h
fame, tired of life, a remote and tragic figure among men--the trail
of Byron is over us all. That was the moment for the great and fatal
passion, and the woman was all that a malignant fate could devise;
not only to inspire the passion, but to transform a frame of mind
arbitrarily imagined into a sickening reality. From a romantic
solitary being I became a prosaic outcast. Nor could I recall anything
in the world I had left worth the sacrifice of the magician that gave
me brief spells of happiness and oblivion. Nobody pretended that it
injured my work, and I remained in the pit."

"And your self-respect? You were satisfied? Oh surely--you
looked--when I first saw you----"

"I loathed myself, of course. My brain was unaffected, was it not? I
abhorred my body, and would willingly have slashed it off could I have
gone on writing without it. Either I compelled my soul to stand aside,
or I was made on that plan--I cannot tell; but my inner life was
never polluted by my visible madness. I have been vile but I have
never had a vile thought. I fancy you understand this. And when I am
writing my ego does not exist at all--my worst enemies have never
accused me of the egoism common to poets. I have lived in another
realm, where I have remembered nothing of this. Had it been otherwise
no doubt I should have put it all at an end long ago."

Anne had averted her eyes, caught in one of those inner crises where
the faculties are almost suspended. She faltered out: "And after--when
I come back next year, shall I find you like this?"

He paused so long before replying that she moved with uncontrollable
excitement, and as she did so his eyes caught hers and held them.

The intensity of his gaze did not waver but he said, unsteadily, until
his own excitement mastered him, "I have assured myself again and
again that I never should dare to tell you that I loved you; that I
was not fit to approach you; that I must let you go, and try to live
with the memory of you. But now I remember nothing but that I love
you. I can speak of what I have been, but I cannot recall it. I feel
nothing but that I am a man in the restored vigour of youth in the
presence of the woman I want. If love is egoistical then I am rampant
this moment with egoism. If I could have the bliss of marrying you I
never should return to the past even in thought. I am a poet no
longer. I am nothing but a lover. I remember nothing, want nothing,
but the perfection of huma