very detailed account. In the first
place, dealing as they do with living people, I have thought it
better, after consultation with the friends of both, to leave the
outlines of the story rather vague; and secondly, there are great
gaps and deficiencies in diaries and letters, which, though I believe
I can supply, knowing what I do of the circumstances, I hardly like
to fill in in a narrative of fact.

He took a dose, as I have already said, of the London season. "Those
six weeks," he said, "absolutely knocked me up; my friends told me,
among other things, that my physiognomy, being of a grave and gloomy
cast, was of a kind that was not suitable to a festive occasion; and
so I used to come home at night with my jaws positively aching with
the effort of a perpetually fatuous grin."

The following extract, which I have selected from one of his letters
of this period, will give a good picture of his mind:

"I think that two of the things that move me most, not to sadness nor
indignation, but to those vague tumultuous feelings for which we
have, I think, no name, but which were formerly called melancholy,
are these:

"To come up-stairs after a hot London banquet, where you have been
sitting, talking the poorest trash, between two empty, worldly women;
and then, perhaps, listening to stories that are dull, or worse, and
see dullness personified in every one of the twelve faces that stare
at you with such sodden respectability through the cigarette smoke;
and then, I say, to come up-stairs, and see moving about among the
knowing selfish people a child with hair like gold thread, and
something of the regretful innocence of heaven in her eyes and
motions. If you can get her to talk to you, so much the better for
you; but if you or she are shy, as generally happens, to watch her
is something. God knows the insidious process by which she will be
transformed, step by step, into one of those godless fine ladies; for
it makes me inclined to pray that anything may happen to her first
that may hinder that development.

"The other thing is, under the same circumstances, to sit down and
hear some rippling melody of Bach's, a tender gavotte or a delicate
rapid fugue, just as it stole on to the paper in that quaint German
garden with the clipped yew-hedges and the tall summer-house in the
corner, in the master's pointed handwriting, calling down by his
magic wand the spirits of the air to aid him in the perfecting of the
exquisite