journeys for her.

But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There

was something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment;

the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.

A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously

to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute

of chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one

or other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.

We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K.

C., who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of

Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who

was in a state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a

game of conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was

impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration

possible in a rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember,

to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of

Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the

Botanic Gardens she got almost her only chance with me.

"Last months at Oxford," she said.

"And then?" I asked.

"I'm coming to London," she said.

"To write?"

She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that

quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to

work with you. Why shouldn't I?"

Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.

I seem to remembermyself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a

handful of papers-galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose-on

my lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and

all that it might mean to me.

It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so

elusive as a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her

gripped me, fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing

filled me with pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no

doubt that her value in my life was tremendous. It made it none the

less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was

transitory, and bound to go out of my life again. It is no good

trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is

gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a

multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich

curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never properly

weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear

preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much

deliberate intention I hide from myself in this affair.

Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the

train: "Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now." I

can't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind…

If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I

could have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage

and before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had

been incidents with other people, flashes of temptation-no telling

is possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and

passion would not have taken me. But between myself and Isabel

things were incurably complicated by the intellectual sympathy we

had, the jolly march of our minds together. That has always

mattered enormously. I should have wanted her company nearly as

badly if she had been some crippled old lady; we would have hunted

shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two men would never have had

the patience and readiness for one another we two had. I had never

for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly sure of

understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully. She

gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious

effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that

it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners

of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to

explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice

heard speaking to any one-heard speaking in another room-pleased

my ears.

She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent

the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of

all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to

London for the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady

Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it became clear she

wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every

one talking by taking a flat near Victoria and installing as her

sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a

scholastic agency. She began writing, not in that copious flood the

undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly

the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms,

developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line. She

was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was disapproved of, but

she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the