e was not going to talk about it. In the fierceness of his
mortal moment he was impatient of everything that for her held
immorality.

"We were so happy then," she said. "Why can't we be happy now?"

"I've told you why."

"Yes, and I can't bear it. When I think of you----"

He looked at her with the lucid gaze of the psychologist, of the
physician who knew her malady.

"Don't think of me," he said. His eyes seemed to say, "That would be
worst of all."

And so he left her.

II

He really did not want her to think of him, any more than he wanted to
think intensely and continuously of her. What he had admired in her so
much was her deep loyalty to their compact, the way she had let him
alone and insisted on his letting her alone.

This desire of Tanqueray's for detachment was not so much an attitude as
an instinct. His genius actually throve on his seclusion, and absorption
in life would have destroyed its finest qualities. It had no need of
sustained and frequent intercourse with men and women. For it worked
with an incredible rapidity. It took at a touch and with a glance of the
eye the thing it wanted. It was an eye that unstripped, a hand that
plunged under all coverings to the essential nakedness.

His device was, "Look and let go." He had never allowed himself to hold
on or be held on to; for thus you were dragged down and swamped; you
were stifled by the stuff you worked in. Your senses, he maintained,
were no good if you couldn't see a thing at the first glance and feel it
with the first touch. Vision and contact prolonged removed you so many
degrees from the reality; and what you saw that way was not a bit of use
to you. He denied perversely that genius was two-sexed, or that it was
even essentially a virile thing. The fruitful genius was feminine,
rather, humble and passive in its attitude to life. It yearned
perpetually for the embrace, the momentary embrace of the real. But no
more. All that it wanted, all that it could deal with was the germ, the
undeveloped thing; the growing and shaping and bringing forth must be
its own. The live thing, the thing that kicked, was never produced in
any other way. Genius in a great realist was itself flesh and blood. It
was only the little men that were the plagiarists of life; only the
sterile imaginations that adopted the already born, and bargained with
experience to do their work for them.

And yet there was no more assiduous devotee of experience th