_ be certain of yourself. And yet--I suspect the trouble with you
is that _your_ dream is divorced from reality."

He stared in amazement at the young girl who thus interpreted him to
herself. At this rate he saw no end to her powers of divination. There
were depths in his life where her innocence could not penetrate, but
she had seized on the essential. It had been as she had said. That
first draft was the work of the young scholar poet, the adorer of
classic form, the dreamer who found in his dreams escape from the
grossness of his own lower nature and from the brutalities of the
world he lived in. A great neo-classic drama was to be his protest
against modernity and actuality. Then came an interval of a year in
which he learnt many things that are not to be found in books, or
adequately expressed through neo-classic drama; and the thing was
finished and re-written at a time when, as she had said, something
had happened to him; when that same gross actual world was making its
claims felt through all his senses. And he was suffering now the deep
melancholy of perspicuous youth, unable to part with its dreams but
aware that its dreams are hopelessly divorced from reality. That was
so; but how on earth did she know it?

"It's hardly a divorce," he said, laughing. "I think it's separation
by mutual consent."

"That's a pity," said she, "life is so lovable."

"I don't always find it either lovable or loving. But then it's life
in a fifth-rate boarding-house in Bloomsbury--if you know what that
is."

She did not know what that was, and her silence suggested that she
conceived it to be something too unpleasant to discuss with him.

"I work eight hours a day in my father's shop--"

"And when your work is done?"

"I go back to the boarding-house and dine."

"And after dinner?"

Mr. Rickman became visibly embarrassed. "Oh, after dinner, there are
the streets, and the theatres, and--and things."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing. Except a club I belong to."

"That's something, isn't it? You make friends."

"I don't know anybody in it, except Mr. Jewdwine; and I don't really
know him. It's the shop, you know. You forget the shop."

"No I don't forget it; but I wish you would. If only you could get
away from it, away from everything. If you could get away from London
altogether for a while."

"If--if? I shall never get away."

"Why not? I've been thinking it over. I wonder whether things could
not be made a little