ove, of those sonnets which ... You know
there's a volume of them. My edition has the portrait of the author at
thirty, and when I showed it to Mr Powell the other day he exclaimed:
"Wonderful! One would think this the portrait of Captain Anthony
himself if..." I wanted to know what that if was. But Powell could not
say. There was something--a difference. No doubt there was--in
fineness perhaps. The father, fastidious, cerebral, morbidly shrinking
from all contacts, could only sing in harmonious numbers of what the son
felt with a dumb and reckless sincerity.

Possessed by most strong men's touching illusion as to the frailness of
women and their spiritual fragility, it seemed to Anthony that he would
be destroying, breaking something very precious inside that being. In
fact nothing less than partly murdering her. This seems a very extreme
effect to flow from Fyne's words. But Anthony, unaccustomed to the
chatter of the firm earth, never stayed to ask himself what value these
words could have in Fyne's mouth. And indeed the mere dark sound of
them was utterly abhorrent to his native rectitude, sea-salted, hardened
in the winds of wide horizons, open as the day.

He wished to blurt out his indignation but she regarded him with an
expectant air which checked him. His visible discomfort made her
uneasy. He could only repeat "Oh yes. You are perfectly honest. You
might have, but I dare say you are right. At any rate you have never
said anything to me which you didn't mean."

"Never," she whispered after a pause.

He seemed distracted, choking with an emotion she could not understand
because it resembled embarrassment, a state of mind inconceivable in
that man.

She wondered what it was she had said; remembering that in very truth
she had hardly spoken to him except when giving him the bare outline of
her story which he seemed to have hardly had the patience to hear,
waving it perpetually aside with exclamations of horror and anger, with
fiercely sombre mutters "Enough! Enough!" and with alarming starts from
a forced stillness, as though he meant to rush out at once and take
vengeance on somebody. She was saying to herself that he caught her
words in the air, never letting her finish her thought. Honest.
Honest. Yes certainly she had been that. Her letter to Mrs Fyne had
been prompted by honesty. But she reflected sadly that she had never
known what to say to him. That perhaps she had nothing to