ll
from the start, with its devilish, delicate intricacy, its subtle slow
enchantment spinning itself out of him, out of his own state of mind and
body, rather than out of the spell cast over him, as though a sort of
fatal force, long dormant, were working up again to burst into dark
flower....

II

Yes, it had begun within him over a year ago, with a queer unhappy
restlessness, a feeling that life was slipping, ebbing away within reach
of him, and his arms never stretched out to arrest it. It had begun with
a sort of long craving, stilled only when he was working hard--a craving
for he knew not what, an ache which was worst whenever the wind was
soft.

They said that about forty-five was a perilous age for a man--especially
for an artist. All the autumn of last year he had felt this vague misery
rather badly. It had left him alone most of December and January, while
he was working so hard at his group of lions; but the moment that was
finished it had gripped him hard again. In those last days of January
he well remembered wandering about in the parks day after day, trying
to get away from it. Mild weather, with a scent in the wind! With what
avidity he had watched children playing, the premature buds on the
bushes, anything, everything young--with what an ache, too, he had been
conscious of innumerable lives being lived round him, and loves loved,
and he outside, unable to know, to grasp, to gather them; and all
the time the sands of his hourglass running out! A most absurd and
unreasonable feeling for a man with everything he wanted, with work that
he loved, quite enough money, and a wife so good as Sylvia--a feeling
that no Englishman of forty-six, in excellent health, ought for a moment
to have been troubled with. A feeling such as, indeed, no Englishman
ever admitted having--so that there was not even, as yet, a Society for
its suppression. For what was this disquiet feeling, but the sense that
he had had his day, would never again know the stir and fearful joy
of falling in love, but only just hanker after what was past and gone!
Could anything be more reprehensible in a married man?

It was--yes--the last day of January, when, returning from one of those
restless rambles in Hyde Park, he met Dromore. Queer to recognize a
man hardly seen since school-days. Yet unmistakably, Johnny Dromore,
sauntering along the rails of Piccadilly on the Green Park side, with
that slightly rolling gait of his thin, horsema