothing but ourselves.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see you
+      again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He meant
+      what he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is no sacrifice for me,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;The sacrifice would
+      be not to give up all in exchange for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We shall be exiles,&rsquo; he went on, &lsquo;until the divorce business
+      is over. And then perhaps we shall creep back&mdash;shall we?&mdash;and
+      try to find out how many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;We shall come back. They all do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What do you mean?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thousands have done what we are going to do,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And
+      all of them have thought that their own case was different from the other
+      cases.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And a few have been happy. A few have not regretted the price. A few have
+      retained the illusion.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Illusion? Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see that my heart&rsquo;s treasure was ruffled. He clasped my hand
+      tenaciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen,&rsquo; I
+      answered quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous passion.
+      &lsquo;In me there are two beings&mdash;myself and the observer of myself.
+      It is the novelist&rsquo;s disease, this duplication of personality. When
+      I said illusion, I meant the supreme illusion of love. Is it not an
+      illusion? I have seen it in others, and in exactly the same way I see it
+      in myself and I see it in you. Will it last?&mdash;who knows? None can
+      tell.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Angel!&rsquo; he expostulated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No one can foresee the end of love,&rsquo; I said, with an exquisite
+      gentle sorrow. &lsquo;But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as
+      yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible
+      years of disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night
+      alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and his
+      disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely round my
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Call it illusion if you like,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Words are nothing. I
+      only know that for me it will be eternal. I only know that my one desire
+      is to be with you always, never to leave you, not to miss a moment of you;
+      to have you for mine, openly, securely. Carlotta, where shall we go?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We must travel, mustn&rsquo;t we?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Travel?&rsquo; he repeated, with an air of discontent. &lsquo;Yes. But
+      where to?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Travel,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;See things. See the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I had thought we might find some quiet little place,&rsquo; he said
+      wistfully, and as if apologetically, where we could be alone, undisturbed,
+      some spot where we could have ourselves wholly to ourselves, and go walks
+      into mountains and return for dinner; and then the long, calm evenings!
+      Dearest, our honeymoon!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our honeymoon! I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human
+      nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I not
+      talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and killed by
+      a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence! Inexperienced as I
+      was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the experience of my
+      impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very thought of
+      calculation would have been abhorrent. But I saw, I felt, I lived through
+      in a few seconds the interminable and monotonous length of those calm
+      days, and especially those calm evenings succeeding each other with a
+      formidable sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And I knew
+      that our love&mdash;miraculously sweet as it was&mdash;probably was not
+      greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive the
+      cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the
+      survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman
+      must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she
+      might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme,
+      devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely
+      and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion, for her, is a
+      campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart,
+      and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the
+      beautiful plant must not be exposed to hazard. Suppose it sickened, such a
+      love as ours&mdash;what then? The misery of hell, the torture of the
+      damned! Only its rich and ample continuance could justify us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear,&rsquo; I said submissively, &lsquo;I shall leave everything to
+      you. The idea of travelling occurred to me; that was all. I have never
+      travelled further than Cannes. Still, we have all our lives before us.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We will travel,&rsquo; he said unselfishly. &lsquo;We&rsquo;ll go round
+      the world&mdash;slowly. I&rsquo;ll get the tickets at Cook&rsquo;s
+      to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, dearest, if you would rather&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no! In any case we shall always have our evenings.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course we shall. Dearest, how good you are!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I wish I was,&rsquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was glad, then, that I had never allowed my portrait to appear in a
+      periodical. We could not prevent the appearance in American newspapers of
+      heralding paragraphs, but the likelihood of our being recognised was
+      sensibly lessened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you start soon?&rsquo; he asked. &lsquo;Can you be ready?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Any time. The sooner the better, now that it is decided.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not regret? We have decided so quickly. Ah! you are the merest
+      girl, and I have taken advantage&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put my hand over his mouth. He seized it, and kept it there and kissed
+      it, and his ardent breath ran through my fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What about your business?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall confide it to old Tate&mdash;tell him some story&mdash;he knows
+      quite as much about it as I do. To-morrow I will see to all that. The day
+      after, shall we start? No; to-morrow night. To-morrow night, eh? I&rsquo;ll
+      run in to-morrow and tell you what I&rsquo;ve arranged. I must see you
+      to-morrow, early.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Do not come before lunch.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not before lunch! Why?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was surprised. But I had been my own mistress for five years, with my
+      own habits, rules, privacies. I had never seen anyone before lunch. And
+      to-morrow, of all days, I should have so much to do and to arrange. Was
+      this man to come like an invader and disturb my morning? So felt the
+      celibate in me, instinctively, thoughtlessly. That deep-seated objection
+      to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common, I
+      think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a rich
+      dress, and donning the <i>peignoir</i> of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a
+      way which is an eternal enigma to men.... Then I saw, in a sudden flash,
+      that I had renounced my individual existence, that I had forfeited my
+      habits and rules, and privacies, that I was a man&rsquo;s woman. And the
+      passionate lover in me gloried in this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come as soon as you like, dearest friend,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nobody except Mary will know anything till we are actually gone,&rsquo;
+      he remarked. &lsquo;And I shall not tell her till the last thing.
+      Afterwards, won&rsquo;t they chatter! God! Let &rsquo;em.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘They are already chattering,&rsquo; I said. And I told him about Mrs.
+      Sardis. ‘When she met you on the landing,&rsquo; I added, &lsquo;she drew
+      her own conclusions, my poor, poor boy!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was furious. I could see he wanted to take me in his arms and protect
+      me masculinely from the rising storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All that is nothing,&rsquo; I soothed him. &lsquo;Nothing. Against it, we
+      have our self-respect. We can scorn all that.&rsquo; And I gave a short,
+      contemptuous laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Darling!&rsquo; he murmured. &lsquo;You are more than a woman.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I hope not.&rsquo; And I laughed again, but unnaturally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had risen; I leaned back in a large cushioned chair; we looked at each
+      other in silence&mdash;a silence that throbbed with the heavy pulse of an
+      unutterable and complex emotion&mdash;pleasure, pain, apprehension, even
+      terror. What had I done? Why had I, with a word&mdash;nay, without a word,
+      with merely a gesture and a glance&mdash;thrown my whole life into the
+      crucible of passion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act,
+      like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as an
+      infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may shatter?
+      Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when I gazed into those
+      eyes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose I must go,&rsquo; he said disconsolately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and the next instant the clock struck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he urged himself, &lsquo;I must go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent down, put his hands on the arms of the chair, and kissed me
+      violently, twice. The fire that consumes the world ran scorchingly through
+      me. Every muscle was suddenly strained into tension, and then fell slack.
+      My face flushed; I let my head slip sideways, so that my left cheek was
+      against the back of the chair. Through my drooping eyelashes I could see
+      the snake-like glitter of his eyes as he stood over me. I shuddered and
+      sighed. I was like someone fighting in vain against the sweet seduction of
+      an overwhelming and fatal drug. I wanted to entreat him to go away, to rid
+      me of the exquisite and sinister enchantment. But I could not speak. I
+      shut my eyes. This was love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment I heard the soft sound of his feet on the carpet. I opened
+      my eyes. He had stepped back. When our glances met he averted his face,
+      and went briskly for his overcoat, which lay on the floor by the piano. I
+      rose freed, re-established in my self-control. I arranged his collar,
+      straightened his necktie with a few touches, picked up his hat, pushed
+      back the crown, which flew up with a noise like a small explosion, and
+      gave it into his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;To-morrow morning, eh? I shall get to
+      know everything necessary before I come. And then we will fix things up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can let myself out,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made a vague gesture, intended to signify that I could not think of
+      permitting him to let himself out. We left the drawing-room, and passed,
+      with precautions of silence, to the front-door, which I gently opened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-night, then,&rsquo; he whispered formally, almost coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Too late for the lift,&rsquo; I murmured out there with him in the vast,
+      glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above
+      us and below us into the mysterious unseen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted steps,
+      firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the baluster.
+      When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below me, he
+      stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he resolutely
+      dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I had glimpses
+      of parts of his figure as he passed story after story. Then I heard his
+      tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the distant clatter of
+      double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was love, at last&mdash;the reality of love! He would have killed
+      himself had he failed to win me&mdash;killed himself! With the novelist&rsquo;s
+      habit, I ran off into a series of imagined scenes&mdash;the dead body,
+      with the hole in the temples and the awkward attitude of death; the
+      discovery, the rush for the police, the search for a motive, the inquest,
+      the rapid-speaking coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself,
+      cold and impassive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said....
+      But he lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his
+      spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was
+      inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my
+      mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous,
+      bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and
+      injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense
+      fact that he was mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How calm I am!&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized
+      the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give the
+      brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind
+      factitiously active. And I began at once to anticipate Frank&rsquo;s
+      coming, and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had
+      determined that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and
+      it occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which had,
+      in fact, wakened me. Save on special occasions, I was never wakened, and
+      Emmeline and my maid had injunctions not to come to me until I rang. My
+      thoughts ran instantly to Frank. He had arrived thus early, merely because
+      he could not keep away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How extremely indiscreet of him!&rsquo; I thought. &lsquo;What detestable
+      prevarications with Emmeline this will lead to! I cannot possibly be ready
+      in time if he is to be in and out all day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing him quickly, and the idea of his
+      splendid impatience, drenched me with joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; I called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emmeline entered in that terrible mauve dressing-gown which I had been
+      powerless to persuade her to discard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So sorry to disturb you,&rsquo; said Emmeline, feeling her loose golden
+      hair with one hand, &lsquo;but Mrs. Ispenlove has called, and wants to see
+      you at once. I&rsquo;m afraid something has happened.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Mrs</i>. Ispenlove?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My voice shook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. Yvonne came to my room and told me that Mrs. Ispenlove was here, and
+      was either mad or very unwell, and would I go to her? So I got up at once.
+      What shall I do? Perhaps it&rsquo;s something very serious. Not half-past
+      eight, and calling like this!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let her come in here immediately,&rsquo; I said, turning my head on the
+      pillow, so that Emmeline should not see the blush which had spread over my
+      face and my neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was inevitable that a terrible and desolating scene must pass between
+      Mary Ispenlove and myself. I could not foresee how I should emerge from
+      it, but I desperately resolved that I would suffer the worst without a
+      moment&rsquo;s delay, and that no conceivable appeal should induce me to
+      abandon Frank. I was, as I waited for Mrs. Ispenlove to appear, nothing
+      but an embodied and fierce instinct to guard what I had won. No
+      consideration of mercy could have touched me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She entered with a strange, hysterical cry:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had asked her long ago to use my Christian name&mdash;long before I ever
+      imagined what would come to pass between her husband and me; but I always
+      called her Mrs. Ispenlove. The difference in our ages justified me. And
+      that morning the difference seemed to be increased. I realized, with a
+      cruel justice of perception quite new in my estimate of her, that she was
+      old&mdash;an old woman. She had never been beautiful, but she was tall and
+      graceful, and her face had been attractive by the sweetness of the mouth
+      and the gray beneficence of the eyes; and now that sweetness and that
+      beneficence appeared suddenly to have been swallowed up in the fatal
+      despair of a woman who discovers that she has lived too long. Gray hair,
+      wrinkles, crow&rsquo;s-feet, tired eyes, drawn mouth, and the terrible
+      tell-tale hollow under the chin&mdash;these were what I saw in Mary
+      Ispenlove. She had learnt that the only thing worth having in life is
+      youth. I possessed everything that she lacked. Surely the struggle was
+      unequal. Fate might have chosen a less piteous victim. I felt profoundly
+      sorry for Mary Ispenlove, and this sorrow was stronger in me even than the
+      uneasiness, the false shame (for it was not a real shame) which I
+      experienced in her presence. I put out my hands towards her, as it were,
+      involuntarily. She sprang to me, took them, and kissed me as I lay in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How beautiful you look&mdash;like that!&rsquo; she exclaimed wildly, and
+      with a hopeless and acute envy in her tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why&mdash;&rsquo; I began to protest, astounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will you think of me, disturbing you like this? What will you think?&rsquo;
+      she moaned. And then her voice rose: &lsquo;I could not help it; I couldn&rsquo;t,
+      really. Oh, Carlotta! you are my friend, aren&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One thing grew swiftly clear to me: that she was as yet perfectly unaware
+      of the relations between Frank and myself. My brain searched hurriedly for
+      an explanation of the visit. I was conscious of an extraordinary relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are my friend, aren&rsquo;t you?&rsquo; she repeated insistently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her
+      friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in
+      the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an
+      understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart
+      bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness
+      that I could not bring myself to reply directly, &lsquo;Yes, I am your
+      friend.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We have known each other a long time,&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There was no one else I could come to,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pass my
+      dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What are you going to do?&rsquo; she demanded fearfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and
+      then we will talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You&rsquo;ll be more
+      yourself after a cup of tea.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How young I was then! I remember my naïve satisfaction in this exhibition
+      of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be&mdash;hard in spite
+      of the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for
+      her. And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I
+      regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will
+      read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she
+      did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one
+      is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one,
+      defenceless as a rabbit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are very kind to me,&rsquo; she said, putting her cup on the
+      mantelpiece with a nervous rattle; &lsquo;and I need it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell me,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;Tell me&mdash;what I can do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace. A distance between us
+      seemed necessary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can&rsquo;t do anything, my dear,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Only I was
+      obliged to talk to someone, after all the night. It&rsquo;s about Frank.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mr. Ispenlove!&rsquo; I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not
+      very well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. He has left me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why? What is the matter?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates
+      me. But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation. Still, could I
+      have behaved differently?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t understand unless I begin a long time ago,&rsquo; said
+      Mary Ispenlove. &lsquo;Carlotta, my married life has been awful&mdash;awful&mdash;a
+      tragedy. It has been a tragedy both for him and for me. But no one has
+      suspected it; we have hidden it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. I, however, had suspected it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just twenty years&mdash;yes, twenty&mdash;since I fell in
+      love,&rsquo; she proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With&mdash;Frank,&rsquo; I assumed. I lay back in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;With another man. That was in Brixton, when I
+      was a girl living with my father; my mother was dead. He was a barrister&mdash;I
+      mean the man I was in love with. He had only just been called to the Bar.
+      I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him. Certainly he
+      did; he could not help seeing it. I could not conceal it. Of course I can
+      understand now that it flattered him. Naturally it did. Any man is
+      flattered when a woman falls in love with him. And my father was rich, and
+      so on, and so on. We saw each other a lot. I hoped, and I kept on hoping.
+      Some people even said it was a match, and that I was throwing myself away.
+      Fancy&mdash;throwing myself away&mdash;me!&mdash;who have never been good
+      for anything! My father did not care much for the man; said he was selfish
+      and grasping. Possibly he was; but I was in love with him all the same.
+      Then I met Frank, and Frank fell in love with me. You know how obstinate
+      Frank is when he has once set his mind on a thing. Frank determined to
+      have me; and my father was on his side. I would not listen. I didn&rsquo;t
+      give him so much as a chance to propose to me. And this state of things
+      lasted for quite a long time. It wasn&rsquo;t my fault; it wasn&rsquo;t
+      anybody&rsquo;s fault.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just so,&rsquo; I agreed, raising my head on one elbow, and listening
+      intently. It was the first sincere word I had spoken, and I was glad to
+      utter it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The man I had fallen in love with came nearer. He was decidedly tempted.
+      I began to feel sure of him. All I wanted was to marry him, whether he
+      loved me a great deal or only a little tiny bit. I was in that state. Then
+      he drew away. He scarcely ever came to the house, and I seemed never to be
+      able to meet him. And then one day my father showed me something in the <i>Morning
+      Post</i>. It was a paragraph saying that the man I was in love with was
+      going to marry a woman of title, a widow and the daughter of a peer. I
+      soon found out she was nearly twice his age. He had done it to get on. He
+      was getting on very well by himself, but I suppose that wasn&rsquo;t fast
+      enough for him. Carlotta, it nearly killed me. And I felt so sorry for
+      him. You can&rsquo;t guess how sorry I felt for him. I felt that he didn&rsquo;t
+      know what he had missed. Oh, how happy I should have made him! I should
+      have lived for him. I should have done everything for him. I should have
+      ... You don&rsquo;t mind me telling you all this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made an imploring gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a shame!&rsquo; I burst out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, my dear!&rsquo; she said, &lsquo;he didn&rsquo;t love me. One can&rsquo;t
+      blame him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And then?&rsquo; I questioned, with an eagerness that I tried to
+      overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Frank was so persevering. And&mdash;and&mdash;I <i>did</i> admire his
+      character. A woman couldn&rsquo;t help admiring his character, could she?
+      And, besides, I honestly thought I had got over the other affair, and that
+      I was in love with him. I refused him once, and then I married him. He was
+      as mad for me as I had been for the other one. Yes, I married him, and we
+      both imagined we were going to be happy.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And why haven&rsquo;t you been?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This is my shame,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;I could not forget the other
+      one. We soon found that out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Did you <i>talk</i> about it, you&mdash;and Frank?&rsquo; I put in,
+      amazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh <i>no</i>!&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;It was never mentioned&mdash;never
+      once during fifteen years. But he knew; and I knew that he knew. The other
+      one was always between us&mdash;always, always, always! The other one was
+      always in my heart. We did our best, both of us; but it was useless. The
+      passion of my life was&mdash;it was invincible. I <i>tried</i> to love
+      Frank. I could only like him. Fancy his position! And we were helpless.
+      Because, you know, Frank and I are not the sort of people that go and make
+      a scandal&mdash;at least, that was what I thought,&rsquo; she sighed.
+      &lsquo;I know different now. Well, he died the day before yesterday.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Crettell. He had just been made a judge. He was the youngest judge on the
+      bench&mdash;only forty-six.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Was <i>that</i> the man?&rsquo; I exclaimed; for Crettell&rsquo;s
+      character was well known in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That was the man. Frank came in yesterday afternoon, and after he had
+      glanced at the paper, he said: &ldquo;By the way, Crettell&rsquo;s dead.&rdquo;
+      I did not grasp it at first. He repeated: &ldquo;Crettell&mdash;he&rsquo;s
+      dead.&rdquo; I burst into tears. I couldn&rsquo;t help it. And, besides, I
+      forgot. Frank asked me very roughly what I was crying for. You know, Frank
+      has much changed these last few months. He is not as nice as he used to
+      be. Excuse me talking like this, my dear. Something must be worrying him.
+      Well, I said as well as I could while I was crying that the news was a
+      shock to me. I tried to stop crying, but I couldn&rsquo;t. I sobbed. Frank
+      threw down the paper and stamped on it, and he swore. He said: &ldquo;I
+      know you&rsquo;ve always been in love with the brute, but you needn&rsquo;t
+      make such a damn fuss about it.&rdquo; Oh, my dear, how can I tell you
+      these things? That angered me. This was the first time in our married life
+      that Crettell had been even referred to, and it seemed to me that Frank
+      put all the hatred of fifteen years into that single sentence. Why was I
+      angry? I didn&rsquo;t know. We had a scene. Frank lost his temper, for the
+      first time that I remember, and then he recovered it. He said quietly he
+      couldn&rsquo;t stand living with me any more; and that he had long since
+      wanted to leave me. He said he would never see me again. And then one of
+      the servants came in, and&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing. I sent her out. And&mdash;and&mdash;Fran didn&rsquo;t come home
+      last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence. I could find nothing to say, and Mary had hidden her
+      face. I utterly forgot myself and my own state in this extraordinary
+      hazard of matrimony. I could only think of Mary&rsquo;s grief&mdash;a
+      grief which, nevertheless, I did not too well comprehend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then you love him now?&rsquo; I ventured at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You love him&mdash;is that so?&rsquo; I pursued. &lsquo;Tell me honestly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I spoke as gently as it was in me to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Honestly!&rsquo; she cried, looking up. &lsquo;Honestly! No! If I loved
+      him, could I have been so upset about Crettell? But we have been together
+      so long. We are husband and wife, Carlotta. We are so used to each other.
+      And generally he is so good. We&rsquo;ve got on very well, considering.
+      And now he&rsquo;s left me. Think of the scandal! It will be terrible!
+      terrible! A separation at my age! Carlotta, it&rsquo;s unthinkable! He&rsquo;s
+      mad&mdash;that&rsquo;s the only explanation. Haven&rsquo;t I tried to be a
+      good wife to him? He&rsquo;s never found fault with me&mdash;never! And I&rsquo;m
+      sure, as regards him, I&rsquo;ve had nothing to complain of.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He will come back,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;He&rsquo;ll think things over
+      and see reason.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was just as though I heard some other person saying these words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But he didn&rsquo;t come <i>home</i> last night,&rsquo; Mary insisted.
+      &lsquo;What the servants are thinking I shouldn&rsquo;t like to guess.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What does it matter what the servants think?&rsquo; I said brusquely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it <i>does</i> matter. He didn&rsquo;t come <i>home</i>. He must have
+      slept at a hotel. Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for
+      him! Oh, Carlotta, you&rsquo;re too young to understand what I feel! You&rsquo;re
+      very clever, and you&rsquo;re very sympathetic; but you can&rsquo;t see
+      things as I see them. Wait till you&rsquo;ve been married fifteen years.
+      The scandal! The shame! And me only too anxious to be a good wife, and to
+      keep our home as it should be, and to help him as much as I can with my
+      stupid brains in his business!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can understand perfectly,&rsquo; I asserted. &lsquo;I can understand
+      perfectly.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I could. The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her
+      ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her,
+      was only too plainly apparent. She was&mdash;and naturally, sincerely,
+      instinctively&mdash;the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the
+      conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her
+      quiet resentment. But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief
+      and her resentment. Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her
+      resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified.
+      I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must
+      always be inferior to emotion. I am intensely proud of my ability to see,
+      then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary
+      Ispenlove&rsquo;s attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural,
+      exactly as free from artificiality, as my own. Can you go outside Nature?
+      Is not the polity of Londoners in London as much a part of Nature as the
+      polity of bees in a hive?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not a word for fifteen years, and then an explosion like that!&rsquo; she
+      murmured, incessantly recurring to the core of her grievance. &lsquo;I did
+      wrong to marry him, I know. But I <i>did</i> marry him&mdash;I <i>did</i>
+      marry him! We are husband and wife. And he goes off and sleeps at a hotel!
+      Carlotta, I wish I had never been born! What will people say? I shall
+      never be able to look anyone in the face again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He will come back,&rsquo; I said again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do you think so?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time she caught at the straw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And you will settle down gradually; and
+      everything will be forgotten.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said that because it was the one thing I could say. I repeat that I had
+      ceased to think of myself. I had become a spectator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It can never be the same between us again,&rsquo; Mary breathed sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment Emmeline Palmer plunged, rather than came, into my bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Miss Peel&mdash;&rsquo; she began, and then stopped, seeing Mrs.
+      Ispenlove by the fireplace, though she knew that Mrs. Ispenlove was with
+      me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Anything wrong?&rsquo; I asked, affecting a complete calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that the good creature had lost her head, as she sometimes
+      did, when I gave her too much to copy, or when the unusual occurred in no
+      matter what form. The excellent Emmeline was one of my mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mr. Ispenlove is here,&rsquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None of us spoke for a few seconds. Mary Ispenlove stared at me, but
+      whether in terror or astonishment, I could not guess. This was one of the
+      most dramatic moments of my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell Mr. Ispenlove that I can see nobody,&rsquo; I said, glancing at the
+      wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And, Emmeline,&rsquo; I stopped her. &lsquo;Do not tell him anything
+      else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surely the fact that Frank had called to see me before nine o&rsquo;clock
+      in the morning, surely my uneasy demeanour, must at length arouse
+      suspicion even in the simple, trusting mind of his wife!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How does he know that I am here?&rsquo; Mary asked, lowering her voice,
+      when Emmeline had shut the door; &lsquo;I said nothing to the servants.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was saved. Her own swift explanation of his coming was, of course, the
+      most natural in the world. I seized on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Never mind how,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;Perhaps he was watching outside
+      your house, and followed you. The important thing is that he has come. It
+      proves,&rsquo; I went on, inventing rapidly, &lsquo;that he has changed
+      his mind and recognises his mistake. Had you not better go back home as
+      quickly as you can? It would have been rather awkward for you to see him
+      here, wouldn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, yes,&rsquo; she said, her eyes softening and gleaming with joy.
+      &lsquo;I will go. Oh, Carlotta! how can I thank you? You are my best
+      friend.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have done nothing,&rsquo; I protested. But I had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are a dear!&rsquo; she exclaimed, coming impulsively to the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat up. She kissed me fervently. I rang the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Has Mr. Ispenlove gone?&rsquo; I asked Emmeline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; said Emmeline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In another minute his wife, too, had departed, timorously optimistic,
+      already denying in her heart that it could never be the same between them
+      again. She assuredly would not find Frank at home. But that was nothing. I
+      had escaped! I had escaped!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Will you mind getting dressed at once?&rsquo; I said to Emmeline. &lsquo;I
+      should like you to go out with a letter and a manuscript as soon as
+      possible.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I got a notebook and began to write to Frank. I told him all that had
+      happened, in full detail, writing hurriedly, in gusts, and abandoning that
+      regard for literary form which the professional author is apt to preserve
+      even in his least formal correspondence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘After this,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;we must give up what we decided last
+      night. I have no good reason to offer you. The situation itself has not
+      been changed by what I have learnt from your wife. I have not even
+      discovered that she loves you, though in spite of what she says, which I
+      have faithfully told you, I fancy she does&mdash;at any rate, I think she
+      is beginning to. My ideas about the rights of love are not changed. My
+      feelings towards you are not changed. Nothing is changed. But she and I
+      have been through that interview, and so, after all, everything is
+      changed; we must give it all up. You will say I am illogical. I am&mdash;perhaps.
+      It was a mere chance that your wife came to me. I don&rsquo;t know why she
+      did. If she had not come, I should have given myself to you. Supposing she
+      had written&mdash;I should still have given myself to you. But I have been
+      in her presence. I have been with her. And then the thought that you
+      struck her, for my sake! She said nothing about that. That was the one
+      thing she concealed. I could have cried when she passed it over. After
+      all, I don&rsquo;t know whether it is sympathy for your wife that makes me
+      change, or my self-respect&mdash;say my self-pride; I&rsquo;m a proud
+      woman. I lied to her through all that interview.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, if I had only had the courage to begin by telling her outright and
+      bluntly that you and I had settled that I should take her place! That
+      would have stopped her. But I hadn&rsquo;t. And, besides, how could I
+      foresee what she would say to me and how she would affect me? No; I lied
+      to her at every point. My whole attitude was a lie. Supposing you and I
+      had gone off together before I had seen her, and then I had met her
+      afterwards, I could have looked her in the face&mdash;sorrowfully, with a
+      heart bleeding&mdash;but I could have looked her in the face. But after
+      this interview&mdash;no; it would be impossible for me to face her with
+      you at my side! Don&rsquo;t I put things crudely, horribly! I know
+      everything that you will say. You could not bring a single argument that I
+      have not thought of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘However, arguments are nothing. It is how I feel. Fate is against us.
+      Possibly I have ruined your life and mine without having done anything to
+      improve hers; and possibly I have saved us all three from terrible misery.
+      Possibly fate is with us. No one can say. I don&rsquo;t know what will
+      happen in the immediate future; I won&rsquo;t think about it. If you do as
+      I wish, if you have any desire to show me that I have any influence over
+      you, you will go back to live with your wife. Where did you sleep last
+      night? Or did you walk the streets? You must not answer this letter at
+      present. Write to me later. Do not try to see me. I won&rsquo;t see you.
+      We <i>mustn&rsquo;t</i> meet. I am going away at once. I don&rsquo;t think
+      I could stand another scene with your wife, and she would be sure to come
+      again to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Try to resume your old existence. You can do it if you try. Remember that
+      your wife is no more to blame than you are, or than I am. Remember that
+      you loved her once. And remember that I act as I am acting because there
+      is no other way for me. <i>C&rsquo;est plus fort que moi,</i> I am going
+      to Torquay. I let you know this&mdash;I hate concealment; and anyway you
+      would find out. But I shall trust you not to follow me. I shall trust you.
+      You are saying that this is a very different woman from last night. It is.
+      I haven&rsquo;t yet realized what my feelings are. I expect I shall
+      realize them in a few days. I send with this a manuscript. It is nothing.
+      I send it merely to put Emmeline off the scent, so that she shall think
+      that it is purely business. Now I shall <i>trust</i> you.&mdash;C. P.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I commenced the letter without even a &lsquo;Dear Frank,&rsquo; and I
+      ended it without an affectionate word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should like you to take these down to Mr. Ispenlove&rsquo;s office,&rsquo;
+      I said to Emmeline. &lsquo;Ask for him and give them to him yourself.
+      There&rsquo;s no answer. He&rsquo;s pretty sure to be in. But if he isn&rsquo;t,
+      bring them back. I&rsquo;m going to Torquay by that eleven-thirty express&mdash;isn&rsquo;t
+      it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Eleven-thirty-five,&rsquo; Emmeline corrected me coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she returned, she said she had seen Mr. Ispenlove and given him the
+      letter and the parcel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had acquaintances in Torquay, but I soon discovered that the place was
+      impossible for me. Torquay is the chosen home of the proprieties, the
+      respectabilities, and all the conventions. Nothing could dislodge them
+      from its beautiful hills; the very sea, as it beats primly, or with a
+      violence that never forgets to be discreet, on the indented shore,
+      acknowledges their sway. Aphrodite never visits there; the human race is
+      not continued there. People who have always lived within the conventions
+      go there to die within the conventions. The young do not flourish there;
+      they escape from the soft enervation. Since everybody is rich, there are
+      no poor. There are only the rich, and the servitors, who get rich. These
+      two classes never mix&mdash;even in the most modest villas they live on
+      opposite sides of the house. The life of the town is a vast conspiracy on
+      the part of the servitors to guard against any danger of the rich taking
+      all their riches to heaven. You can, if you are keen enough, detect
+      portions of this conspiracy in every shop. On the hills each abode stands
+      in its own undulating grounds, is approached by a winding drive of at
+      least ten yards, is wrapped about by the silence of elms, is flanked by
+      greenhouses, and exudes an immaculate propriety from all its windows. In
+      the morning the rich descend, the servitors ascend; the bosky and
+      perfectly-kept streets on the hills are trodden with apologetic celerity
+      by the emissaries of the servitors. The one interminable thoroughfare of
+      the town is graciously invaded by the rich, who, if they have not walked
+      down for the sake of exercise, step cautiously from their carriages,
+      enunciate a string of orders ending with the name of a house, and
+      cautiously regain their carriages. Each house has a name, and the pride of
+      the true servitor is his ability to deduce instantly from the name of the
+      house the name of its owner and the name of its street. In the afternoon a
+      vast and complicated game of visiting cards is played. One does not begin
+      to be serious till the evening; one eats then, solemnly and fully, to the
+      faint accompaniment of appropriate conversation. And there is no relief,
+      no surcease from utmost conventionality. It goes on night and day; it
+      hushes one to sleep, and wakes one up. On all but the strongest minds it
+      casts a narcotizing spell, so that thought is arrested, and originality,
+      vivacity, individuality become a crime&mdash;a shame that must be hidden.
+      Into this strange organism I took my wounded heart, imagining that an
+      atmosphere of coma might help to heal it. But no! Within a week my state
+      had become such that I could have cried out in mid Union Street at noon:
+      &lsquo;Look at me with your dead eyes, you dead who have omitted to get
+      buried, I am among you, and I am an adulteress in spirit! And my body has
+      sinned the sin! And I am alive as only grief can be alive. I suffer the
+      torture of vultures, but I would not exchange my lot with yours!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And one morning, after a fortnight, I thought of Monte Carlo. And the
+      vision of that place, which I had never seen, too voluptuously lovely to
+      be really beautiful, where there are no commandments, where
+      unconventionality and conventionality fight it out on even terms, where
+      the adulteress swarms, and the sin is for ever sinned, and wounded hearts
+      go about gaily, where it is impossible to distinguish between virtue and
+      vice, and where Toleration in fine clothes is the supreme social goddess&mdash;the
+      vision of Monte Carlo, as a place of refuge from the exacerbating and
+      moribund and yet eternal demureness of Torquay, appealed to me so
+      persuasively that I was on my way to the Riviera in two hours. In that
+      crisis of my life my moods were excessively capricious. Let me say that I
+      had not reached Exeter before I began to think kindly of Torquay. What was
+      Torquay but an almost sublime example of what the human soul can
+      accomplish in its unending quest of an ideal?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I left England on a calm, slate-coloured sea&mdash;sea that more than any
+      other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes wonderful
+      the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me the
+      mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters of
+      the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical
+      curiosity concerning each other, and then, mutually forgotten, took wing,
+      and spread out into the unknown. I think that as I stood near the hot
+      funnel, breasting the wind, and vacantly staring at the smooth expanse
+      that continually slipped from under us, I understood myself better than I
+      had done before. My soul was at peace&mdash;the peace of ruin after a
+      conflagration, but peace. Sometimes a little flame would dart out&mdash;flame
+      of regret, revolt, desire&mdash;and I would ruthlessly extinguish it. I
+      felt that I had nothing to live for, that no energy remained to me, no
+      interest, no hope. I saw the forty years of probable existence in front of
+      me flat and sterile as the sea itself. I was coldly glad that I had
+      finished my novel, well knowing that it would be my last. And the immense
+      disaster had been caused by a chance! Why had I been born with a vein of
+      overweening honesty in me? Why should I have sacrificed everything to the
+      pride of my conscience, seeing that consciences were the product of
+      education merely? Useless to try to answer the unanswerable! What is, is.
+      And circumstances are always at the mercy of character. I might have been
+      wrong, I might have been right; no ethical argument could have bent my
+      instinct. I did not sympathize with myself&mdash;I was too proud and stern&mdash;but
+      I sympathized with Frank. I wished ardently that he might be consoled&mdash;that
+      his agony might not be too terrible. I wondered where he was, what he was
+      doing. I had received no letter from him, but then I had instructed that
+      letters should not be forwarded to me. My compassion went out after him,
+      followed him into the dark, found him (as I hoped), and surrounded him
+      like an alleviating influence. I thought pityingly of the ravage that had
+      been occasioned by our love. His home was wrecked. Our lives were equally
+      wrecked. Our friends were grieved; they would think sadly of my closed
+      flat. Even the serio-comic figure of Emmeline touched me; I had paid her
+      three months&rsquo; wages and dismissed her. Where would she go with her
+      mauve <i>peignoir</i>? She was over thirty, and would not easily fall into
+      another such situation. Imagine Emmeline struck down by a splinter from
+      our passionate explosion! Only Yvonne was content at the prospect of
+      revisiting France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Ah! Qu&rsquo;on est bien ici, madame</i>!&rsquo; she said, when we had
+      fixed ourselves in the long and glittering <i>train de grand luxe</i> that
+      awaited us at Calais. Once I had enjoyed luxury, but now the futility of
+      all this luxurious cushioned arrogance, which at its best only
+      corresponded with a railway director&rsquo;s dreams of paradise, seemed to
+      me pathetic. Could it detain youth, which is for ever flying? Could it
+      keep out sorrow? Could it breed hope? As the passengers, so correct in
+      their travelling costumes, passed to and fro in the corridors with the
+      subdued murmurs always adopted by English people when they wish to prove
+      that they are not excited, I thought: &lsquo;Does it matter how you and I
+      go southwards? The pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs,
+      what can it help us that this should be sated? We cannot leave our souls
+      behind.&rsquo; The history of many of these men and women was written on
+      their faces. I wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the
+      mirrors which were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had
+      always seen. Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response.
+      Was I not part of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life
+      is good? On every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh
+      flowers that had been torn from the South, and would return there dead,
+      having ministered to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is
+      good. I hated that. I could almost have wished that I was travelling
+      southwards in a slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate
+      does not wear a mask. Great grief is democratic, levelling&mdash;not
+      downwards but upwards. It strips away the inessential, and makes brothers.
+      It is impatient with all the unavailing inventions which obscure the
+      brotherhood of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I descended from the train restlessly&mdash;there were ten minutes to
+      elapse before the departure&mdash;and walked along the platform, glimpsing
+      the faces in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and
+      napery in the two restaurant-cars: wistful all alike, I thought&mdash;flowers
+      and faces! How fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was! Opposite the door of
+      the first car stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery
+      of the International Sleeping Car Company. He wore white gloves, like all
+      the servants on the train: it was to foster the illusion; it was part of
+      what we paid for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘When is luncheon served?&rsquo; I asked him idly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs. He
+      contemplated me for an instant. He seemed to add me up, antipathetically,
+      as a product of Western civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Soon as the train starts, madam,&rsquo; he replied suavely, in good
+      American, and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the
+      platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you!&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the
+      African bush. I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression that
+      had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it was.
+      &lsquo;And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like
+      me,&rsquo; I mused. A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker
+      were busy with coal and grease. &lsquo;Five minutes hence, and our lives,
+      and our correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,&rsquo;
+      I said to myself. Strange world, the world of the <i>train de grand luxe</i>!
+      But a world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as
+      the inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and
+      varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all
+      that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself up
+      and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray
+      landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a
+      long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon;
+      and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway
+      director had received their most luscious expression&mdash;and had then
+      been modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern
+      flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes
+      as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was
+      finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car
+      towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How do you do, Miss Kate?&rsquo; I accosted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the younger of Vicary&rsquo;s two maiden sisters. I guessed that
+      the other could not be far away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had
+      done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?&rsquo; she said distantly, with a nervous
+      simper; and she passed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world of
+      my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from Miss
+      Kate&rsquo;s attitude that something must have occurred, or something must
+      have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a
+      time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly.
+      What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I
+      left without delay and went back to my coupé; it would have been a pity to
+      derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet it
+      might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for. I
+      read a little in the <i>Imitation of Christ</i> which Aunt Constance had
+      meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even
+      Christianity itself. &lsquo;Think not that thou hast made any progress,&rsquo;
+      I read, &lsquo;unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far
+      off thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be
+      angry or indignant, with any except one&rsquo;s self.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its
+      invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations,
+      dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through
+      placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save
+      their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In
+      traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs
+      of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair
+      dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in the abandoned attitudes
+      of fatigue&mdash;here and there a compartment with blinds discreetly
+      drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and here and there a
+      group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves nothing could
+      affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train and every
+      steamer a few such are to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we
+      thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their façades
+      occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under
+      streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to
+      see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to
+      a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared
+      haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to
+      carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial
+      quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations
+      we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we
+      trailed slowly our disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris would
+      fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony
+      magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we
+      were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the
+      splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by
+      the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a <i>train de grand luxe</i>,
+      while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms,
+      guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at
+      which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses
+      Vicary had brought several pairs of white gloves in order to have me
+      dismissed from the society of the train. A hand touched me. It was Yvonne&rsquo;s.
+      I awoke to a renewal of the maddening vibration. We had quitted Paris long
+      since. It was after seven o&rsquo;clock. &lsquo;<i>On dit que le diner est
+      servi, madame</i> said Yvonne. I told her to go, and I collected my wits
+      to follow her. As I was emerging into the corridor, Miss Kate went by. I
+      smiled faintly, perhaps timidly. She cut me completely. Then I went out
+      into the corridor. A man was standing at the other end twirling his
+      moustaches. He turned round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came towards me, uncertainly swaying with the movement of the swaying
+      train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good God!&rsquo; he muttered, and stopped within a yard of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I clung convulsively to the framework of the doorway. Our lives paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why have you followed me, Frank?&rsquo; I asked gloomily, in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had meant to be severe, offended. I had not meant to put his name at the
+      end of my question, much less to utter it tenderly, like an endearment.
+      But I had little control over myself. I was almost breathless with a fatal
+      surprise, shaken with terrible emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve not followed you,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I joined the train at
+      Paris. I&rsquo;d no idea you were on the train till I saw you in the
+      corner asleep, through the window of the compartment. I&rsquo;ve been
+      waiting here till you came out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you seen the Vicarys?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! You&rsquo;ve been away from London all this time?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I couldn&rsquo;t stay. I couldn&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;ve been in Belgium and
+      Holland. Then I went to Paris. And now&mdash;you see me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m going to Mentone,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I had thought of Monte
+      Carlo first, but I changed my mind. Where are you going to?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mentone,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked in hard, strained tones, avoiding each other&rsquo;s eyes. A
+      string of people passed along the car on their way to dinner. I withdrew
+      into my compartment, and Frank flattened himself against a window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come in here a minute,&rsquo; I said, when they were gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He entered the compartment and sat down opposite to me and lifted his
+      hand, perhaps unconsciously, to pull the door to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;don&rsquo;t shut it. Leave it like that.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was dressed in a gray tourist suit. Never before had I seen him in any
+      but the formal attire of London. I thought he looked singularly graceful
+      and distinguished, even romantic, in that loose, soft clothing. But no
+      matter what he wore, Frank satisfied the eye. We were both extremely
+      nervous and excited and timid, fearing speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta,&rsquo; he said at last&mdash;I had perceived that he was
+      struggling to a resolution&mdash;&lsquo;this is the best thing that could
+      have happened. Whatever we do, everybody will believe that we are running
+      off together.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think they have been believing that ever since we left London,&rsquo; I
+      said; and I told him about Miss Kate&rsquo;s treatment of me at lunch.
+      &lsquo;But how can that affect us?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Mary will believe it&mdash;does believe, I&rsquo;m sure. Long before
+      this, people will have enlightened her. And now the Vicarys have seen us,
+      it&rsquo;s all over. Our hand is forced, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Frank,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;didn&rsquo;t you think my letter was right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I obeyed it,&rsquo; he replied heavily. &lsquo;I haven&rsquo;t even
+      written to you. I meant to when I got to Mentone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But didn&rsquo;t you think I was right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know. Yes&mdash;I suppose it was.&rsquo; His lower lip
+      fell. &lsquo;Of course I don&rsquo;t want you to do anything that you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dinner, please,&rsquo; said my negro, putting his head between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both informed the man that we should not dine, and I asked him to tell
+      Yvonne not to wait for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There&rsquo;s your maid, too,&rsquo; said Frank. &lsquo;How are we going
+      to get out of it? The thing&rsquo;s settled for us.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My dear, dear boy!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;Are we to outrage our
+      consciences simply because people think we have outraged them?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It isn&rsquo;t my conscience&mdash;it&rsquo;s yours,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, then&mdash;mine.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I drew down my veil; I could scarcely keep dry eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why are you so hard, Carlotta?&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t
+      understand you. I never could. But you&rsquo;ll kill me&mdash;that&rsquo;s
+      what you&rsquo;ll do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Impulsively I leaned forward; and he seized my hand. Our antagonism melted
+      in tears. Oh the cruel joy of that moment! Who will dare to say that the
+      spirit cannot burn with pleasure while drowning in grief? Or that tragedy
+      may not be the highest bliss? That instant of renunciation was our true
+      marriage. I realize it now&mdash;a union that nothing can soil nor impair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I love you; you are fast and fast in my heart,&rsquo; I murmured. &lsquo;But
+      you must go back to Mary. There is nothing else.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I withdrew my hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve no right, my dearest, to tell me to go back to Mary. I
+      cannot.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Forgive me,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I have only the right to ask you to
+      leave me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then there is no hope?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His lips trembled. Ah! those lips!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made a sign that there was no hope. And we sat in silence, overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A servant came to arrange the compartment for sleeping, and we were
+      obliged to assume nonchalance and go into the corridor. All the windows of
+      the corridor were covered with frost traceries. The train with its
+      enclosed heat and its gleaming lamps was plunging through an ice-gripped
+      night. I thought of the engine-driver, perched on his shaking, snorting,
+      monstrous machine, facing the weather, with our lives and our loves in his
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘We&rsquo;ll leave each other now, Frank,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;before the
+      people begin to come back from dinner. Go and eat something.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be all right. Yvonne will get me some fruit. I shall stay in our
+      compartment till we arrive.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes. And when we do arrive&mdash;what then? What are your wishes? You
+      see, I can&rsquo;t leave the train before we get to Mentone because of my
+      registered luggage.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke appealingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dear thing, with his transparent pretexts!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can ignore us at the station, and then leave Mentone again during the
+      day.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you wish,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good-night!&rsquo; I whispered. &lsquo;Good-bye!&rsquo; And I turned to
+      my compartment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Carlotta!&rsquo; he cried despairingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I shut the door and drew the blinds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yvonne was discretion itself when she returned. She had surely seen Frank.
+      No doubt she anticipated piquant developments at Mentone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All night I lay on my narrow bed, with Yvonne faintly snoring above me,
+      and the harsh, metallic rattle of the swinging train beneath. I could
+      catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow. The lamp burnt
+      delicately within its green shade. I lay almost moveless, almost dead,
+      shifting only at long intervals from side to side. Sometimes my brain
+      would arouse itself, and I would live again through each scene of my
+      relationship with Frank and Mary. I often thought of the engine-driver,
+      outside, watching over us and unflinchingly dragging us on. I hoped that
+      his existence had compensations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Early on the second morning after that interview in the train I sat on my
+      balcony in the Hôtel d'Écosse, full in the tremendous sun that had
+      ascended over the Mediterranean. The shore road wound along beneath me by
+      the blue water that never receded nor advanced, lopping always the same
+      stones. A vivid yellow electric tram, like a toy, crept forward on my left
+      from the direction of Vintimille and Italy, as it were swimming
+      noiselessly on the smooth surface of the road among the palms of an
+      intense green, against the bright blue background of the sea; and another
+      tram advanced, a spot of orange, to meet it out of the variegated tangle
+      of tinted houses composing the Old Town. High upon the summit of the Old
+      Town rose the slim, rose-coloured cupola of the church in a sapphire sky.
+      The regular smiting sound of a cracked bell, viciously rung, came from it.
+      The eastern prospect was shut in by the last olive-clad spurs of the Alps,
+      that tread violently and gigantically into the sea. The pathways of the
+      hotel garden were being gently swept by a child of the sun, who could not
+      have sacrificed his graceful dignity to haste; and many peaceful morning
+      activities proceeded on the road, on the shore, and on the jetty. A
+      procession of tawny fishing-boats passed from the harbour one after
+      another straight into the eye of the sun, and were lost there. Smoke
+      climbed up softly into the soft air from the houses and hotels on the
+      level of the road. The trams met and parted, silently widening the
+      distance between them which previously they had narrowed. And the sun rose
+      and rose, bathing the blue sea and the rich verdure and the glaring white
+      architecture in the very fluid of essential life. The whole azure coast
+      basked in it like an immense cat, commencing the day with a voluptuous
+      savouring of the fact that it was alive. The sun is the treacherous and
+      tyrannical god of the South, and when he withdraws himself, arbitrary and
+      cruel, the land and the people shiver and prepare to die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was such a morning as renders sharp and unmistakable the division
+      between body and soul&mdash;if the soul suffers. The body exults; the body
+      cries out that nothing on earth matters except climate. Nothing can damp
+      the glorious ecstasy of the body baptized in that air, caressed by that
+      incomparable sun. It laughs, and it laughs at the sorrow of the soul. It
+      imperiously bids the soul to choose the path of pleasure; it shouts aloud
+      that sacrifice is vain and honour an empty word, full of inconveniences,
+      and that to exist amply and vehemently, to listen to the blood as it beats
+      strongly through the veins, is the end of the eternal purpose. Ah! how
+      easy it is to martyrize one&rsquo;s self by some fatal decision made
+      grandly in the exultation of a supreme moment! And how difficult to endure
+      the martyrdom without regret! I regretted my renunciation. My body
+      rebelled against it, and even my soul rebelled. I scorned myself for a
+      fool, for a sentimental weakling&mdash;yes, and for a moral coward. Every
+      argument that presented itself damaged the justice of my decision. After
+      all, we loved, and in my secret dreams had I not always put love first, as
+      the most sacred? The reality was that I had been afraid of what Mary would
+      think. True, my attitude had lied to her, but I could not have avoided
+      that. Decency would have forbidden me to use any other attitude; and more
+      than decency&mdash;kindness. Ought the course of lives to be changed at
+      the bidding of mere hazard? It was a mere chance that Mary had called on
+      me. I bled for her grief, but nothing that I could do would assuage it. I
+      felt sure that, in the impossible case of me being able to state my
+      position to her and argue in its defence, I could force her to see that in
+      giving myself to Frank I was not being false to my own ideals. What else
+      could count? What other consideration should guide the soul on its
+      mysterious instinctive way? Frank and I had a right to possess each other.
+      We had a right to be happy if we could. And the one thing that had robbed
+      us of that right was my lack of courage, caused partly by my feminine
+      mentality (do we not realize sometimes how ignobly feminine we are?), and
+      partly by the painful spectacle of Mary&rsquo;s grief.... And her grief,
+      her most intimate grief, sprang not from thwarted love, but from a base
+      and narrow conventionality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus I declaimed to myself in my heart, under the influence of the
+      seductive temptations of that intoxicating atmosphere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; said a voice firmly and quietly underneath me in the
+      orange-trees of the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I started violently. It was Frank&rsquo;s voice. He was standing in the
+      garden, his legs apart, and a broad, flat straw hat, which I did not
+      admire, on his head. His pale face was puckered round about the eyes as he
+      looked up at me, like the face of a person trying to look directly at the
+      sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I exclaimed foolishly, glancing down over the edge of the
+      balcony, and shutting my white parasol with a nervous, hurried movement,
+      ‘have&mdash;have you come here?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had disobeyed my wish. He had not left Mentone at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; he repeated persuasively, and yet commandingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could feel my heart beating against the marble parapet of the balcony. I
+      seemed to be caught, to be trapped. I could not argue with him in that
+      position. I could not leave him shouting in the garden. So I nodded to
+      pacify him, and disappeared quickly from the balcony, almost scurrying
+      away. And in the comparative twilight of my room I stopped and gave a
+      glance in the mirror, and patted my hair, and fearfully examined the woman
+      that I saw in the glass, as if to discern what sort of woman she truly
+      was, and what was the root of her character. I hesitated and snatched up
+      my gloves. I wanted to collect my thoughts, and I could not. It was
+      impossible to think clearly. I moved in the room, dazed. I stood by the
+      tumbled bed, fingering the mosquito curtains. They might have been a veil
+      behind which was obscured the magic word of enlightenment I needed. I
+      opened the door, shut it suddenly, and held the knob tight, defying an
+      imagined enemy outside. &lsquo;Oh!&rsquo; I muttered at last, angry with
+      myself, &lsquo;what is the use of all this? You know you must go down to
+      him. He&rsquo;s waiting for you. Show a little common-sense and go without
+      so much fuss.&rsquo; And so I descended the stairs swiftly and guiltily,
+      relieved that no one happened to see me. In any case, I decided, nothing
+      could induce me to yield to him after my letter and after what had passed
+      in the train. The affair was beyond argument. I felt that I could not
+      yield, and that though it meant the ruin of happiness by obstinacy, I
+      could not yield. I shrank from yielding in that moment as men shrink from
+      public repentance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not moved from his post in the garden. We shook hands. A band of
+      Italian musicians wandered into the garden and began to sing Verdi to a
+      vigorous thrumming of guitars. They sang as only Italians can sing&mdash;as
+      naturally as they breathed, and with a rich and overflowing innocent joy
+      in the art which Nature had taught them. They sang loudly, swingingly,
+      glancing full of naive hope up at the windows of the vast, unresponsive
+      hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you are still in Mentone,&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Come for a walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come for a walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Very well,&rsquo; I consented. &lsquo;As I am?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you are. I saw you all in white on the balcony, and I was determined
+      to fetch you out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But could you see who it was from the road?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course I could. I knew in an instant.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We descended, he a couple of paces in front of me, the narrow zigzag path
+      leading down between two other hotels to the shore road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will happen now?&rsquo; I asked myself wildly. My head swam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that nothing would happen. We turned eastwards, walking slowly,
+      and I began to resume my self-control. Only the simple and the humble were
+      abroad at that early hour: purveyors of food, in cheerfully rattling
+      carts, or hauling barrows with the help of grave and formidable dogs;
+      washers and cleaners at the doors of highly-decorated villas, amiably
+      performing their tasks while the mighty slept; fishermen and fat
+      fisher-girls, industriously repairing endless brown nets on the other side
+      of the parapet of the road; a postman and a little policeman; a porcelain
+      mender, who practised his trade under the shadow of the wall; a few
+      loafers; some stable-boys exercising horses; and children with adorable
+      dirty faces, shouting in their high treble as they played at hopscotch. I
+      felt very closely akin to these meek ones as we walked along. They were so
+      human, so wistful. They had the wonderful simplicity of animals,
+      uncomplicated by the disease of self-consciousness; they were the vital
+      stuff without the embroidery. They preserved the customs of their
+      ancestors, rising with the sun, frankly and splendidly enjoying the sun,
+      looking up to it as the most important thing in the world. They never
+      attempted to understand what was beyond them; they troubled not with
+      progress, ideals, righteousness, the claims of society. They accepted
+      humbly and uninquiringly what they found. They lived the life of their
+      instincts, sometimes violent, often kindly, and always natural. Why should
+      I have felt so near to them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A calm and gentle pleasure filled me, far from intense, but yet
+      satisfying. I determined to enjoy the moment, or, perhaps, without
+      determination, I gave myself up, gradually, to the moment. I forgot care
+      and sorrow. I was well; I was with Frank; I was in the midst of enchanting
+      natural beauty; the day was fair and fresh and virgin. I knew not where I
+      was going. Shorewards a snowy mountain ridge rose above the long, wide
+      slopes of olives, dotted with white dwellings. A single sail stood up
+      seawards on the immense sheet of blue. The white sail appeared and
+      disappeared in the green palm-trees as we passed eastwards. Presently we
+      left the sea, and we lost the hills, and came into a street of poor little
+      shops for simple folk, that naïvely exposed their cheap and tawdry goods
+      to no matter what mightiness should saunter that way. And then we came to
+      the end of the tram-line, and it was like the end of the world. And we saw
+      in the distance abodes of famous persons, fabulously rich, defying the sea
+      and the hills, and condescending from afar off to the humble. We crossed
+      the railway, and a woman ran out from a cabin with a spoon in one hand and
+      a soiled flag in the other, and waved the flag at a towering black engine
+      that breathed stertorously in a cutting. Already we were climbing, and the
+      road grew steeper, and then we came to custom-houses&mdash;unsightly,
+      squalid, irregular, and mean&mdash;in front of which officials laughed and
+      lounged and smoked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked scarcely at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were up early this morning,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; I could not sleep.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was the same with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We recovered the sea; but now it was far below us, and the footprints of
+      the wind were marked on it, and it was not one blue, but a thousand blues,
+      and it faded imperceptibly into the sky. The sail, making Mentone, was
+      much nearer, and had developed into a two-masted ship. It seemed to be
+      pushed, rather than blown, along by the wind. It seemed to have rigidity
+      in all its parts, and to be sliding unwillingly over a vast slate. The
+      road lay through craggy rocks, shelving away unseen on one hand, and
+      rising steeply against the burning sky on the other. We mounted steadily
+      and slowly. I did not look much at Frank, but my eye was conscious of his
+      figure, striding leisurely along. Now and then, when I turned to glance
+      behind, I saw our shadows there diagonally on the road, and again I did
+      not care for his hat. I had not seen him in a straw hat till that morning.
+      We arrived at a second set of French custom-houses, deserted, and then we
+      saw that the gigantic side of the mountain was cleft by a fissure from
+      base to summit. And across the gorge had been thrown a tiny stone bridge
+      to carry the road. At this point, by the bridge, the face of the rock had
+      been carved smooth, and a great black triangle painted on it. And on the
+      road was a common milestone, with ‘France&rsquo; on one side and &lsquo;Italia&rsquo;
+      on the other. And a very old man was harmlessly spreading a stock of
+      picture postcards on the parapet of the bridge. My heart went out to that
+      poor old man, whose white curls glinted in the sunlight. It seemed to me
+      so pathetic that he should be just there, at that natural spot which the
+      passions and the blood of men long dead had made artificial, tediously
+      selling postcards in order to keep his worn and creaking body out of the
+      grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do give him something,&rsquo; I entreated Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while Frank went to him I leaned over the other parapet and listened
+      for the delicate murmur of the stream far below. The split flank of the
+      hill was covered with a large red blossom, and at the base, on the edge of
+      the sea, were dolls&rsquo; houses, each raising a slanted pencil of pale
+      smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then we were in Italy, and still climbing. We saw a row of narrow,
+      slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched
+      to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a
+      rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged about
+      four years and eight years, dirty, unkempt, delicious, shrill, their
+      movements full of the ravishing grace of infancy. They attacked the laced
+      soldier, chattering furiously, grumbling at him, intimidating him with the
+      charming gestures of spoilt and pouting children. And he bent down stiffly
+      in his superb uniform, and managed his long, heavy gun, and talked to them
+      in a deep, vibrating voice. He reasoned with them till we could hear him
+      no more. It was so touching, so exquisitely human!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reached the top of the hill, having passed the Italian customs, equally
+      vile with the French. The terraced grounds of an immense deserted castle
+      came down to the roadside; and over the wall, escaped from the garden,
+      there bloomed extravagantly a tangle of luscious yellow roses, just out of
+      our reach. The road was still and deserted. We could see nothing but the
+      road and the sea and the hills, all steeped, bewitched, and glorious under
+      the sun. The ship had nearly slid to Mentone. The curving coastline of
+      Italy wavered away into the shimmering horizon. And there were those huge
+      roses, insolently blooming in the middle of winter, the symbol of the
+      terrific forces of nature which slept quiescent under the universal calm.
+      Perched as it were in a niche of the hills, we were part of that
+      tremendous and ennobling scene. Long since the awkward self-consciousness
+      caused by our plight had left us. We did not use speech, but we knew that
+      we thought alike, and were suffering the same transcendent emotion. Was it
+      joy or sadness? Rather than either, it was an admixture of both,
+      originating in a poignant sense of the grandeur of life and of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Frank,&rsquo; I murmured, my spirit bursting, &lsquo;how beautiful it
+      is!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our eyes met. He took me and kissed me impetuously, as though my utterance
+      had broken a spell which enchained him. And as I kissed him I wept,
+      blissfully. Nature had triumphed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We departed from Mentone that same day after lunch. I could not remove to
+      his hotel; he could not remove to mine, for this was Mentone. We went to
+      Monte Carlo by road, our luggage following. We chose Monte Carlo partly
+      because it was the nearest place, and partly because it has some of the
+      qualities&mdash;incurious, tolerant, unprovincial&mdash;of a capital city.
+      If we encountered friends there, so much the better, in the end. The great
+      adventure, the solemn and perilous enterprise had begun. I sent Yvonne for
+      a holiday to her home in Laroche. Why? Ah, why? Perhaps for the simple
+      reason that I had not the full courage of my convictions. We seldom have&mdash;<i>nous
+      autres</i>. I felt that, if she had remained, Yvonne would have been too
+      near me in the enterprise. I could not at first have been my natural self
+      with her. I told the astonished and dissatisfied Yvonne that I would write
+      to her as soon as I wanted her. Yet in other ways I had courage, and I
+      found a delicious pleasure in my courage. When I was finally leaving the
+      hotel I had Frank by my side. I behaved to him as to a husband. I publicly
+      called him &lsquo;dear.&rsquo; I asked his advice in trifles. He paid my
+      bill. He even provided the money necessary for Yvonne. My joy in the
+      possession of this male creature, whose part it now was to do for me a
+      thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was
+      almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man&rsquo;s woman. I
+      had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of
+      that word&mdash;I had a protector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Frank was able to get three rooms at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. I
+      had only to approve them. We met in our sitting-room at half-past three,
+      ready to go out for a walk. It would be inexact to say that we were not
+      nervous. But we were happy. He had not abandoned his straw hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t wear that any more,&rsquo; I said to him, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why? It&rsquo;s quite new.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It doesn&rsquo;t suit you,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, that doesn&rsquo;t matter,&rsquo; he laughed, and he put it on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I don&rsquo;t like to see you in it,&rsquo; I persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, you&rsquo;ll stand it this afternoon, my angel, and I&rsquo;ll get
+      another to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Haven&rsquo;t you got another one here?&rsquo; I asked, with discontent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; and he laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, dear&mdash;&rsquo; I pouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed suddenly to realize that as a fact I did not like the hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come here,&rsquo; he said, charmingly grave; and he led me by the hand
+      into his bedroom, which was littered with clothes, small parcels, boots,
+      and brushes. One chair was overturned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Heavens!&rsquo; I muttered, pretending to be shocked at the disorder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew, me to a leather box of medium size.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You can open it,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I opened it. The thing was rather a good contrivance, for a man. It held a
+      silk hat, an opera hat, a bowler hat, some caps, and a soft Panama straw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And you said you had no others!&rsquo; I grumbled at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, which is it to be?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This, of course,&rsquo; I said, taking the bowler. I reached up, removed
+      the straw hat from his head, and put the bowler in its place. &lsquo;There!&rsquo;
+      I exclaimed, satisfied, giving the bowler a pat&mdash;there!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed, immensely content, enraptured, foolishly blissful. We were
+      indeed happy. Before opening the door leading to the corridor we stopped
+      and kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the seaward terrace of the vast, pale, floriated Casino, so impressive
+      in its glittering vulgarity, like the bride-cake of a stockbroker&rsquo;s
+      wedding, we strolled about among a multifarious crowd, immersed in
+      ourselves. We shared a contempt for the architecture, the glaring
+      flower-beds, and the false distinction of the crowd, and an enthusiasm for
+      the sunshine and the hills and the sea, and whatever else had escaped the
+      hands of the Casino administration. We talked lightly and freely. Care
+      seemed to be leaving us; we had no preoccupations save those which were
+      connected with our passion. Then I saw, standing in an attitude of
+      attention, the famous body-servant of Lord Francis Alcar, and I knew that
+      Lord Francis could not be far away. We spoke to the valet; he pointed out
+      his master, seated at the front of the terrace, and told us, in a
+      discreet, pained, respectful voice, that our venerable friend had been
+      mysteriously unwell at Monte Carlo, and was now taking the air for the
+      first time in ten days. I determined that we should go boldly and speak to
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I said gently, after we had stood some seconds by
+      his chair, unremarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was staring fixedly at the distance of the sea. He looked amazingly
+      older than when I had last talked with him. His figure was shrunken, and
+      his face rose thin and white out of a heavy fur overcoat and a large blue
+      muffler. In his eyes there was such a sadness, such an infinite regret,
+      such a profound weariness as can only be seen in the eyes of the senile.
+      He was utterly changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Lord Francis,&rsquo; I repeated, &lsquo;don&rsquo;t you know me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He started slightly and looked at me, and a faint gleam appeared in his
+      eyes. Then he nodded, and took a thin, fragile alabaster hand out of the
+      pocket of his overcoat. I shook it. It was like shaking hands with a dead,
+      starved child. He carefully moved the skin and bone back into his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you pretty well?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded. Then the faint gleam faded out of his eyes; his head fell a
+      little, and he resumed his tragic contemplation of the sea. The fact of my
+      presence had dropped like a pebble into the strange depths of that aged
+      mind, and the waters of the ferocious egotism of senility had closed over
+      it, and it was forgotten. His rapt and yet meaningless gaze frightened me.
+      It was as if there was more desolation and disillusion in that gaze than I
+      had previously imagined the whole earth to contain. Useless for Frank to
+      rouse him for the second time. Useless to explain ourselves. What was love
+      to him, or the trivial conventions of a world which he was already
+      quitting?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked away. From the edge of the terrace I could see a number of boats
+      pulling to and fro in the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s the pigeon-shooting,&rsquo; Frank explained. &lsquo;Come to
+      the railings and you&rsquo;ll be able to see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had already heard the sharp popping of rifles. I went to the railings,
+      and saw a number of boxes arranged in a semicircle on a green, which was,
+      as it were, suspended between the height of the terrace and the sea.
+      Suddenly one of the boxes collapsed with a rattle, and a bird flew out of
+      the ruin of it. There were two reports of a gun; the bird, its curving
+      flight cut short, fell fluttering to the grass; a dog trotted out from the
+      direction of the gun unseen beneath us, and disappeared again with the
+      mass of ruffled feathers in its mouth. Then two men showed themselves, ran
+      to the collapsed box, restored it, and put in it a fresh victim, and
+      disappeared after the dog. I was horrified, but I could not remove my eyes
+      from the green. Another box fell flat, and another bird flew out; a gun
+      sounded; the bird soared far away, wavered, and sank on to the surface of
+      the sea, and the boats converged towards it in furious haste. So the game
+      proceeded. I saw a dozen deaths on the green; a few birds fell into the
+      sea, and one escaped, settling ultimately on the roof of the Casino.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So that is pigeon-shooting,&rsquo; I said coldly, turning to Frank.
+      &lsquo;I suppose it goes on all day?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just as cruel as plenty of other sports, and no more,&rsquo;
+      he said, as if apologizing for the entire male sex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I presume so,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;But do you know, dear, if the
+      idea once gets into my head that that is going on all day, I shan&rsquo;t
+      be able to stop here. Let us have tea somewhere.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not until dinner did I recover from the obsession of that continual
+      slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the
+      Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the
+      mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot out
+      all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now do I
+      completely perceive how violent, how capricious and contradictory were my
+      emotions in those unique and unforgettable hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We dined late, because I had deprived myself of Yvonne. Already I was
+      almost in a mind to send for her. The restaurant of the hotel was full,
+      but we recognised no one as we walked through the room to our table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There is one advantage in travelling about with you,&rsquo; said Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No matter where one is, one can always be sure of being with the most
+      beautiful woman in the place.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was content. I repaid him by being more than ever a man&rsquo;s woman. I
+      knew that I was made for that. I understood why great sopranos have of
+      their own accord given up even the stage on marriage. The career of
+      literature seemed to me tedious and sordid in comparison with that of
+      being a man&rsquo;s woman. In my rich black dress and my rings and
+      bracelets I felt like an Eastern Empress; I felt that I could adequately
+      reward homage with smiles, and love with fervid love. And I felt like a
+      cat&mdash;idle, indolently graceful, voluptuously seeking warmth and
+      caresses. I enveloped Frank with soft glances, I dazed him with glances.
+      He ordered a wine which he said was fit for gods, and the waiter brought
+      it reverently and filled our glasses, with a ritual of precautions. Later
+      during the dinner Frank asked me if I would prefer champagne. I said,
+      &lsquo;No, of course not.&rsquo; But he said, &lsquo;I think you would,&rsquo;
+      and ordered some. &lsquo;Admit,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that you prefer
+      champagne.&rsquo; &lsquo;Well, of course,&rsquo; I replied. But I drank
+      very little champagne, lest I should be too happy. Frank&rsquo;s wonderful
+      face grew delicately flushed. The room resounded with discreet chatter,
+      and the tinkle of glass and silver and porcelain. The upper part of it
+      remained in shadow, but every table was a centre of rosy light,
+      illuminating faces and jewels and napery. And in my sweet illusion I
+      thought that every face had found the secret of joy, and that even the old
+      had preserved it. Pleasure reigned. Pleasure was the sole goddess. And how
+      satisfying then was the worship of her! Life had no inconveniences, no
+      dark spots, no pitfalls. The gratification of the senses, the appeasing of
+      appetites that instantly renewed themselves&mdash;this was the business of
+      the soul. And as the wine sank lower in the bottles, and we cooled our
+      tongues with ices, and the room began to empty, expectation gleamed and
+      glittered in our eyes. At last, except a group of men smoking and talking
+      in a corner, we were the only diners left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shall we go?&rsquo; Frank said, putting a veil of cigarette smoke between
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I trembled. I was once more the young and timid girl. I could not speak. I
+      nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the hall was Vicary, talking to the head-porter. He saw us and started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What! Vicary!&rsquo; I murmured, suddenly cooled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want to speak to you,&rsquo; said Vicary. &lsquo;Where can we go?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This way,&rsquo; Frank replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went to our sitting-room, silent and apprehensive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Sit down,&rsquo; said Vicary, shutting the door and standing against it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was wearing a tourist suit, with a gray overcoat, and his grizzled hair
+      was tumbling over his hard, white face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s the matter?&rsquo; Frank asked. &lsquo;Anything wrong?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Look here, you two,&rsquo; said Vicary, &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t want to
+      discuss your position, and I&rsquo;m the last person in this world to cast
+      the first stone; but it falls to me to do it. I was coming down to Nice to
+      stay with my sisters, and I&rsquo;ve come a little further. My sisters
+      wired me they had seen you. I&rsquo;ve been to Mentone, and driven here
+      from there. I hoped I should get here earlier than the newspapers, and I
+      have done, it seems.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Earlier than the newspapers?&rsquo; Frank repeated, standing up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Try to keep calm,&rsquo; Vicary continued. &lsquo;Your wife&rsquo;s body
+      was found in the Thames at seven o&rsquo;clock last night. The doctors say
+      it had been in the water for forty-eight hours. Your servants thought she
+      had gone to you. But doubtless some thoughtful person had told her that
+      you two were wandering about Europe together.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>My wife</i>&rsquo; cried Frank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the strange and terrible emphasis he put on the word &lsquo;wife&rsquo;
+      proved to me in the fraction of a second that in his heart I was not his
+      wife. A fearful tragedy had swept away the structure of argument in favour
+      of the rights of love which he had built over the original conventionality
+      of his mind. Poor fellow!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fell back into his chair and covered his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I thank God my mother didn&rsquo;t live to see this!&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he rushed to his bedroom and banged the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor girl!&rsquo; said Vicary, approaching me. &lsquo;What can I&mdash;I&rsquo;m
+      awfully&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I waved him away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s that?&rsquo; he exclaimed, in a different voice, listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran to the bedroom, and saw Frank lifting a revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve brought me to this, Carlotta!&rsquo; he shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang towards him, but it was too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART III &mdash; THE VICTORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I came out of the house, hurried and angrily flushing, I perceived
+      clearly that my reluctance to break a habit and my desire for physical
+      comfort, if not my attachment to the girl, had led me too far. I was
+      conscious of humiliation. I despised myself. The fact was that I had
+      quarrelled with Yvonne&mdash;Yvonne, who had been with me for eight years,
+      Yvonne who had remained sturdily faithful during my long exile. Now the
+      woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with
+      a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or
+      both. Possibly I was both. I had permitted Yvonne too much liberty. I had
+      spoilt her. She was fidelity itself, goodness itself; but her character
+      had not borne the strain of realizing that she had acquired power over me,
+      and that she had become necessary to me. So that morning we had differed
+      violently; we had quarrelled as equals. The worst side of her had appeared
+      suddenly, shockingly. And she had left me, demonstrating even as she
+      banged the door that she was at least my mistress in altercation. All day
+      I fought against the temptation to eat my pride, and ask her to return. It
+      was a horrible, a deplorable, temptation. And towards evening, after seven
+      hours of solitude in the hotel in the Avenue de Kleber, I yielded to it. I
+      knew the address to which she had gone, and I took a cab and drove there,
+      hating myself. I was received with excessive rudeness by a dirty and
+      hag-like concierge, who, after refusing all information for some minutes,
+      informed me at length that the young lady in question had quitted Paris in
+      company with a gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The insolence of the concierge, my weakness and my failure, the bitter
+      sense of lost dignity, the fact that Yvonne had not hesitated even a few
+      hours before finally abandoning me&mdash;all these things wounded me. But
+      the sharpest stab of all was that during our stay in Paris Yvonne must
+      have had secret relations with a man. I had hidden nothing from her; she,
+      however, had not reciprocated my candour. I had imagined that she lived
+      only for me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, the truth cannot be concealed that the years of wandering which had
+      succeeded the fatal night at Monte Carlo had done little to improve me.
+      What would you have? For months and months my ears rang with Frank&rsquo;s
+      despairing shout: &lsquo;<i>You&rsquo;ve</i> brought me to this, Carlotta!&rsquo;
+      And the profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of
+      my immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my
+      inmost soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem
+      inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what
+      it means to be broken&mdash;to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming
+      calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the
+      afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert
+      me; I deserted them. For the second time in my career I tore myself up by
+      the roots. I lived the nomad&rsquo;s life, in the usual European haunts of
+      the nomad. And in five years I did not make a single new friend, scarcely
+      an acquaintance. I lived in myself and on myself, nursing grief, nursing a
+      rancour against fate, nursing an involuntary shame.... You know, the
+      scandal of which I had been the centre was appalling; it touched the
+      extreme. It must have nearly killed the excellent Mrs. Sardis. I did not
+      dare to produce another novel. But after a year or so I turned to poetry,
+      and I must admit that my poetry was accepted. But it was not enough to
+      prevent me from withering&mdash;from shrivelling. I lost ground, and I was
+      still losing it. I was becoming sinister, warped, peculiar, capricious,
+      unaccountable. I guessed it then; I see it clearly now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house of the odious concierge was in a small, shabby street off the
+      Boulevard du Montparnasse. I looked in vain for a cab. Even on the wide,
+      straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had
+      been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great,
+      glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession,
+      but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither they
+      went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car. Without a cab I was as
+      helpless and as timid as a young girl, I who was thirty-one, and had
+      travelled and lived and suffered! Never had I been alone in the streets of
+      a large city at night. And the September night was sultry and forbidding.
+      I was afraid&mdash;I was afraid of the men who passed me, staring at me.
+      One man spoke to me, and I literally shook with fear as I hastened on.
+      What would I have given to have had the once faithful Yvonne by my side!
+      Presently I came to the crossing of the Boulevard Raspail, and this
+      boulevard, equally long, uncharitable, and mournful with the other,
+      endless, stretching to infinity, filled me with horror. Yes, with the
+      horror of solitude in a vast city. Oh, you solitary, you who have felt
+      that horror descending upon you, desolating, clutching, and chilling the
+      heart, you will comprehend me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the corner, of the two boulevards was a glowing cafe, the Café du Dome,
+      with a row of chairs and little tables in front of its windows. And at one
+      of these little tables sat a man, gazing absently at a green glass in a
+      white saucer. I had almost gone past him when some instinct prompted me to
+      the bravery of looking at him again. He was a stoutish man, apparently
+      aged about forty-five, very fair, with a puffed face and melancholy eyes.
+      And then it was as though someone had shot me in the breast. It was as if
+      I must fall down and die&mdash;as if the sensations which I experienced
+      were too acute&mdash;too elemental for me to support. I have never borne a
+      child, but I imagine that the woman who becomes a mother may feel as I
+      felt then, staggered at hitherto unsuspected possibilities of sensation. I
+      stopped. I clung to the nearest table. There was ice on my shuddering
+      spine, and a dew on my forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda!&rsquo; breathed the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had raised his eyes to mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Diaz, after ten years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first I had not recognised him. Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years
+      older. I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the returned
+      traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered landmarks.
+      Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him. The magic of
+      his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth reappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is I,&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, and in doing so shook the table, and his glass was overturned,
+      and scattered itself in fragments on the asphalte. At the noise a waiter
+      ran out of the cafe, and Diaz, blushing and obviously making a great
+      effort at self-control, gave him an order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should have known you anywhere,&rsquo; said Diaz to me, taking my hand,
+      as the waiter went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ineptitude of the speech was such that I felt keenly sorry for him. I
+      was not in the least hurt. My sympathy enveloped him. The position was so
+      difficult, and he had seemed so pathetic, sitting there alone on the
+      pavement of the vast nocturnal boulevard, so weighed down by sadness, that
+      I wanted to comfort him and soothe him, and to restore him to all the
+      brilliancy of his first period. It appeared to me unjust and cruel that
+      the wheels of life should have crushed him too. And so I said, smiling as
+      well as I could:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Won&rsquo;t you sit down here?&rsquo; he suggested, avoiding my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thus I found myself seated outside a cafe, at night, conspicuous for
+      all Montparnasse to see. We never know what may lie in store for us at the
+      next turning of existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then I am not much changed, you think?&rsquo; he ventured, in an anxious
+      tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I lied. &lsquo;You are perhaps a little stouter. That&rsquo;s
+      all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How hard it was to talk! How lamentably self-conscious we were! How
+      unequal to the situation! We did not know what to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are far more beautiful than ever you were,&rsquo; he said, looking at
+      me for an instant. &lsquo;You are a woman; you were a girl&mdash;then.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The waiter brought another glass and saucer, and a second waiter followed
+      him with a bottle, from which he poured a greenish-yellow liquid into the
+      glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What will you have?&rsquo; Diaz asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thank you,&rsquo; I said quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To sit outside the cafe was already much. It would have been impossible
+      for me to drink there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! as you please, as you please,&rsquo; Diaz snapped. &lsquo;I beg your
+      pardon.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Poor fellow!&rsquo; I reflected. &lsquo;He must be suffering from nervous
+      irritability.&rsquo; And aloud, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m not thirsty, thank you,&rsquo;
+      as nicely as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled beautifully; the irritability had passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s awfully kind of you to sit down here with me,&rsquo; he said,
+      in a lower voice. &lsquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ve heard about me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drank half the contents of the glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I read in the papers some years ago that you were suffering from
+      neurasthenia and nervous breakdown,&rsquo; I replied. &lsquo;I was very
+      sorry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;nervous breakdown&mdash;nervous breakdown.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You haven&rsquo;t been playing lately, have you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is more than two years since I played. And if you had heard me that
+      time! My God!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you have tried some cure?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Cure!&rsquo; he repeated after me. &lsquo;There&rsquo;s no cure. Here I
+      am! Me!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His glass was empty. He tapped on the window behind us, and the procession
+      of waiters occurred again, and Diaz received a third glass, which now
+      stood on three saucers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ll excuse me,&rsquo; he said, sipping slowly. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      not very well to-night. And you&rsquo;ve&mdash;Why did you run away from
+      me? I wanted to find you, but I couldn&rsquo;t.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Please do not let us talk about that,&rsquo; I stopped him. &lsquo;I&mdash;I
+      must go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, of course, if I&rsquo;ve offended you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m not at all offended. But I think&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, if you aren&rsquo;t offended, stop a little, and let me see you
+      home. You&rsquo;re sure you won&rsquo;t have anything?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head, wishing that he would not drink so much. I thought it
+      could not be good for his nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Been in Paris long?&rsquo; he asked me, with a slightly confused
+      utterance. ‘Staying in this quarter? Many English and Americans here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, in setting down the glass, he upset it, and it smashed on the
+      pavement like the first one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Damn!&rsquo; he exclaimed, staring forlornly at the broken glass, as if
+      in the presence of some irreparable misfortune. And before I could put in
+      a word, he turned to me with a silly smile, and approaching his face to
+      mine till his hat touched the brim of my hat, he said thickly: &lsquo;After
+      all, you know, I&rsquo;m the greatish pianist in the world.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth struck me like a blow. In my amazing ignorance of certain
+      aspects of life I had not suspected it. Diaz was drunk. The ignominy of
+      it! The tragedy of it! He was drunk. He had fallen to the beast. I drew
+      back from that hot, reeking face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t think I am?&rsquo; he muttered. &lsquo;You think young
+      What&rsquo;s-his-name can play Ch&mdash;Chopin better than me? Is that it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted to run away, to cease to exist, to hide with my shame in some
+      deep abyss. And there I was on the boulevard, next to this animal, sharing
+      his table and the degradation! And I could not move. There are people so
+      gifted that in a dilemma they always know exactly the wisest course to
+      adopt. But I did not know. This part of my story gives me infinite pain to
+      write, and yet I must write it, though I cannot persuade myself to write
+      it in full; the details would be too repulsive. Nevertheless, forget not
+      that I lived it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his face to mine again, and began to stammer something, and I drew
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are ashamed of me, madam,&rsquo; he said sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you are not quite yourself&mdash;not quite well,&rsquo; I
+      replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I am drunk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I mean what I say. You are not quite well. Please do not twist my words.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I am drunk,&rsquo; he insisted, raising his voice. &lsquo;I am
+      not drunk; I have never been drunk. That I can swear with my hand on my
+      heart. But you are ashamed of being seen with me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you ought to go home,&rsquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That is only to get rid of me!&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no,&rsquo; I appealed to him persuasively. &lsquo;Do not wound me. I
+      will go with you as far as your house, if you like. You are too ill to be
+      alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment an empty open cab strolled by, and, without pausing for his
+      answer, I signalled the driver. My heart beat wildly. My spirit was in an
+      uproar. But I was determined not to desert him, not to abandon him to a
+      public disgrace. I rose from my seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re very good,&rsquo; he said, in a new voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cab had stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come!&rsquo; I entreated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rapped uncertainly on the window, and then, as the waiter did not
+      immediately appear, he threw some silver on the table, and aimed himself
+      in the direction of the cab. I got in. Diaz slipped on the step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ve forgotten somethin&rsquo;,&rsquo; he complained. &lsquo;What
+      is it? My umbrella&mdash;yes, my umbrella&mdash;<i>pépin</i> as they say
+      here. &lsquo;Scuse me moment.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His umbrella was, in fact, lying under a chair. He stooped with difficulty
+      and regained it, and then the waiter, who had at length arrived, helped
+      him into the cab, and he sank like a mass of inert clay on my skirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell the driver the address,&rsquo; I whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver, with head turned and a grin on his face, was waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Rue de Douai,&rsquo; said Diaz sullenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What number?&rsquo; the driver asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Does that regard you?&rsquo; Diaz retorted crossly in French. &lsquo;I
+      will tell you later.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tell him now,&rsquo; I pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well, to oblige you, I will. Twenty-seven. But what I can&rsquo;t stand
+      is the impudence of these fellows.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver winked at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just so,&rsquo; I soothed Diaz, and we drove off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have never been happier than in unhappiness. Happiness is not joy, and
+      it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more
+      disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realization of one&rsquo;s
+      secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence.
+      As I crossed Paris with the drunken Diaz leaning clumsily against my
+      shoulder, I was profoundly unhappy. I was desolated by the sight of this
+      ruin, and yet I was happier than I had been since Frank died. I had
+      glimpses and intimations of the baffling essence of our human lives here,
+      strange, fleeting comprehensions of the eternal wonder and the eternal
+      beauty.... In vain, professional writer as I am, do I try to express
+      myself. What I want to say cannot be said; but those who have truly lived
+      will understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed over the Seine, lighted and asleep in the exquisite Parisian
+      night, and the rattling of the cab on the cobble-stones roused Diaz from
+      his stupor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where are we?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just going through the Louvre,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know how I got to the other s-side of the river,&rsquo; he
+      said. ‘Don&rsquo;t remember. So you&rsquo;re coming home with me, eh? You
+      aren&rsquo;t ‘shamed of me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are hurting me,&rsquo; I said coldly, &lsquo;with your elbow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, a thousand pardons! a thous&rsquo; parnds, Magda! That isn&rsquo;t
+      your real name, is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat upright and turned his face to glance at mine with a fatuous smile;
+      but I would not look at him. I kept my eyes straight in front. Then a
+      swerve of the carriage swung his body away from me, and he subsided into
+      the corner. The intoxication was gaining on him every minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What shall I do with him?&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I blushed as we drove up the Avenue de l&rsquo;Opera and across the Grand
+      Boulevard, for it seemed to me that all the gay loungers must observe Diaz&rsquo;
+      condition. We followed darker thoroughfares, and at last the cab, after
+      climbing a hill, stopped before a house in a street that appeared rather
+      untidy and irregular. I got out first, and Diaz stumbled after me, while
+      two women on the opposite side of the road stayed curiously to watch us.
+      Hastily I opened my purse and gave the driver a five-franc-piece, and he
+      departed before Diaz could decide what to say. I had told him to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not wish to tell the driver to go. I told him in spite of myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz, grumbling inarticulately, pulled the bell of the great door of the
+      house. But he had to ring several times before finally the door opened;
+      and each second was a year for me, waiting there with him in the street.
+      And when the door opened he was leaning against it, and so pitched forward
+      into the gloom of the archway. A laugh&mdash;the loud, unrestrained laugh
+      of the courtesan&mdash;came from across the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The archway was as black as night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Shut the door, will you?&rsquo; I heard Diaz&rsquo; voice. &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t
+      see it. Where are you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I was not going to shut the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you got a servant here?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘She comes in the mornings,&rsquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then there is no one in your flat?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not a shoul,&rsquo; said Diaz. &lsquo;Needn&rsquo;t be &lsquo;fraid.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I&rsquo;m not afraid,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;But I wanted to know. Which
+      floor is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Third. I&rsquo;ll light a match.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I pushed to the door, whose automatic latch clicked. We were fast in
+      the courtyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz dropped his matches in attempting to strike one. The metal box
+      bounced on the tiles. I bent down and groped with both hands till I found
+      it. And presently we began painfully to ascend the staircase, Diaz holding
+      his umbrella and the rail, and I striking matches from time to time. We
+      were on the second landing when I heard the bell ring again, and the
+      banging of the front-door, and then voices at the foot of the staircase. I
+      trembled lest we should be over-taken, and I would have hurried Diaz on,
+      but he would not be hurried. Happily, as we were halfway between the
+      second and third story, the man and the girl whose voices I heard stopped
+      at the second. I caught sight of them momentarily through the banisters.
+      The man was striking matches as I had been. &lsquo;<i>C&rsquo;est ici</i>,&rsquo;
+      the girl whispered. She was dressed in blue with a very large hat. She put
+      a key in the door when they had stopped, and then our matches went out
+      simultaneously. The door shut, and Diaz and I were alone on the staircase
+      again. I struck another match; we struggled on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I had taken his key from Diaz&rsquo; helpless hand, and opened his
+      door and guided him within, and closed the door definitely upon the outer
+      world, I breathed a great sigh. Every turn of the stair had been a station
+      of the cross for me. We were now in utter darkness. The classical
+      effluvium of inebriety mingled with the classical odour of the furnished
+      lodging. But I cared not. I had at last successfully hidden his shame. No
+      one could witness it now but me. So I was glad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither of us said anything as, still with the aid of matches, I
+      penetrated into the flat. Silently I peered about until I perceived a pair
+      of candles, which I lighted. Diaz, with his hat on his head and his
+      umbrella clasped tightly in his hand, fell into a chair. We glanced at
+      each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You had better go to bed,&rsquo; I suggested. &lsquo;Take your hat off.
+      You will feel better without it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not move, and I approached him and gently took his hat. I then
+      touched the umbrella.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no, no!&rsquo; he cried suddenly; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m always losing this
+      umbrella, and I won&rsquo;t let it out of my sight.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As you wish,&rsquo; I replied coldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was standing by him when he got up with a surprising lurch and put a
+      hand on my shoulder. He evidently meant to kiss me. I kept him at arm&rsquo;s
+      length, feeling a sort of icy anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to bed,&rsquo; I repeated fiercely. &lsquo;It is the only place for
+      you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made inarticulate noises in his throat, and ultimately achieved the
+      remark:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re very hard, Magda.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he bent himself towards the next room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You will want a candle,&rsquo; I said, with bitterness. &lsquo;No; I will
+      carry it. Let me go first.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I preceded him through a tiny salon into the bedroom, and, leaving him
+      there with one candle, came back into the first room. The whole place was
+      deplorable, though not more deplorable than I had expected from the look
+      of the street and the house and the stairs and the girl with the large
+      hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless,
+      and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel&mdash;a
+      kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings
+      and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with enormous
+      red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once been a
+      carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with actually
+      a bed! It was the ready-made human kennel of commerce, which every large
+      city supplies wholesale in tens of thousands to its victims. In that
+      street there were hundreds such; in the house alone there were probably a
+      score at least. Their sole virtue was their privacy. Ah the blessedness of
+      the sacred outer door, which not even the tyrant concierge might violate!
+      I thought of all the other interiors of the house, floor above floor, and
+      serried one against another&mdash;vile, mean, squalid, cramped, unlovely,
+      frowsy, fetid; but each lighted and intensely alive with the interplay of
+      hearts; each cloistered, a secure ground where the instincts that move the
+      world might show themselves naturally and in secret. There was something
+      tragically beautiful in that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had heard uncomfortable sounds from the bedroom. Then Diaz called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s no use. Can&rsquo;t do it. Can&rsquo;t get into bed.&rsquo; I
+      went directly to him. He sat on the bed, still clasping the umbrella, one
+      arm out of his coat. His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man
+      who retires baffled from some tremendously complicated problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Put down your umbrella,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t be foolish.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m not foolish,&rsquo; he retorted irritably. &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t
+      want to loosh thish umbrella again.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well then,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;hold it in the other hand, and I will
+      help you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that
+      revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He
+      was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty
+      centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should
+      exist&mdash;there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened,
+      shut in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted.
+      Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his mother.
+      I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed, clutching the
+      umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it from both
+      hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one
+      clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left
+      him to his inanimate companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was
+      prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs
+      alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to get
+      out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a cab
+      in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to walk
+      even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was, seated
+      in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself in the
+      vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful, passionate city
+      in the night&mdash;the night when the commonest noises seem to carry some
+      mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth walks abroad
+      naked and whispers her secrets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of
+      the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night,
+      the lamp was extinguished by a careful municipality, and I was left in
+      utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and
+      sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with
+      difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow&mdash;as if the city had not
+      been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was
+      about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up, and
+      I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound
+      disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz&rsquo; bedroom. As of
+      old, he slept with the tranquillity of a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished
+      floor under the table. The night had passed, and it appeared to be almost
+      a miracle that the night had passed, and that I had lived through it and
+      was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed
+      back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in
+      blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom. She
+      went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more sane,
+      more astringent. And yet only a few hours&mdash;and it had been night,
+      strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were
+      warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dreaming souls. But
+      that tall woman must go to bed in day, and rise to meet the first wind of
+      the morning, and perhaps never have known the sweet poison of the night. I
+      sank back into my chair....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sharp, decisive sound of a key in the lock of the
+      entrance-door. I jumped up, fully awake, with beating heart and blushing
+      face. Someone was invading the flat. Someone would catch me there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course it was his servant. I had entirely forgotten her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We met in the little passage. She was a stout creature and appeared to
+      fill the flat. She did not seem very surprised at the sight of me, and she
+      eyed me with the frigid disdain of one who conforms to a certain code for
+      one who does not conform to it. She sat in judgment on my well-hung skirt
+      and the rings on my fingers and the wickedness in my breast, and condemned
+      me to everlasting obloquy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Madame is going?&rsquo; she asked coldly, holding open the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, madame,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Are you the <i>femme de ménage</i> of
+      monsieur?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur is ill,&rsquo; I said, deciding swiftly what to do. &lsquo;He
+      does not wish to be disturbed. He would like you to return at two o&rsquo;clock.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before two I should have departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur knows well that I have another <i>ménage</i> from twelve to two,&rsquo;
+      protested the woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Three o&rsquo;clock, then,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Bien</i>, madame,&rsquo; said she, and, producing the contents of a
+      reticule: ‘Here are the bread, the butter, the milk, and the newspaper,
+      madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thank you, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took the things, and she left, and I shut the door and bolted it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In anticipation, the circumstances of such an encounter would have caused
+      me infinite trouble of spirit. &lsquo;But after all it was not so very
+      dreadful,&rsquo; I thought, as I fastened the door. &lsquo;Do I care for
+      his <i>femme de ménage</i>?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great door of the house would be open now, and the stairs no longer
+      affrighting, and I might slip unobserved away. But I could not bring
+      myself to leave until I had spoken with Diaz, and I would not wake him. It
+      was nearly noon when he stirred. I heard his movements, and a slight
+      moaning sigh, and he called me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you there, Magda?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How feeble and appealing his voice!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For answer I stepped into his bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a quiver of
+      the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is is the ordered
+      and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be abhorrent, nothing
+      blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In the
+      presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we
+      maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin and of justice? We are, and that
+      is all we should dare to say. And yet, when I saw Diaz stretched on that
+      wretched bed my first movement was one of physical disgust. He had not
+      shaved for several days. His hair was like a doormat. His face was unclean
+      and puffed; his lips full and cracked; his eyes all discoloured. If aught
+      can be vile, he was vile. If aught can be obscene, he was obscene. His
+      limbs twitched; his features were full of woe and desolation and
+      abasement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at me heavily, mournfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz, Diaz!&rsquo; said my soul. &lsquo;Have you come to this?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great and overmastering pity seized me, and I went to him, and laid my
+      hand gently on his. He was so nervous and tremulous that he drew away his
+      hand as if I had burnt it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, Magda,&rsquo; he murmured, &lsquo;my head! There was a piece of hot
+      brick in my mouth, and I tried to take it out. But it was my tongue. Can I
+      have some tea? Will you give me some cold water first?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strange that the frank and simple way in which he accepted my presence
+      there, and assumed my willingness to serve him, filled me with a new joy!
+      He said nothing of the night. I think that Diaz was one of the few men who
+      are strong enough never to regret the past. If he was melancholy, it was
+      merely because he suffered bodily in the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gave him water, and he thanked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now I will make some tea,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went into the tiny kitchen and looked around, lifting my skirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Can you find the things?&rsquo; he called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s all that splashing?&rsquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m washing a saucepan,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I never have my meals here,&rsquo; he called. &lsquo;Only tea. There are
+      two taps to the gas-stove&mdash;one a little way up the chimney.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, I was joyous, actively so. I brought the tea to the bedroom with a
+      glad smile. I had put two cups on the tray, which I placed on the
+      night-table; and there were some biscuits. I sat at the foot of the bed
+      while we drank. And the umbrella, unperceived by Diaz, lay with its handle
+      on a pillow, ludicrous and yet accusing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are an angel,&rsquo; said Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t call me that,&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because I wish it,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Angel&rsquo; was Ispenlove&rsquo;s
+      word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, what shall I call you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My name is Carlotta Peel,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Not Magdalen at all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was astounding, incredible, that he should be learning my name then for
+      the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall always call you Magda,&rsquo; he responded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And now I must go,&rsquo; I stated, when I had explained to him about the
+      servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But you&rsquo;ll come back?&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No question of his coming to me! I must come to him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘To a place like this?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unthinkingly I put into my voice some of the distaste I felt for his
+      deplorable apartments, and he was genuinely hurt. I believe that in all
+      honesty he deemed his apartments to be quite adequate and befitting. His
+      sensibilities had been so dulled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw up his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Of course,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;if you&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I stopped him quickly. &lsquo;I will come here. I was only
+      teasing you. Let me see. I&rsquo;ll come back at four, just to see how you
+      are. Won&rsquo;t you get up in the meantime?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, placated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I may do,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll try to. But in case I don&rsquo;t,
+      will you take my key? Where did you put it last night?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have it,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He summoned me to him just as I was opening the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are magnificent,&rsquo; he replied, with charming, impulsive
+      eagerness, his eyes resting upon me long. He was the old Diaz again.
+      &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t thank you. But when you come back I shall play to
+      you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Till four o&rsquo;clock,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he called again, just as I was leaving, &lsquo;bring one of
+      your books with you, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hesitated, with my hand on the door. When I gave him my name he had made
+      no sign that it conveyed to him anything out of the ordinary. That was
+      exactly like Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you read any of them?&rsquo; I asked loudly, without moving from the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; he answered. &lsquo;But I have heard of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really!&rsquo; I said, keeping my tone free from irony. &lsquo;Well, I
+      will not bring you one of my books.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked hard at the door in front of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For you I will be nothing but a woman,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I fled down the stairs and past the concierge swiftly into the street,
+      as anxious as a thief to escape notice. I got a fiacre at once, and drove
+      away. I would not analyze my heart. I could not. I could but savour the
+      joy, sweet and fresh, that welled up in it as from some secret source. I
+      was so excited that I observed nothing outside myself, and when the cab
+      stopped in front of my hotel, it seemed to me that the journey had
+      occupied scarcely a few seconds. Do you imagine I was saddened by the
+      painful spectacle of Diaz&rsquo; collapse in life? No! I only knew that he
+      needed sympathy, and that I could give it to him with both hands. I could
+      give, give! And the last thing that the egotist in me told me before it
+      expired was that I was worthy to give. My longing to assuage the lot of
+      Diaz became almost an anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I returned at about half-past five, bright and eager, with vague
+      anticipations. I seemed to have become used to the house. It no longer
+      offended me, and I had no shame in entering it. I put the key into the
+      door of Diaz&rsquo; flat with a clear, high sense of pleasure. He had
+      entrusted me with his key; I could go in as I pleased; I need have no fear
+      of inconveniencing him, of coming at the wrong moment. It seemed
+      wonderful! And as I turned the key and pushed open the door my sole wish
+      was to be of service to him, to comfort him, to render his life less
+      forlorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Here I am!&rsquo; I cried, shutting the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the smaller of the two tiny sitting-rooms the piano, which had been
+      closed, was open, and I saw that it was a Pleyel. But both rooms were
+      empty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you still in bed, then?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went cautiously into the bedroom. It, too, was empty. The bed was made,
+      and the flat generally had a superficial air of tidiness. Evidently the
+      charwoman had been and departed; and doubtless Diaz had gone out, to
+      return immediately. I sat down in the chair in which I had spent most of
+      the night. I took off my hat and put it by the side of a tiny satchel
+      which I had brought, and began to wait for him. How delicious it would be
+      to open the door to him! He would notice that I had taken off my hat, and
+      he would be glad. What did the future, the immediate future, hold for me?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A long time I waited, and then I yawned heavily, and remembered that for
+      several days I had had scarcely any sleep. I shut my eyes to relieve the
+      tedium of waiting. When I reopened them, dazed, and startled into sudden
+      activity by mysterious angry noises, it was quite dark. I tried to recall
+      where I was, and to decide what the noises could be. I regained my
+      faculties with an effort. The noises were a beating on the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is Diaz,&rsquo; I said to myself; &lsquo;and he can&rsquo;t get in!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I felt very guilty because I had slept. I must have slept for hours.
+      Groping for a candle, I lighted it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Coming! coming!&rsquo; I called in a loud voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I went into the passage with the candle and opened the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Diaz. The gas was lighted on the stairs. Between that and my candle
+      he stood conspicuous in all his details. Swaying somewhat, he supported
+      himself by the balustrade, and was thus distant about two feet from the
+      door. He was drunk&mdash;viciously drunk; and in an instant I knew the
+      cruel truth concerning him, and wondered that I had not perceived it
+      before. He was a drunkard&mdash;simply that. He had not taken to drinking
+      as a consequence of nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdown was a euphemism
+      for the result of alcoholic excess. I saw his slow descent as in a vision,
+      and everything was explained. My heart leapt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can save him,&rsquo; I said to myself. &lsquo;I can restore him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was aware of the extreme difficulty of curing a drunkard, of the immense
+      proportion of failures. But, I thought, if a woman such as I cannot by the
+      lavishing of her whole soul and body deliver from no matter what fiend a
+      man such as Diaz, then the world has changed, and the eternal Aphrodite is
+      dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I can save him!&rsquo; I repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, heavenly moment!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Aren&rsquo;t you coming in?&rsquo; I addressed him quietly. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve
+      been waiting for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have you?&rsquo; he angrily replied. &lsquo;I waited long enough for you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;come in.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who is it?&rsquo; he demanded. &lsquo;I inzizt&mdash;who is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s I,&rsquo; I answered; &lsquo;Magda.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That&rsquo;s no&rsquo; wha&rsquo; I mean,&rsquo; he went on. &lsquo;And
+      wha&rsquo;s more&mdash;you know it. Who is it addrezzes you, madame?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I humoured him, &lsquo;it&rsquo;s you, of course&mdash;Diaz.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the sound of a door opening on one of the lower storeys, and I
+      hoped I had pacified him, and that he would enter; but I was mistaken. He
+      stamped his foot furiously on the landing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz!&rsquo; he protested, shouting. &lsquo;Who dares call me Diaz? Wha&rsquo;s
+      my full name?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Emilio Diaz,&rsquo; I murmured meekly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That&rsquo;s better,&rsquo; he grumbled. &lsquo;What am I?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wha&rsquo; am I?&rsquo; he roared; and his voice went up and down the
+      echoing staircase. &lsquo;I won&rsquo;t put foot ev&rsquo;n on doormat
+      till I&rsquo;m told wha&rsquo; I am here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are the&mdash;the master,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;But do come in.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘The mas&rsquo;r! Mas&rsquo;r of wha&rsquo;?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Master of the pianoforte,&rsquo; I answered at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled, suddenly appeased, and put his foot unsteadily on the doormat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Good!&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;But, un&rsquo;stan&rsquo;, I wouldn&rsquo;t
+      ev&rsquo;n have pu&rsquo; foot on doormat&mdash;no, not ev&rsquo;n on
+      doormat&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came in, and I shut the door, and I was alone with my wild beast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Kiss me,&rsquo; he commanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I kissed him on the mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t put your arms roun&rsquo; me,&rsquo; he growled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I deposited the candle on the floor, and put my arms round his neck,
+      standing on tip-toe, and kissed him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went past me, staggering and growling, into the sitting-room at the end
+      of the passage, and furiously banged down the lid of the piano, so that
+      every cord in it jangled deafeningly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Light the lamp,&rsquo; he called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘In one second,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I locked the outer door on the inside, slipped the key into my pocket, and
+      picked up the candle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What were you doing out there?&rsquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I had to pick the candle up.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized my hat from the table and threw it to the floor. Then he sat
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nex&rsquo; time,&rsquo; he remarked, &lsquo;you&rsquo;ll know better&rsquo;n
+      to keep me waiting.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I lighted a lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;m very sorry,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Won&rsquo;t you go to bed?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall go to bed when I want,&rsquo; he answered. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      thirsty. In the cupboard you&rsquo;ll see a bottle. I&rsquo;ll trouble you
+      to give it me, with a glass and some water.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This cupboard?&rsquo; I said questioningly, opening a cupboard papered to
+      match the rest of the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you can&rsquo;t be thirsty, Diaz?&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Must I repea&rsquo; wha&rsquo; I said?&rsquo; he glared at me. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+      thirsty. Give me the bottle.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took out the bottle nearest to hand. It was of a dark green colour, and
+      labelled &lsquo;Extrait d&rsquo;Absinthe. Pernod fils.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not this one, Diaz?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he insisted. &lsquo;Give it me. And get a glass and some
+      water.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wha&rsquo;? You won&rsquo;t give it me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He jumped up recklessly and faced me. His hat fell off the back of his
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me that bottle!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His breath poisoned the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I retreated in the direction of the window, and put my hand on the knob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang at me, but not before I had opened the window and thrown out the
+      bottle. I heard it fall in the roadway with a crash and scattering of
+      glass. Happily it had harmed no one. Diaz was momentarily checked. He
+      hesitated. I eyed him as steadily as I could, closing the while the window
+      behind me with my right hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He may try to kill me,&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My heart was thudding against my dress, not from fear, but from
+      excitement. My situation seemed impossible to me, utterly passing belief.
+      Yesterday I had been a staid spinster, attended by a maid, in a hotel of
+      impeccable propriety. Today I had locked myself up alone with a riotous
+      drunkard in a vile flat in a notorious Parisian street. Was I mad? What
+      force, secret and powerful, had urged me on?... And there was the foul
+      drunkard, with clenched hands and fiery eyes, undecided whether or not to
+      murder me. And I waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved away, inarticulately grumbling, and resumed with difficulty his
+      hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ver&rsquo; well,&rsquo; he hiccupped morosely, &lsquo;ver&rsquo; well; I&rsquo;m
+      going. Tha&rsquo;s all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lurched into the passage, and then I heard him fumbling a long time
+      with the outer door. He left the door and went into his bedroom, and
+      finally returned to me. He held one hand behind his back. I had sunk into
+      a chair by the small table on which the lamp stood, with my satchel beside
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now!&rsquo; he said, halting in front of me. &lsquo;You&rsquo;ve locked
+      tha&rsquo; door. I can&rsquo;t go out.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me the key.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Give me the key,&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I mus&rsquo; have the key.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he showed his right hand, and it held a revolver. He bent slightly
+      over the table, staring down at me as I stared up at him. But as his chin
+      felt the heat rising from the chimney of the lamp, he shifted a little to
+      one side. I might have rushed for shelter into some other room; I might
+      have grappled with him; I might have attempted to soothe him. But I could
+      neither stir nor speak. Least of all, could I give him the key&mdash;for
+      him to go and publish his own disgrace in the thoroughfares. So I just
+      gazed at him, inactive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I s&rsquo;ll kill you!&rsquo; he muttered, and raised the revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My throat became suddenly dry. I tried to make the motion of swallowing,
+      and could not. And looking at the revolver, I perceived in a swift
+      revelation the vast folly of my inexperience. Since he was already drunk,
+      why had I not allowed him to drink more, to drink himself into a stupor?
+      Drunkards can only be cured when they are sober. To commence a course of
+      moral treatment at such a moment as I had chosen was indeed the act of a
+      woman. However, it was too late to reclaim the bottle from the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw that he meant to kill me. And I knew that previously, during our
+      encounter at the window, I had only pretended to myself that I thought
+      there was a risk of his killing me. I had pretended, in order to increase
+      the glory of my martyrdom in my own sight. Moreover, my brain, which was
+      working with singular clearness, told me that for his sake I ought to give
+      up the key. His exposure as a helpless drunkard would be infinitely
+      preferable to his exposure as a murderer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet I could not persuade myself to relinquish the key. If I did so, he
+      would imagine that he had frightened me. But I had no fear, and I could
+      not bear that he should think I had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My ears sang. The room was full of a new odour, and a cloud floated
+      reluctantly upwards from the mouth of the revolver. I sneezed, and then I
+      grew aware that, firing at a distant of two feet, he had missed me. What
+      had happened to the bullet I could not guess. He put the revolver down on
+      the table with a groan, and the handle rested on my satchel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My God, Magda!&rsquo; he sighed, pushing back his hair with his beautiful
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was somewhat sobered. I said nothing, but I observed that the lamp was
+      smoking, and I turned down the wick. I was so self-conscious, so
+      irresolute, so nonplussed, that in sheer awkwardness, like a girl at a
+      party who does not know what to do with her hands, I pushed the revolver
+      off the satchel, and idly unfastened the catch of the satchel. Within it,
+      among other things, was my sedative. I, too, had fallen the victim of a
+      habit. For five years a bad sleeper, I had latterly developed into a very
+      bad sleeper, and my sedative was accordingly strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A notion struck me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Drink a little of this, my poor Diaz!&rsquo; I murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It will make you sleep,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a convulsive movement he clutched the bottle and uncorked it, and
+      before I could interfere he had drunk nearly the whole of its contents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Stop!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;You will kill yourself!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What matter!&rsquo; he exclaimed; and staggered off to the darkness of
+      the bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed him with the lamp, but he had already fallen on the bed, and
+      seemed to be heavily asleep. I shook him; he made no response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘At any cost he must he roused,&rsquo; I said aloud. &lsquo;He must be
+      forced to walk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a knocking at the outer door, low, discreet, and continuous. It
+      sounded to me like a deliverance. Whoever might be there must aid me to
+      waken Diaz. I ran to the door, taking the key out of my pocket, and opened
+      it. A tall woman stood on the doormat. It was the girl that I had glimpsed
+      on the previous night in the large hat ascending the stairs with a man.
+      But now her bright golden head was uncovered, and she wore a blue <i>peignoir</i>,
+      such as is sold ready made, with its lace and its ribbons, at all the big
+      Paris shops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, pardon, madame,&rsquo; she said, in a thin, sweet voice in French.
+      &lsquo;I was at my door, and it seemed to me that I heard&mdash;a
+      revolver. Nothing serious has passed, then? Pardon, madame.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thank you. You are very amiable, madame,&rsquo; I replied
+      stiffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All my excuses, madame,&rsquo; said she, turning away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;I am wrong. Do not go. Someone is ill&mdash;very
+      ill. If you would&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where? What is it?&rsquo; she inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He is in the bedroom&mdash;here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both spoke breathlessly, hurrying to the bedroom, after I had fetched
+      the lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Wounded? He has done himself harm? Ah!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;not that.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I explained to her that Diaz had taken at least six doses of my strong
+      solution of trional.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I seized the lamp and held it aloft over the form of the sleeper, which
+      lay on its side cross-wise, the feet projecting a little over the edge of
+      the bed, the head bent forward and missing the pillow, the arms stretched
+      out in front&mdash;the very figure of abandoned and perfect
+      unconsciousness. And the girl and I stared at Diaz, our shoulders
+      touching, in the kennel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘He must be made to walk about,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;You would be
+      extremely kind to help me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, madame,&rsquo; she replied. &lsquo;He will be very well like that.
+      When one is alcoholic, one cannot poison one&rsquo;s self; it is
+      impossible. All the doctors will tell you as much. Your friend will sleep
+      for twenty hours&mdash;twenty-four hours&mdash;and he will waken himself
+      quite re-established.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are sure? You know?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I know, madame. Be tranquil. Leave him. He could not have done better. It
+      is perfect.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Perhaps I should fetch a doctor?&rsquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is not worth the pain,&rsquo; she said, with conviction. &lsquo;You
+      would have vexations uselessly. Leave him.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gazed at her, studying her, and I was satisfied. With her fluffly locks,
+      and her simple eyes, and her fragile face, and her long hands, she had,
+      nevertheless, the air of knowing profoundly her subject. She was a great
+      expert on males and all that appertained to them, especially their vices.
+      I was the callow amateur. I was compelled to listen with respect to this
+      professor in the professor&rsquo;s garb. I was impressed, in spite of
+      myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘One might arrange him more comfortably,&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And we lifted the senseless victim, and put him on his back, and
+      straightened his limbs, as though he had been a corpse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How handsome he is!&rsquo; murmured my visitor, half closing her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You think so?&rsquo; I said politely, as if she had been praising one of
+      my private possessions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh yes. We are neighbours, madame. I have frequently remarked him, you
+      understand, on the stairs, in the street.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Has he been here long?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About a year, madame. You have, perhaps, not seen him since a long time.
+      An old friend?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is ten years ago,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah! Ten years! In England, without doubt?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘In England, yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ten years!&rsquo; she repeated, musing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am certain she has a kind heart,&rsquo; I said to myself, and I decided
+      to question her: &lsquo;Will you not sit down, madame?&rsquo; I invited
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, madame! it is you who should sit down,&rsquo; she said quickly.
+      &lsquo;You must have suffered.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We both sat down. There were only two chairs in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I would like to ask you,&rsquo; I said, leaning forward towards her,
+      &lsquo;have you ever seen him&mdash;drunk&mdash;before?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; she replied instantly; &lsquo;never before yesterday evening.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Be frank,&rsquo; I urged her, smiling sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why should I not be frank, madame?&rsquo; she said, with a grave, gentle
+      appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if she had said: &lsquo;We are talking woman to woman. I know
+      one of your secrets. You can guess mine. The male is present, but he is
+      deaf. What reason, therefore, for deceit?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am much obliged to you,&rsquo; I breathed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Not at all,&rsquo; she said. &lsquo;Decidedly he is alcoholic&mdash;that
+      sees itself,&rsquo; she proceeded. &lsquo;But drunk&mdash;no!... He was
+      always alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Always alone?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Always.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes filled. I thought I had never seen a creature more gentle,
+      delicate, yielding, acquiescent, and fair. She was not beautiful, but she
+      had grace and distinction of movement. She was a Parisienne. She had won
+      my sympathy. We met in a moment when my heart needed the companionship of
+      a woman&rsquo;s heart, and I was drawn to her by one of those sudden
+      impulses that sometimes draw women to each other. I cared not what she
+      was. Moreover, she had excited my curiosity. She was a novelty in my life.
+      She was something that I had heard of, and seen&mdash;yes, and perhaps
+      envied in secret, but never spoken with. And she shattered all my
+      preconceptions about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are an old tenant of this house?&rsquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; she said; &lsquo;it suits me. But the great heats are
+      terrible here.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You do not leave Paris, then?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Never. Except to see my little boy.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I started, envious of her, and also surprised. It seemed strange that this
+      ribboned and elegant and plastic creature, whose long, thin arms were used
+      only to dalliance, should be a mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you have a little boy?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; he lives with my parents at Meudon. He is four years old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Excuse me,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Be frank with me once again. Do you love
+      your child, honestly? So many women don&rsquo;t, it appears.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I love him?&rsquo; she cried, and her face glowed with her love.
+      &lsquo;I adore him!&rsquo; Her sincerity was touching and overwhelming.
+      &lsquo;And he loves me, too. If he is naughty, one has only to tell him
+      that he will make his <i>petite mère</i> ill, and he will be good at once.
+      When he is told to obey his grandfather, because his grandfather provides
+      his food, he says bravely: &ldquo;No, not grandpapa; it is <i>petite mère</i>!&rdquo;
+      Is it not strange he should know that I pay for him? He has a little
+      engraving of the Queen of Italy, and he says it is his <i>petite mère</i>.
+      Among the scores of pictures he has he keeps only that one. He takes it to
+      bed with him. It is impossible to deprive him of it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled divinely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How beautiful!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;And you go to see him often?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘As often as I have time. I take him out for walks. I run with him till we
+      reach the woods, where I can have him to myself alone. I never stop; I
+      avoid people. No one except my parents knows that he is my child. One
+      supposes he is a nurse-child, received by my parents. But all the world
+      will know now,&rsquo; she added, after a pause. &lsquo;Last Monday I went
+      to Meudon with my friend Alice, and Alice wanted to buy him some sweets at
+      the grocer&rsquo;s. In the shop I asked him if he would like <i>dragées</i>,
+      and he said &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; The grocer said to him, &ldquo;Yes who,
+      young man?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes, <i>petite mère</i>,&rdquo; he said, very
+      loudly and bravely. The grocer understood. We all lowered our heads.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something so affecting in the way she half whispered the last
+      phrase, that I could have wept; and yet it was comical, too, and she
+      appreciated that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have no child, madame?&rsquo; she asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;How I envy you!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You need not,&rsquo; she observed, with a touch of hardness. &lsquo;I
+      have been so unhappy, that I can never be as unhappy again. Nothing
+      matters now. All I wish is to save enough money to be able to live quietly
+      in a little cottage in the country.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘With your child,&rsquo; I put in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My child will grow up and leave me. He will become a man, and he will
+      forget his <i>petite mère.&lsquo;</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do not talk like that,&rsquo; I protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glanced at me almost savagely. I was astonished at the sudden change
+      in her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo; she inquired coldly. &lsquo;Is it not true, then? Do you
+      still believe that there is any difference between one man and another?
+      They are all alike&mdash;all, all, all! I know. And it is we who suffer,
+      we others.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But surely you have some tender souvenir of your child&rsquo;s father?&rsquo;
+      I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I know who my child&rsquo;s father is?&rsquo; she demanded. &lsquo;My
+      child has thirty-six fathers!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You seem very bitter,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;for your age. You are much
+      younger than I am.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled and shook her honey-coloured hair, and toyed with the ribbons
+      of her <i>peignoir</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What I say is true,&rsquo; she said gently. &lsquo;But, there, what would
+      you have? We hate them, but we love them. They are beasts! beasts! but we
+      cannot do without them!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes rested on Diaz for a moment. He slept without the least sound,
+      the stricken and futile witness of our confidences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You will take him away from Paris soon, perhaps?&rsquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If I can,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sound of light footsteps on the stair. They stopped at the
+      door, which I remembered we had not shut. I jumped up and went into the
+      passage. Another girl stood in the doorway, in a <i>peignoir</i> the exact
+      counterpart of my first visitor&rsquo;s, but rose-coloured. And this one,
+      too, was languorous and had honey-coloured locks. It was as though the
+      mysterious house was full of such creatures, each with her secret lair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Pardon, madame,&rsquo; said my visitor, following and passing me; and
+      then to the newcomer: &lsquo;What is it, Alice?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is Monsieur Duchatel who is arrived.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; with a disdainful gesture. &lsquo;<i>Je m&rsquo;en fiche.</i>
+      Let him go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But it is the nephew, my dear; not the uncle.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, the nephew! I come. <i>Bon soir, madams, et bonne nuit</i>.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two <i>peignoirs</i> fluttered down the stairs together. I returned to
+      my Diaz, and seeing his dressing-gown behind the door of the bedroom, I
+      took it and covered him with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      His first words were:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda, you look like a ghost. Have you been sitting there like that all
+      the time?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I lay down.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘By your side.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Tea-time. The water is boiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Was I dreadful last night?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dreadful? How?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have a sort of recollection of getting angry and stamping about. I didn&rsquo;t
+      do anything foolish?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You took a great deal too much of my sedative,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I feel quite well,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;but I didn&rsquo;t know I had
+      taken any sedative at all. I&rsquo;m glad I didn&rsquo;t do anything silly
+      last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran away to prepare the tea. The situation was too much for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor Diaz!&rsquo; I said, when we had begun to drink the tea, and he
+      was sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes full of sleep, his chin
+      rough, and his hair magnificently disarranged, &lsquo;you did one thing
+      that was silly last night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t tell me I struck you?&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh no!&rsquo; and I laughed. &lsquo;Can&rsquo;t you guess what I mean?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean I got vilely drunk.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he burst out passionately, seeming at this point fully to
+      arouse himself, to resume acutely his consciousness, &lsquo;why were you
+      late? You said four o&rsquo;clock. I thought you had deceived me. I
+      thought I had disgusted you, and that you didn&rsquo;t mean to return. I
+      waited more than an hour and a quarter, and then I went out in despair.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But I came just afterwards,&rsquo; I protested. &lsquo;You had only to
+      wait a few more minutes. Surely you could have waited a few more minutes?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You said four o&rsquo;clock,&rsquo; he repeated obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It was barely half-past five when I came,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I had meant never to drink again,&rsquo; he went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You were so kind to me. But then, when you didn&rsquo;t come&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You doubted me, Diaz. You ought to have been sure of me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I was wrong.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;It was I who was wrong. But I never thought
+      that an hour and a half would make any difference.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah, Magda, Magda!&rsquo;&mdash;he suddenly began to weep; it was
+      astounding&mdash;&lsquo;remember that you had deserted me once before.
+      Remember that. If you had not done that, my life might have been
+      different. It <i>would</i> have been different.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Don&rsquo;t say so,&rsquo; I pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I must say so. You cannot imagine how solitary my life has been.
+      Magda, I loved you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I too wept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His accent was sincerity itself. I saw the young girl hurrying secretly
+      out of the Five Towns Hotel. Could it be true that she had carried away
+      with her, unknowing, the heart of Diaz? Could it be true that her panic
+      flight had ruined a career? The faint possibility that it was true made me
+      sick with vain grief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And now I am old and forgotten and disgraced,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘How old are you, Diaz?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Thirty-six,&rsquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;you have thirty years to live.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes; and what years?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Famous years. Brilliant years.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am done for&mdash;&rsquo; he murmured, and his head sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you so weak, then?&rsquo; I took his hand. &lsquo;Are you so weak?
+      Look at me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He obeyed, and his wet eyes met mine. In that precious moment I lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I don&rsquo;t know,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You could not have looked at me if you had not been strong, very strong,&rsquo;
+      I said firmly. &lsquo;You told me once that you had a house near
+      Fontainebleau. Have you still got it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I suppose so.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Let us go there, and&mdash;and&mdash;see.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I should like to go,&rsquo; I insisted, with a break in my voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My God!&rsquo; he exclaimed in a whisper, &lsquo;my God!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was sobbing violently, and my forehead was against the rough stuff of
+      his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And one morning, long afterwards, I awoke very early, and the murmuring of
+      the leaves of the forest came through the open window. I had known that I
+      should wake very early, in joyous anticipation of that day. And as I lay
+      he lay beside me, lost in the dreamless, boyish, natural sleep that he
+      never sought in vain. He lay, as always, slightly on his right side, with
+      his face a little towards me&mdash;his face that was young again, and from
+      which the bane had passed. It was one of the handsomest, fairest faces in
+      the world, one of the most innocent, and one of the strongest; the face of
+      a man who follows his instincts with the direct simplicity of a savage or
+      a child, and whose instincts are sane and powerful. Seen close, perfectly
+      at rest, as I saw it morning after morning, it was full of a special and
+      mysterious attraction. The fine curves of the nostrils and of the lobe of
+      the ear, the masterful lines of the mouth, the contours of the cheek and
+      chin and temples, the tints of the flesh subtly varying from rose to
+      ivory, the golden crown of hair, the soft moustache. I had learned every
+      detail by heart; my eyes had dwelt on them till they had become my soul&rsquo;s
+      inheritance, till they were mystically mine, drawing me ever towards them,
+      as a treasure draws. Gently moving, I would put my ear close, close, and
+      listen to the breath of life as it entered regularly, almost
+      imperceptibly, vivifying that organism in repose. There is something
+      terrible in the still beauty of sleep. It is as though the spiritual
+      fabric hangs inexplicably over the precipice of death. It seems
+      impossible, or at least miraculous, that the intake and the expulsion upon
+      which existence depends should continue thus, minute by minute, hour by
+      hour. It is as though one stood on the very confines of life, and could
+      one trace but one step more, one single step, one would unveil the eternal
+      secret. I would not listen long; the torture was too sweet, too exquisite,
+      and I would gently slide back to my place.... His hand was on the
+      counterpane, near to my breast&mdash;the broad hand of the pianist, with a
+      wrist of incredible force, and the fingers tapering suddenly at the end to
+      a point. I let my own descend on it as softly as snow. Ah, ravishing
+      contact! He did not move. And while my small hand touched his I gazed into
+      the spaces of the bedroom, with its walls of faded blue tapestry and its
+      white curtains, and its marble and rosewood, and they seemed to hold
+      peace, as the hollows of a field hold dew; they seemed to hold happiness
+      as a great tree holds sunlight in its branches; and outside was the
+      murmuring of the leaves of the forest and the virginal freshness of the
+      morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Surely he must wake earlier that day! I pursed my lips and blew tenderly,
+      mischievously, on his cheek, lying with my cheek full on the pillow, so
+      that I could watch him. The muscles of his mouth twitched, his inner being
+      appeared to protest. And then began the first instinctive blind movement
+      of the day with him. His arms came forward and found my neck, and drew me
+      forcibly to him, and then, just before our lips touched, he opened his
+      eyes and shut them again. So it occurred every morning. Ere even his brain
+      had resumed activity his heart had felt its need of me. This it was that
+      was so wonderful, so overpowering! And the kiss, languid and yet warm,
+      heavy with a human scent, with the scent of the night, honest, sensuous,
+      and long&mdash;long! As I lay thus, clasped in his arms, I half closed my
+      eyes, and looked into his eyes through my lashes, smiling, and all was a
+      delicious blur....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the summit of bliss! No! I have never mounted higher! I asked
+      myself, astounded, what I had done that I should receive such happiness,
+      what I had done that existence should have no flaw for me. And what <i>had</i>
+      I done? I know not, I know not. It passes me. I am lost in my joy. For I
+      had not even cured him. I had anticipated painful scenes, interminable
+      struggles, perhaps a relapse. But nothing of the kind. He had simply
+      ceased at once the habit&mdash;that was all. We never left each other. And
+      his magnificent constitution had perfectly recovered itself in a few
+      months. I had done nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he murmured indistinctly, drawing his mouth an inch away
+      from mine, &lsquo;why can&rsquo;t your dark hair always be loose over your
+      shoulders like that? It is glorious!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What ideas you have!&rsquo; I murmured, more softly than he. &lsquo;And
+      do you know what it is to-day?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve forgotten?&rsquo; I pouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Guess.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No; you must tell me. Not your birthday? Not mine?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It&rsquo;s just a year since I met you,&rsquo; I whispered timidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our mouths met again, and, so enlocked, we rested, savouring the true
+      savour of life. And presently my hand stole up to his head and stroked his
+      curls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every morning he began to practise at eight o&rsquo;clock, and continued
+      till eleven. The piano, a Steinway in a hundred Steinways, was in the
+      further of the two drawing-rooms. He would go into the room smoking a
+      cigarette, and when he had thrown away the cigarette I would leave him.
+      And as soon as I had closed the door the first notes would resound, slow
+      and solemn, of the five-finger exercises with which he invariably
+      commenced his studies. That morning, as often, I sat writing in the
+      enclosed garden. I always wrote in pencil on my knee. The windows of the
+      drawing-room were wide open, and Diaz&rsquo; music filled the garden. The
+      sheer beauty of his tone was such that to hear him strike even an isolated
+      note gave pleasure. He created beauty all the time. His five-finger
+      exercises were lovely patterns of sound woven with exact and awful
+      deliberation. It seemed impossible that these should be the same bald and
+      meaningless inventions which I had been wont to repeat. They were
+      transformed. They were music. The material in which he built them was
+      music itself, enchanting the ear as much by the quality of the tone as by
+      the impeccable elegance of the form. To hear Diaz play a scale, to catch
+      that measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of
+      equal splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born&mdash;this
+      was to perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the
+      divine magic that is the soul of the divinest art. I used to believe that
+      nothing could surpass the beauty of a scale, until Diaz, after writing
+      formal patterns in the still air innumerably, and hypnotizing me with that
+      sorcery, would pass suddenly to the repetition of fragments of Bach. And
+      then I knew that hitherto he had only been trying to be more purely and
+      severely mechanical than a machine, and that now the interpreter was at
+      work. I have heard him repeat a passage fifty times&mdash;and so slowly!&mdash;and
+      each rendering seemed more beautiful than the last; and it was more
+      beautiful than the last. He would extract the final drop of beauty from
+      the most beautiful things in the world. Washed, drenched in this
+      circumambient ether of beauty, I wrote my verse. Perhaps it may appear
+      almost a sacrilege that I should have used the practising of a Diaz as a
+      background for my own creative activity. I often thought so. But when one
+      has but gold, one must put it to lowly use. So I wrote, and he passed from
+      Bach to Chopin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Usually he would come out into the garden for five minutes at half-past
+      nine to smoke a cigarette, but that morning it had struck ten before the
+      music ceased. I saw him. He walked absent-minded along the terrace in the
+      strange silence that had succeeded. He was wearing his riding-breeches,
+      for we habitually rode at eleven. And that morning I did not hide my work
+      when he came. It was, in fact, finished; the time had arrived to disclose
+      it. He stopped in front of me in the sunlight, utterly preoccupied with
+      himself and his labours. He had the rapt look on his face which results
+      from the terrible mental and spiritual strain of practising as he
+      practised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Satisfied?&rsquo; I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He frowned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There are times when one gets rather inspired,&rsquo; he said, looking at
+      me, as it were, without seeing me. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s as if the whole soul
+      gets into one&rsquo;s hands. That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s wanted.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You had it this morning?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘A bit.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled with candid joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘While I was listening&mdash;&rsquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; he broke in impulsively, violently, &lsquo;it isn&rsquo;t you
+      that have to listen. It&rsquo;s I that have to listen. It&rsquo;s the
+      player that has to listen. He&rsquo;s got to do more than listen. He&rsquo;s
+      got to be <i>in</i> the piano with his inmost heart. If he isn&rsquo;t on
+      the full stretch of analysis the whole blessed time, he might just as well
+      be turning the handle of a barrel-organ.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He always talked about his work during the little &lsquo;recess&rsquo;
+      which he took in the middle of the morning. He pretended to be talking to
+      me, but it was to himself that he talked. He was impatient if I spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall be greater than ever,&rsquo; he proceeded, after a moment. And
+      his attitude towards himself was so disengaged, so apart and aloof, so
+      critically appreciative, that it was impossible to accuse him of egoism.
+      He was, perhaps, as amazed at his own transcendent gift as any other
+      person could be, and he was incapable of hiding his sensations. &lsquo;Yes,&rsquo;
+      he repeated; &lsquo;I think I shall be greater than ever. You see, a
+      Chopin player is born; you can&rsquo;t make him. With Chopin it&rsquo;s
+      not a question of intellect. It&rsquo;s all tone with Chopin&mdash;<i>tone</i>,
+      my child, even in the most bravura passages. You&rsquo;ve got to get it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed over the tree-tops into the blue sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I may be ready in six months,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think you will,&rsquo; I concurred, with a judicial air. But I honestly
+      deemed him to be more than ready then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twelve months previously he had said: &lsquo;With six hours&rsquo;
+      practice a day for two years I shall recover what I have lost.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had succeeded beyond his hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Are you writing in that book?&rsquo; he inquired carelessly as he threw
+      down the cigarette and turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I have just finished something,&rsquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh!&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m glad you aren&rsquo;t idle. It&rsquo;s
+      so boring.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He returned to the piano, perfectly incurious about what I did,
+      self-absorbed as a god. And I was alone in the garden, with the semicircle
+      of trees behind me, and the façade of the old house and its terrace in
+      front. And lying on the lawn, just under the terrace, was the white end of
+      the cigarette which he had abandoned; it breathed upwards a thin spiral of
+      blue smoke through the morning sunshine, and then it ceased to breathe.
+      And the music recommenced, on a different plane, more brilliantly than
+      before. It was as though, till then, he had been laboriously building the
+      bases of a tremendous triumphal arch, and that now the two wings met,
+      dazzlingly, soaringly, in highest heaven, and the completed arch became a
+      rainbow glittering in the face of the infinite. He played two of his great
+      concert pieces, and their intricate melodies&mdash;brocaded, embroidered,
+      festooned&mdash;poured themselves through the windows into the garden in a
+      procession majestic and impassioned, perturbing the intent soul of the
+      solitary listener, swathing her in intoxicating sound. It was the unique
+      virtuoso born again, proudly displaying the ultimate sublime end of all
+      those slow-moving exercises to which he had subdued his fingers. Not for
+      ten years had I heard him play so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we first came into the house I had said bravely to myself: &lsquo;His
+      presence shall not deter me from practising as I have always done.&rsquo;
+      And one afternoon I had sat down to the piano full of determination to
+      practise without fear of him, without self-consciousness. But before my
+      hands had touched the keys shame took me, unreasoning, terror-struck
+      shame, and I knew in an instant that while he lived I should never more
+      play the piano. He laughed lightly when I told him, and I called myself
+      silly. Yet now, as I sat in the garden, I saw how right I had been. And I
+      wondered that I should ever have had the audacity even to dream of playing
+      in his house; the idea was grotesque. And he did not ask me to play, save
+      when there arrived new orchestral music arranged for four hands. Then I
+      steeled myself to the ordeal of playing with him, because he wished to try
+      over the music. And he would thank me, and say that pianoforte duets were
+      always very enjoyable. But he did not pretend that I was not an amateur,
+      and he never&mdash;thank God!&mdash;suggested that we should attempt <i>Tristan</i>
+      again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he finished. And I heard distantly the bell which he had rung for
+      his glass of milk. And, remembering that I was not ready for the ride, I
+      ran with guilty haste into the house and upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two bay horses were waiting, our English groom at their heads, when I
+      came out to the porch. Diaz was impatiently tapping his boot with his
+      whip. He was not in the least a sporting man, but he loved the sensation
+      of riding, and the groom would admit that he rode passably; but he loved
+      more to strut in breeches, and to imitate in little ways the sporting man.
+      I had learnt to ride in order to please him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come along,&rsquo; he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes said: &lsquo;You are always late.&rsquo; And I was. Some people
+      always know exactly what point they have reached in the maze and jungle of
+      the day, just as mariners are always aware, at the back of their minds, of
+      the state of the tide. But I was not born so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz helped me to mount, and we departed, jingling through the gate and
+      across the road into a glade of the forest, one of those long sandy
+      defiles, banked on either side, and over-shadowed with tall oaks, which
+      pierce the immense forest like rapiers. The sunshine slanted through the
+      crimsoning leafwork and made irregular golden patches on the dark sand to
+      the furthest limit of the perspective. And though we could not feel the
+      autumn wind, we could hear it in the tree-tops, and it had the sound of
+      the sea. The sense of well-being and of joy was exquisite. The beauty of
+      horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and irrational as young
+      girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange is that their vast strength
+      does not seem incongruous with it. To be above that proud and lovely
+      organism, listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nervous far beyond the
+      human, to feel one&rsquo;s self almost part of it by intimate contact, to
+      yield to it, and make it yield, to draw from it into one&rsquo;s self some
+      of its exultant vitality&mdash;in a word, to ride&mdash;yes, I could
+      comprehend Diaz&rsquo; fine enthusiasm for that! I could share it when he
+      was content to let the horses amble with noiseless hoofs over the soft
+      ways. But when he would gallop, and a strong wind sprang up to meet our
+      faces, and the earth shook and thundered, and the trunks of the trees
+      raced past us, then I was afraid. My fancy always saw him senseless at the
+      foot of a tree while his horse calmly cropped the short grass at the sides
+      of the path, or with his precious hand twisted and maimed! And I was in
+      agony till he reined in. I never dared to speak to him of this fear, nor
+      even hint to him that the joy was worth less than the peril. He would have
+      been angry in his heart, and something in him stronger than himself would
+      have forced him to increase the risks. I knew him! ... Ah! but when we
+      went gently, life seemed to be ideal for me, impossibly perfect! It seemed
+      to contain all that I could ever have demanded of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at him sideways, so noble and sane and self-controlled. And the
+      days in Paris had receded, far and dim and phantom-like. Was it
+      conceivable that they had once been real, and that we had lived through
+      them? And was this Diaz, the world-renowned darling of capitals, riding by
+      me, a woman whom he had met by fantastic chance? Had he really hidden
+      himself in my arms from the cruel stare of the world and the insufferable
+      curiosity of admirers who, instead of admiring, had begun to pity? Had I
+      in truth saved him? Was it I who would restore him to his glory? Oh, the
+      astounding romance that my life had been! And he was with me! He shared my
+      life, and I his! I wondered what would happen when he returned to his
+      bright kingdom. I was selfish enough to wish that he might never return to
+      his kingdom, and that we might ride and ride for ever in the forest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then we came to a circular clearing, with an iron cross in the middle,
+      where roads met, a place such as occurs magically in some ballade of
+      Chopin&rsquo;s. And here we drew rein on the leaf-strewn grass, breathing
+      quickly, with reddened cheeks, and the horses nosed each other, with long
+      stretchings of the neck and rattling of bits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘So you&rsquo;ve been writing again?&rsquo; said Diaz, smiling
+      quizzically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve been writing a long time, but I
+      haven&rsquo;t let <i>you</i> know anything about it; and just to-day I&rsquo;ve
+      finished it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What is it&mdash;another novel?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No; a little drama in verse.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Going to publish it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why, naturally.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was aware that I enjoyed fame in England and America. He was probably
+      aware that my books had brought me a considerable amount of money. He had
+      read some of my works, and found them excellent&mdash;indeed, he was quite
+      proud of my talent. But he did not, he could not, take altogether
+      seriously either my talent or my fame. I knew that he always regarded me
+      as a child gracefully playing at a career. For him there was only one sort
+      of fame; all the other sorts were shadows. A supreme violinist might,
+      perhaps, approach the real thing, in his generous mind; but he was
+      incapable of honestly believing that any fame compared with that of a
+      pianist. The other fames were very well, but they were paste to the
+      precious stone, gewgaws to amuse simple persons. The sums paid to sopranos
+      struck him as merely ridiculous in their enormity. He could not be called
+      conceited; nevertheless, he was magnificently sure that he had been, and
+      still was, the most celebrated person in the civilized world. Certainly he
+      had no superiors in fame, but he would not admit the possibility of
+      equals. Of course, he never argued such a point; it was a tacit
+      assumption, secure from argument. And with that he profoundly reverenced
+      the great composers. The death of Brahms affected him for years. He
+      regarded it as an occasion for universal sorrow. Had Brahms condescended
+      to play the piano, Diaz would have turned the pages for him, and deemed
+      himself honoured&mdash;him whom queens had flattered!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Did you imagine,&rsquo; I began to tease him, after a pause, &lsquo;that
+      while you are working I spend my time in merely existing?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You exist&mdash;that is enough, my darling,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Strange
+      that a beautiful woman can&rsquo;t understand that in existing she is
+      doing her life&rsquo;s work!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he leaned over and touched my right wrist below the glove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You dear thing!&rsquo; I murmured, smiling. &lsquo;How foolish you can
+      be!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What&rsquo;s the drama about?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘About La Vallière,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘La Vallière! But that&rsquo;s the kind of subject I want for my opera!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;I have thought so.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Could you turn it into a libretto, my child?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, dearest.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because it already is a libretto. I have written it as such.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘For whom else?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I looked at him fondly, and I think tears came to my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are a genius, Magda!&rsquo; he exclaimed. &lsquo;You leave nothing
+      undone for me. The subject is the very thing to suit Villedo.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Who is Villedo?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My jewel, you don&rsquo;t know who Villedo is! Villedo is the director of
+      the Opéra Comique in Paris, the most artistic opera-house in Europe. He
+      used to beg me every time we met to write him an opera.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And why didn&rsquo;t you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Because I had neither the subject nor the time. One doesn&rsquo;t write
+      operas after lunch in hotel parlours; and as for a good libretto&mdash;well,
+      outside Wagner, there&rsquo;s only one opera in the world with a good
+      libretto, and that&rsquo;s <i>Carmen</i>.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz, who had had a youthful operatic work performed at the Royal School
+      of Music in London, and whose numerous light compositions for the
+      pianoforte had, of course, enjoyed a tremendous vogue, was much more
+      serious about his projected opera than I had imagined. He had frequently
+      mentioned it to me, but I had not thought the idea was so close to his
+      heart as I now perceived it to be. I had written the libretto to amuse
+      myself, and perhaps him, and lo! he was going to excite himself; I well
+      knew the symptoms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You wrote it in that little book,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You haven&rsquo;t
+      got it in your pocket?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;I haven&rsquo;t even a pocket.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would not laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come,&rsquo; he said&mdash;&lsquo;come, let&rsquo;s see it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gathered up his loose rein and galloped off. He could not wait an
+      instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come along!&rsquo; he cried imperiously, turning his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am coming,&rsquo; I replied; &lsquo;but wait for me. Don&rsquo;t leave
+      me like that, Diaz.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old fear seized me, but nothing could stop him, and I followed as fast
+      as I dared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Where is it?&rsquo; he asked, when we reached home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Upstairs,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came upstairs behind me, pulling my habit playfully, in an effort
+      to persuade us both that his impatience was a simulated one. I had to find
+      my keys and unlock a drawer. I took the small, silk-bound volume from the
+      back part of the drawer and gave it to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There!&rsquo; I exclaimed. &lsquo;But remember lunch is ready.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He regarded the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a pretty binding!&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Who worked it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I did.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And, of course, your handwriting is so pretty, too!&rsquo; he added,
+      glancing at the leaves. &lsquo;&ldquo;La Vallière, an opera in three acts.&rdquo;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We exchanged a look, each of us deliciously perturbed, and then he ran off
+      with the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had to be called three times from the garden to lunch, and he brought
+      the book with him, and read it in snatches during the meal, and while
+      sipping his coffee. I watched him furtively as he turned over the pages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, you&rsquo;ve done it!&rsquo; he said at length&mdash;&lsquo;you&rsquo;ve
+      done it! You evidently have a gift for libretto. It is neither more nor
+      less than perfect! And the subject is wonderful!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose, walked round the table, and, taking my head between his hands,
+      kissed me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;you&rsquo;re the cleverest girl that was
+      ever born.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Then, do you think you will compose it?&rsquo; I asked, joyous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Do I think I will compose it! Why, what do you imagine? I&rsquo;ve
+      already begun. It composes itself. I&rsquo;m now going to read it all
+      again in the garden. Just see that I&rsquo;m not worried, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean you don&rsquo;t want me there. You don&rsquo;t care for me any
+      more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It amused me to pretend to pout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he laughed; &lsquo;that&rsquo;s it. I don&rsquo;t care for
+      you any more.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Have no fear!&rsquo; I cried after him. &lsquo;I shan&rsquo;t come into
+      your horrid garden!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His habit was to resume his practice at three o&rsquo;clock. The hour was
+      then half-past one. I wondered whether he would allow himself to be
+      seduced from the piano that afternoon by the desire to compose. I hoped
+      not, for there could be no question as to the relative importance to him
+      of the two activities. To my surprise, I heard the piano at two o&rsquo;clock,
+      instead of at three, and it continued without intermission till five. Then
+      he came, like a sudden wind, on to the terrace where I was having tea.
+      Diaz would never take afternoon tea. He seized my hand impulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Come down,&rsquo; he said&mdash;&lsquo;down under the trees there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What for?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But, Diaz, let me put my cup down. I shall spill the tea on my dress.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll take your cup.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘And I haven&rsquo;t nearly finished my tea, either. And you&rsquo;re
+      hurting me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll bring you a fresh cup,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Come, come!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he dragged me off, laughing, to the lower part of the garden, where
+      were two chairs in the shade. And I allowed myself to be dragged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘There! Sit down. Don&rsquo;t move. I&rsquo;ll fetch your tea.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And presently he returned with the cup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Now that you&rsquo;ve nearly killed me,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;and spoilt
+      my dress, perhaps you&rsquo;ll explain.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He produced the silk-bound book of manuscript from his pocket and put it
+      in my unoccupied hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to read it to me aloud, all of it,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What a strange boy you are!&rsquo; I chided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I drank the tea, straightened my features into seriousness, and began
+      to read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reading occupied less than an hour. He made no remark when it was
+      done, but held out his hand for the book, and went out for a walk. At
+      dinner he was silent till the servants had gone. Then he said musingly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘That scene in the cloisters between Louise and De Montespan is a great
+      idea. It will be magnificent; it will be the finest thing in the opera.
+      What a subject you have found! what a subject!&rsquo; His tone altered.
+      &lsquo;Magda, will you do something to oblige me?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘If it isn&rsquo;t foolish.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want you to go to bed.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Out of the way?&rsquo; I smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Go to bed and to sleep,&rsquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘But why?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I want to walk about this floor. I must be alone.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;just to prove how humble and obedient I am, I
+      will go.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I held up my mouth to be kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wondrous, the joy I found in playing the decorative, acquiescent,
+      self-effacing woman to him, the pretty, pouting plaything! I liked him to
+      dismiss me, as the soldier dismisses his charmer at the sound of the
+      bugle. I liked to think upon his obvious conviction that the libretto was
+      less than nothing compared to the music. I liked him to regard the whole
+      artistic productivity of my life as the engaging foible of a pretty woman.
+      I liked him to forget that I had brought him alive out of Paris. I liked
+      him to forget to mention marriage to me. In a word, he was Diaz, and I was
+      his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as I lay in bed I even tried to go to sleep, in my obedience, because
+      I knew he would wish it. But I could not easily sleep for anticipating his
+      triumph of the early future. His habits of composition were extremely
+      rapid. It might well occur that he would write the entire opera in a few
+      months, without at all sacrificing the piano. And naturally any operatic
+      manager would be loath to refuse an opera signed by Diaz. Villedo,
+      apparently so famous, would be sure to accept it, and probably would
+      produce it at once. And Diaz would have a double triumph, a dazzling and
+      gorgeous re-entry into the world. He might give his first recital in the
+      same week as the <i>première</i> of the opera. And thus his shame would
+      never be really known to the artistic multitude. The legend of a nervous
+      collapse could be insisted on, and the opera itself would form a
+      sufficient excuse for his retirement.... And I should be the secret cause
+      of all this glory&mdash;I alone! And no one would ever guess what Diaz
+      owed to me. Diaz himself would never appreciate it. I alone, withdrawn
+      from the common gaze, like a woman of the East, Diaz&rsquo; secret
+      fountain of strength and balm&mdash;I alone should be aware of what I had
+      done. And my knowledge would be enough for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I imagine I must have been dreaming when I felt a hand on my cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Magda, you aren&rsquo;t asleep, are you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was standing over me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, no!&rsquo; I answered, in a voice made feeble by sleep. And I looked
+      up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Put something on and come downstairs, will you?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What time is it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Oh, I don&rsquo;t know. One o&rsquo;clock.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve been working for over three hours, then!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes,&rsquo; he said proudly. &lsquo;Come along. I want to play you my
+      notion of the overture. It&rsquo;s only in the rough, but it&rsquo;s
+      there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;ve begun with the overture?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Why not, my child? Here&rsquo;s your dressing-gown. Which is the top end
+      of it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed him downstairs, and sat close by him at the piano, with one
+      limp hand on his shoulder. There was no light in the drawing-rooms, save
+      one candle on the piano. My slipper escaped off my bare foot. As Diaz
+      played he looked at me constantly, demanding my approval, my enthusiasm,
+      which I gave him from a full heart. I thought the music charming, and, of
+      course, as he played it...!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I shall only have three motives,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;That&rsquo;s the
+      La Vallière motive. Do you see the idea?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mean she limps?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Precisely. Isn&rsquo;t it delightful?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘She won&rsquo;t have to limp much, you know. She didn&rsquo;t.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Just the faintest suggestion. It will be delicious. I can see Morenita in
+      the part. Well, what do you think of it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not speak. His appeal, suddenly wistful, moved me so. I leaned
+      forward and kissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear girl!&rsquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he blew out the candle. He was beside himself with excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz,&rsquo; I cried, &lsquo;what&rsquo;s the matter with you? Do have a
+      little sense. And you&rsquo;ve made me lose my slipper.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I&rsquo;ll carry you upstairs,&rsquo; he replied gaily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint illumination came from the hall, so that we could just see each
+      other. He lifted me off the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No!&rsquo; I protested, laughing. &lsquo;And my slipper.... The servants!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Stuff!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a trifle in those arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The triumphal re-entry into the world has just begun, and exactly as Diaz
+      foretold. And the life of the forest is over. We have come to Paris, and
+      he has taken Paris, and already he is leaving it for other shores, and I
+      am to follow. At this moment, while I write because I have not slept and
+      cannot sleep, his train rolls out of St. Lazare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last night! How glorious! But he is no longer wholly mine. The world has
+      turned his face a little from my face....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if I had never before realized the dazzling significance of the
+      fame of Diaz. I had only once seen him in public. And though he conquered
+      in the Jubilee Hall of the Five Towns, his victory, personal and artistic,
+      at the Opera Comique, before an audience as exacting, haughty, and
+      experienced as any in Europe, was, of course, infinitely more striking&mdash;a
+      victory worthy of a Diaz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat alone and hidden at the back of a <i>baignoire</i> in the
+      auditorium. I had drawn up the golden grille, by which the occupants of a
+      <i>baignoire</i> may screen themselves from the curiosity of the <i>parterre</i>.
+      I felt like some caged Eastern odalisque, and I liked so to feel. I liked
+      to exist solely for him, to be mysterious, and to baffle the general gaze
+      in order to be more precious to him. Ah, how I had changed! How he had
+      changed me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Thursday, a subscription night, and, in addition, all Paris was in
+      the theatre, a crowded company of celebrities, of experts, and of
+      perfectly-dressed women. And no one knew who I was, nor why I was there.
+      The vogue of a musician may be universal, but the vogue of an English
+      writer is nothing beyond England and America. I had not been to a
+      rehearsal. I had not met Villedo, nor even the translator of my verse. I
+      had wished to remain in the background, and Diaz had not crossed me. Thus
+      I gazed through the bars of my little cell across the rows of bald heads,
+      and wonderful coiffures, and the waving arms of the conductor, and the
+      restless, gliding bows of the violinists, and saw a scene which was
+      absolutely strange and new to me. And it seemed amazing that these figures
+      which I saw moving and chanting with such grace in a palace garden,
+      authentic to the last detail of historical accuracy, were my La Vallière
+      and my Louis, and that this rich and coloured music which I heard was the
+      same that Diaz had sketched for me on the piano, from illegible scraps of
+      ruled paper, on the edge of the forest. The full miracle of operatic art
+      was revealed to me for the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when the curtain fell on the opening act, the intoxicating human
+      quality of an operatic success was equally revealed to me for the first
+      time. How cold and distant the success of a novelist compared to this! The
+      auditorium was suddenly bathed in bright light, and every listening face
+      awoke to life as from an enchantment, and flushed and smiled, and the
+      delicatest hands in France clapped to swell the mighty uproar that filled
+      the theatre with praise. Paris, upstanding on its feet, and leaning over
+      balconies and cheering, was charmed and delighted by the fable and the
+      music, in which it found nothing but the sober and pretty elegance that it
+      loves. And Paris applauded feverishly, and yet with a full sense of the
+      value of its applause&mdash;given there in the only French theatre where
+      the claque has been suppressed. And then the curtain rose, and La Vallière
+      and Louis tripped mincingly forward to prove that after all they were
+      Morenita and Montfériot, the darlings of their dear Paris, and utterly
+      content with their exclusively Parisian reputation. Three times they came
+      forward. And then the applause ceased, for Paris is not Naples, and it is
+      not Madrid, and the red curtain definitely hid the stage, and the theatre
+      hummed with animated chatter as elegant as Diaz&rsquo; music, and my ear,
+      that loves the chaste vivacity of the French tongue, was caressed on every
+      side by its cadences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘This is the very heart of civilization,&rsquo; I said to myself. &lsquo;And
+      even in the forest I could not breathe more freely.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stared up absently at Benjamin Constant&rsquo;s blue ceiling,
+      meretricious and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of
+      Paris, and my eyes moistened because the world is so beautiful in such
+      various ways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the door of the <i>baignoire</i> opened. It was Diaz himself who
+      appeared. He had not forgotten me in the excitements of the stage and the
+      dressing-rooms. He put his hand lightly on my shoulder, and I glanced at
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well?&rsquo; he murmured, and gave me a box of bonbons elaborately tied
+      with rich ribbons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I murmured, &lsquo;Well?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glory of his triumph was upon him. But he understood why my eyes were
+      wet, and his fingers moved soothingly on my shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You won&rsquo;t come round?&rsquo; he asked. &lsquo;Both Villedo and
+      Morenita are dying to meet you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shook my head, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You&rsquo;re satisfied?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘More than satisfied,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;The thing is wonderful.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I think it&rsquo;s rather charming,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;By the way, I&rsquo;ve
+      just had an offer from New York for it, and another from Rome.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded my appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You don&rsquo;t want anything?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Nothing, thanks,&rsquo; I said, opening the box of bonbons, &lsquo;except
+      these. Thanks so much for thinking of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Well&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he left me again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the second act the legend&mdash;has not the tale of La Vallière
+      acquired almost the quality of a legend?&mdash;grew in persuasiveness and
+      in magnificence. It was the hour of La Vallière&rsquo;s unwilling
+      ascendancy, and it foreboded also her fall. The situations seemed to me to
+      be poignantly beautiful, especially that in which La Vallière and
+      Montespan and the Queen found themselves together. And Morenita had
+      perceived my meaning with such a sure intuition. I might say that she
+      showed me what I had meant. Diaz, too, had given to my verse a voice than
+      which it appeared impossible that anything could be more appropriate. The
+      whole effect was astonishing, ravishing. And within me&mdash;far, far
+      within the recesses of my glowing heart&mdash;a thin, clear whisper spoke
+      and said that I, and I alone, was the cause of that beauty of sight and
+      sound. Not Morenita, and not Montfériot, not Diaz himself, but Magda, the
+      self-constituted odalisque, was its author. I had thought of it; I had
+      schemed it; I had fashioned it; I had evoked the emotion in it. The others
+      had but exquisitely embroidered my theme. Without me they must have been
+      dumb and futile. On my shoulders lay the burden and the glory. And though
+      I was amazed, perhaps naively, to see what I had done, nevertheless I had
+      done it&mdash;I! The entire opera-house, that complicated and various
+      machine, was simply a means to express me. And it was to my touch on their
+      heartstrings that the audience vibrated. With all my humility, how proud I
+      was&mdash;coldly and arrogantly proud, as only the artist can be! I wore
+      my humility as I wore my black gown. Even Diaz could not penetrate to the
+      inviolable place in my heart, where the indestructible egoism defied the
+      efforts of love to silence it. And yet people say there is nothing
+      stronger than love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the close of the act, while the ringing applause, much more
+      enthusiastic than before, gave certainty of a genuine and extraordinary
+      success, I could not help blushing. It was as if I was in danger of being
+      discovered as the primal author of all that fleeting loveliness, as if my
+      secret was bound to get about, and I to be forced from my seclusion in
+      order to receive the acclamations of Paris. I played nervously and
+      self-consciously with my fan, and I wrapped my humility closer round me,
+      until at length the tumult died away, and the hum of charming, eager
+      chatter reassured my ears again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz did not come. The entr&rsquo;acte stretched out long, and the chatter
+      lost some of its eagerness, and he did not come. Perhaps he could not
+      come. Perhaps he was too much engaged, too much preoccupied, to think of
+      the gallantry which he owed to his mistress. A man cannot always be
+      dreaming of his mistress. A mistress must be reconciled to occasional
+      neglect; she must console herself with chocolates. And they were
+      chocolates from Marquis&rsquo;s, in the Passage des Panoramas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he came, accompanied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A whirl of high-seasoned, laughing personalities invaded my privacy. Diaz,
+      smiling humorously, was followed by a man and a cloaked woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Dear lady,&rsquo; he said, with an intimate formality, &lsquo;I present
+      Mademoiselle Morenita and Monsieur Villedo. They insisted on seeing you.
+      Mademoiselle, Monsieur&mdash;Mademoiselle Peel.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stood up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘All our excuses,&rsquo; said Villedo, in a low, discreet voice, as he
+      carefully shut the door. &lsquo;All our excuses, madame. But it was
+      necessary that I should pay my respects&mdash;it was stronger than I.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he came forward, took my hand, and raised it to his lips. He is a
+      little finicking man, with a little gray beard, and the red rosette in his
+      button-hole, and a most consummate ease of manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Monsieur,&rsquo; I replied, &lsquo;you are too amiable. And you, madame.
+      I cannot sufficiently thank you both.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morenita rushed at me with a swift, surprising movement, her cloak
+      dropping from her shoulders, and taking both my hands, she kissed me
+      impulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You have genius,&rsquo; she said; &lsquo;and I am proud. I am ashamed
+      that I cannot read English; but I have the intention to learn in order to
+      read your books. Our Diaz says wonderful things of them.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She is a tall, splendidly-made, opulent creature, of my own age, born for
+      the footlights, with an extremely sweet and thrilling voice, and that
+      slight coarseness or exaggeration of gesture and beauty which is the
+      penalty of the stage. She did not in the least resemble a La Vallière as
+      she stood there gazing at me, with her gleaming, pencilled eyes and heavy,
+      scarlet lips. It seemed impossible that she could refine herself to a La
+      Vallière. But that woman is the drama itself. She would act no matter
+      what. She has always the qualities necessary to a rôle. And the gods have
+      given her green eyes, so that she may be La Vallière to the very life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I began to thank her for her superb performance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is I who should thank you,&rsquo; she answered. &lsquo;It will be my
+      greatest part. Never have I had so many glorious situations in a part. Do
+      you like my limp?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled, her head on one side. Success glittered in those orbs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You limp adorably,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘It is my profession to make compliments,&rsquo; Villedo broke in; and
+      then, turning to Morenita, &lsquo;<i>N&rsquo;est-ce pas, ma belle créature</i>?
+      But really&rsquo;&mdash;he turned to me again&mdash;&lsquo;but very
+      sincerely, all that there is of most sincerely, dear madame, your libretto
+      is made with a virtuosity astonishing. It is <i>du théâtre</i>. And with
+      that a charm, an emotion...! One would say&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it continued, the flattering stream, while Diaz listened, touched,
+      and full of pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Ah!&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;It is not I who deserve praise.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An electric bell trembled in the theatre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morenita picked up her cloak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Mon ami</i>,&rsquo; she warned Villedo. &lsquo;I must go. Diaz, <i>mon
+      petit</i>! you will persuade Mademoiselle Peel to come to the room of the
+      Directeur later. Madame, a few of us will meet there&mdash;is it not so,
+      Villedo? We shall count on you, madame. You have hidden yourself too long.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I glanced at Diaz, and he nodded. As a fact, I wished to refuse; but I
+      could not withstand the seduction of Morenita. She had a physical
+      influence which was unique in my experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I accept,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>A tout à l&rsquo;heure</i>, then,&rsquo; she twittered gaily; and they
+      left as they had come, Villedo affectionately toying with Morenita&rsquo;s
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz remained behind a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am so glad you didn&rsquo;t decline,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;You see,
+      here in this theatre Morenita is a queen. I wager she has never before in
+      all her life put herself out of the way as she has done for you to-night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Really!&rsquo; I faltered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, indeed, as I pondered over it, the politeness of these people
+      appeared to be marvellous, and so perfectly accomplished. Villedo, who has
+      made a European reputation and rejuvenated his theatre in a dozen years,
+      is doubtless, as he said, a professional maker of compliments. In his
+      position a man must be. But, nevertheless, last night&rsquo;s triumph is
+      officially and very genuinely Villedo&rsquo;s. While as for Morenita and
+      Diaz, the mere idea of these golden stars waiting on me, the librettist,
+      effacing themselves, rendering themselves subordinate at such a moment,
+      was fantastic. It passed the credible.... A Diaz standing silent and
+      deferential, while an idolized prima donna stepped down from her throne to
+      flatter me in her own temple! All that I had previously achieved of renown
+      seemed provincial, insular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Diaz took his own right place in the spacious salon of Villedo
+      afterwards, after all the applause had ceased, and the success had been
+      consecrated, and the enraptured audience had gone, and the lights were
+      extinguished in the silent auditorium. It is a room that seems to be
+      furnished with nothing but a grand piano and a large, flat writing-table
+      and a few chairs. On the walls are numberless signed portraits of singers
+      and composers, and antique playbills of the Opéra Comique, together with
+      strange sinister souvenirs of the great fires which have destroyed the
+      house and its patrons in the past. When Diaz led me in, only Villedo and
+      the principal artists and Pouvillon, the conductor, were present.
+      Pouvillon, astonishingly fat, was sitting on the table, idly swinging the
+      electric pendant over his head; while Morenita occupied Villedo&rsquo;s
+      armchair, and Villedo talked to Montfériot and another man in a corner.
+      But a crowd of officials of the theatre ventured on Diaz&rsquo; heels. And
+      then came Monticelli, the <i>première danseuse</i>, in a coat and skirt,
+      and then some of her rivals. And as the terrible Director did not protest,
+      the room continued to fill until it was full to the doors, where stood a
+      semicircle of soiled, ragged scene-shifters and a few fat old women, who
+      were probably dressers. Who could protest on such a night? The democracy
+      of a concerted triumph reigned. Everybody was joyous, madly happy.
+      Everybody had done something; everybody shared the prestige, and the rank
+      and file might safely take generals by the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Diaz was then the centre of attraction. It was recognised that he had
+      entered that sphere from a wider one, bringing with him a radiance
+      brighter than he found there. He was divine last night. All felt that he
+      was divine. He spoke to everyone with an admirable modesty, gaily, his
+      eyes laughing. Several women kissed him, including Morenita. Not that I
+      minded. In the theatre the code is different, coarser, more banal. He
+      alone raised this crowd above its usual level and gave it distinction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Someone suggested that, as the piano was there, he should play, and the
+      demand ran from mouth to mouth. Villedo, appreciating its audacity, made a
+      gesture to indicate that such a thing could not be asked. But Diaz
+      instantly said that, if it would give pleasure, he would play with
+      pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sat down to the piano, and looked round, smiling, and the room was
+      hushed in a moment, and each face was turned towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘What?&rsquo; he ejaculated. And then, as no definite recommendation was
+      offered, he said: &lsquo;Do you wish that I improvise?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea was accepted with passionate, noisy enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cold perspiration broke out over my whole body. I must have turned very
+      pale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are not ill, madame?&rsquo; asked that ridiculous fop, Montfèriot,
+      who had been presented to me, and was whispering the most fatuous
+      compliments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘No, I thank you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact was that Diaz, since his retirement, had not yet played to anyone
+      except myself. This was his first appearance. I was afraid for him. I
+      trembled for him. I need not have done. He was absolutely master of his
+      powers. His fingers announced, quite simply, one of the most successful
+      airs from <i>La Vallière</i>, and then he began to decorate it with an
+      amazing lacework of variations, and finished with a bravura display such
+      as no pianist could have surpassed. The performance, marvellous in itself,
+      was precisely suited to that audience, and it electrified the audience; it
+      electrified even me. Diaz fought his way through kisses and embraces to
+      Villedo, who stood on his toes and wept and put his arms round Diaz&rsquo;
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Cher maître</i>,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;you overwhelm us!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You are too kind, all of you,&rsquo; said Diaz. &lsquo;I must ask
+      permission to retire. I have to conduct Mademoiselle Peel to her hotel,
+      and there is much for me to do during the night. You know I start very
+      early to-morrow.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘<i>Hélas!</i> Morenita sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had blushed. Decidedly I behaved like a girl last night. But, indeed,
+      the new, swift realization, as Diaz singled me out of that multitude, that
+      after all he utterly belonged to me, that he was mine alone, was more than
+      I could bear with equanimity. I was the proudest woman in the universe. I
+      scorned the lot of all other women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The adieux were exchanged, and there were more kisses. &lsquo;<i>Au
+      revoir! Bon voyage</i>! Much success over there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The majority of these good, generous souls were in tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Villedo opened a side-door, and we escaped into a corridor, only Morenita
+      and one or two others accompanying us to the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And on the pavement a carpet had been laid. The electric brougham was
+      waiting. I gathered up my skirt and sprang in. Diaz followed, smiling at
+      me. He put his head out of the window and said a few words. Morenita blew
+      a kiss. Villedo bowed profoundly. The carriage moved in the direction of
+      the boulevard.... I had carried him off. Oh, the exquisite dark intimacy
+      of the interior of that smooth-rolling brougham! When, after the theatre,
+      a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory in
+      the fact that she is his? Is it not the most delicious of avowals? There
+      is something in the enforced bend of one&rsquo;s head as one steps in. And
+      when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wondered idly what Morenita and Villedo thought of our relations. They
+      must surely guess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went down the boulevard and by the Rue Royale into the Place de la
+      Concorde, where vehicles flitted mysteriously in a maze of lights under
+      the vast dome of mysterious blue. And Paris, in her incomparable toilette
+      of a June night, seemed more than ever the passionate city of love that
+      she is, recognising candidly, with the fearless intellectuality of the
+      Latin temperament, that one thing only makes life worth living. How soft
+      was the air! How languorous the pose of the dim figures that passed us
+      half hidden in other carriages! And in my heart was the lofty joy of work
+      done, definitely accomplished, and a vista of years of future pleasure. My
+      happiness was ardent and yet calm&mdash;a happiness beyond my hopes,
+      beyond what a mortal has the right to dream of. Nothing could impair it,
+      not even Diaz&rsquo; continued silence as to a marriage between us, not
+      even the imminent brief separation that I was to endure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My child,&rsquo; said Diaz suddenly, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m very hungry. I&rsquo;ve
+      never been so hungry.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You surely didn&rsquo;t forget to have your dinner?&rsquo; I exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Yes, I did,&rsquo; he admitted like a child; &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve just
+      remembered.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Diaz!&rsquo; I pouted, and for some strange reason my bliss was
+      intensified, ‘you are really terrible! What can I do with you? You will
+      eat before you leave me. I must see to that. We can get something for you
+      at the hotel, perhaps.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Suppose we go to a supper restaurant?&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without waiting for my reply, he seized the dangling end of the
+      speaking-tube and spoke to the driver, and we swerved round and regained
+      the boulevard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the private room of a great, glittering restaurant, one of a long
+      row of private rooms off a corridor, I ate strawberries and cream and
+      sipped champagne while Diaz went through the entire menu of a supper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Your eyes look sad,&rsquo; he murmured, with a cigar between his teeth.
+      &lsquo;What is it? We shall see each other again in a fortnight.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was to resume his career by a series of concerts in the United States.
+      A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents,
+      had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and
+      fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played
+      at no concert before he played in New York. And in order to reach New York
+      in time for the first concert, it was imperative that he should catch the
+      <i>Touraine</i> at Havre. I was to follow in a few days by a
+      Hamburg-American liner. Diaz had judged it more politic that we should not
+      travel together. In this he was undoubtedly right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I smiled proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘I am both sad and happy,&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved his chair until it touched mine, and put his arm round my neck,
+      and brought my face close to his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘Look at me,&rsquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I looked into his large, splendid eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘You mustn&rsquo;t think,&rsquo; he whispered, &lsquo;that, because I don&rsquo;t
+      talk about it, I don&rsquo;t feel that I owe everything to you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I let my face fall on his breast. I knew I had flushed to the ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ‘My poor boy,&rsquo; I sobbed, &lsquo;if you talk about that I shall never
+      forgive you.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was heaven itself. No woman has ever been more ecstatically happy than
+      I was then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rang for the bill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We parted at the door of my hotel. In the carriage we had exchanged one
+      long, long kiss. At the last moment I wanted to alter the programme, go
+      with him to his hotel to assist in his final arrangements, and then see
+      him off at early morning at the station. But he refused. He said he could
+      not bear to part from me in public. Perhaps it was best so. Just as I
+      turned away he put a packet into my hand. It contained seven banknotes for
+      ten thousand francs each, money that it had been my delight to lend him
+      from time to time. Foolish, vain, scrupulous boy! I knew not where he had
+      obtained&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      It is now evening. Diaz is on the sea. While writing those last lines I
+      was attacked by fearful pains in the right side, and cramp, so that I
+      could not finish. I can scarcely write now. I have just seen the old
+      English doctor. He says I have appendicitis, perhaps caused by pips of
+      strawberries. And that unless I am operated on at once&mdash;And that even
+      if&mdash;He is telephoning to the hospital. Diaz! No; I shall come safely
+      through the affair. Without me Diaz would fall again. I see that now. And
+      I have had no child. I must have a child. Even that girl in the blue <i>peignoir</i>
+      had a&mdash;Chance is a strange&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Extract translated from &lsquo;Le Temps,&rsquo; the Paris Evening Paper</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OBSEQUIES OF MISS PELL (<i>sic</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obsequies of Mademoiselle Pell, the celebrated English poetess, and
+      author of the libretto of <i>La Vallière</i>, were celebrated this morning
+      at eleven o&rsquo;clock in the Church of St. Honoré d&rsquo;Eylau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief mourners were the doctor who assisted at the last moments of
+      Mademoiselle Pell, and M. Villedo, director of the Opéra-Comique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the wreaths we may cite those of the Association of Dramatic
+      Artists, of Madame Morenita, of the management of the Opéra-Comique, and
+      of the artists of the Opéra-Comique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mass was said by a vicar of the parish, and general absolution given by M.
+      le Curé Marbeau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the service there was given, under the direction of M. Lêtang,
+      chapel-master, the <i>Funeral March</i> of Beethoven, the <i>Kyrie</i> of
+      Neidermeyer, the <i>Pie Jesu</i> of Stradella, the <i>Ego Sum</i> of
+      Gounod, the <i>Libera Me</i> of S. Rousseau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      M. Deep officiated at the organ.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the ceremony the remains were transported to the cemetery of
+      Père-Lachaise and cremated.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <pre>
+
+
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+</pre>
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