of it, and when he
sat down to write next morning (a little study had been arranged for
him), it was the first thought that stirred in him.

"How fearfully unpleasant!--and after having been married for nearly
two years! I could not do it. If I were married--even if I were to
marry Lily, I should insist on having separate rooms. Even with
separate rooms marriage is intolerable. How much better to see her
sometimes, sigh for her from afar, and so preserve one's ideal.
Married! One day I should be sure to surprise her washing herself;
and I know of no more degrading spectacle than that of a woman
washing herself over a basin. Degas painted it once. I'd give
anything to have that picture."

But he could not identify Lily as forming part of that picture; his
imagination did not help him, and he could only see her staid and
gracious, outside all the gross materialism of life. He felt that
Lily would never lose her dignity and loveliness, which in her were
one, and in his mind she ever stood like a fair statue out of reach
of the mud and the contumely of the common street; and ashamed, an
unsuccessful iconoclast, he could not do otherwise than kneel and
adore.

And when at the end of a week he received an invitation to a ball
where he thought she would be, he must perforce obey, and go with
tremulous heart. She was engaged in a quadrille that passed to and
fro beneath blue tapestry curtains, and he noticed the spray of
lilies of the valley in her bodice, so emblematic did they seem of
her. Beneath the blue curtain she stood talking to her partner after
the dance; and he did not go to speak to her, but remained looking.
They only danced together twice; and that evening was realized by him
in a strangely intense and durable perception of faint scent and
fluent rhythm. The sense of her motion, of her frailness, lingered in
his soul ever afterwards. And he remembered ever afterwards the
moments he spent with her in a distant corner--the palm, the gold of
the screen, the movement of her white skirt as she sat down. All was,
as it were, bitten upon his soul--exquisite etchings! Even the pauses
in the conversation were remembered; pauses full of mute affection;
pauses full of thought unexpressed, falling in sharp chasms of
silence. In such hours and in such pauses is the essence of our
lives, the rest is adjunct and decoration. He watched, fearing each
man that looked through the doorway might claim her for the next
dance. His