nimportant background, and for the first time I saw a meaning
in the stale phrase of a picture's walking out of its frame. For,
after all, most people _are_ just that to us: pictures, furniture, the
inanimate accessories of our little island-area of sensation. And then
sometimes one of these graven images moves and throws out live filaments
toward us, and the line they make draws us across the world as the
moon-track seems to draw a boat across the water....

"There she stood; and as this queer sensation came over me I felt
that she was looking steadily at me, that her eyes were voluntarily,
consciously resting on me with the weight of the very question I was
asking.

"I went over and joined her, and she turned and walked with me into the
music-room. Earlier in the evening some one had been singing, and
there were low lights there, and a few couples still sitting in those
confidential corners of which Mrs. Cumnor has the art; but we were under
no illusion as to the nature of these presences. We knew that they were
just painted in, and that the whole of life was in us two, flowing back
and forward between us. We talked, of course; we had the attitudes, even
the words, of the others: I remember her telling me her plans for the
spring and asking me politely about mine! As if there were the least
sense in plans, now that this thing had happened!

"When we went back into the drawing-room I had said nothing to her that
I might not have said to any other woman of the party; but when we shook
hands I knew we should meet the next day--and the next....

"That's the way, I take it, that Nature has arranged the beginning of
the great enduring loves; and likewise of the little epidermal flurries.
And how is a man to know where he is going?

"From the first my feeling for Paulina Trant seemed to me a grave
business; but then the Enemy is given to producing that illusion. Many
a man--I'm talking of the kind with imagination--has thought he was
seeking a soul when all he wanted was a closer view of its tenement. And
I tried--honestly tried--to make myself think I was in the latter case.
Because, in the first place, I didn't, just then, want a big disturbing
influence in my life; and because I didn't want to be a dupe; and
because Paulina Trant was not, according to hearsay, the kind of woman
for whom it was worth while to bring up the big batteries....

"But my resistance was only half-hearted. What I really felt--_all_ I
really