WE sat on chairs in the sun, and after we had been silent a long while, she began to do what women will never cease doing, so wise men say, as long as men say they love them, to define what the love of a man meant to a woman, and to explain the love of a man. She said that that man was wise who had said that love was like religion, and must be done well or not at all, but that she had never yet found in any man sincere love and delicacy, for there was always something coarse, some little note which jarred, some movement of the mind and body maladroit, in a man who is shown a woman's love. "When men love and are not loved," she said, "often they kept their grace and pride, and women are proud to be loved by such men—even faithfully for more than ten years; but when men are loved and are confident, then they seem to lose delicacy, to think that love breaks down all barriers between man and woman; that love is a vase of iron, unbreakable, and not, as it is, a vase of the most delicate and brittle pottery, to be broken to pieces by the least touch of a careless hand. They seem to think that the state of love stands at the end of a great striving; they do not realise that it is only the beginning, and that the striving must never cease, for without striving there is no love, but only content. But they do not see that; they insist on spoiling love, breaking the vase with stupid, unconscious hands; and when it breaks they are surprised, and they say that love is a fickle thing and will stand no tests, and that women are the very devil. Always they spoil love; it comes and finds them helpless, puzzling whether to clothe themselves entirely in reserve or whether to be entirely naked in brutality; and generally they compromise, and, physically and mentally, walk about in their shirts."

"As you say that," I said, "you remind me of that woman, Mrs. Millamant, in Congreve's play, 'The Way of the World.' Do you remember that scene between her and Mirabell, when she attaches 'provisos' to her consent to marry him? She says, 'We must be as strange as though we had been married a long time, and as well bred as though we had never been married at all.' And it seems to me that she was right, and that you are right, Shelmerdene. Nowadays there is a reaction against convention, and such people make life unclean. They talk about being 'natural,' and succeed only in being boorish; they think that the opposite of 'natural' is 'artificial,' but that is absurd, for why was the title 'gentleman' invented if not for the man who could put a presentable gloss on his primitive, 'natural' instincts in polite company? There must always be etiquette in life and in love, and there is no friendship or passion which can justify familiarity trying to break down the barriers which hide every man and every woman from the outside world. Men grow mentally limp with their careless way of living; and life is like walking on the Embankment at three o'clock in the morning, when London is very silent: and if you lounge along as your feet take you, your hands deep in your pockets, being 'natural,' you will see very little but the general darkness of the night and the patch of pavement on which your eyes are glued: but if you walk upright, your mind taut and rigid as it always must be except when asleep, then you will see many things, how the river looks strange beneath the stars, the mystery of Battersea Park which might, in the darkness, be an endless forest of distantly murmuring trees, the figure of a policeman by the bridge, a light here and there in the windows of the houses in Cheyne Walk, which might mean birth or death or nothing, but is food for your mind because you are living and interested in all living things. It was probably some wise philosopher, an Epicurean, and not a buffoon, as is supposed, who first uttered that saying which is now become farcical, that 'distance lends enchantment.' For he did not mean the material distance of yards and furlongs and miles, but the distance of necessary strangeness, of inevitable mystery, and of a rigid mental etiquette, the good manners of the mind. And that is why Henry James was a great man, and with a great propaganda. He was subtle with his propaganda—an ugly word which can be used for other things than the bawling of tiresome men in this Park on Sunday afternoons—for he could do nothing without an almost obvious subtlety; but it is there in all his work, a teaching for all who care to be taught. In the world of Henry James, for he was more fastidious than Meredith or Mr. Hardy and would have nothing to do with this world as it was, but made one of his own, in this world the men and women are not just men and women, with thoughts and doings bluntly and coarsely expressed as in real life; but he showed them to be subtle creatures, something higher than clever animals, with different shades of meaning in every word—what fool was it who said that a word spoken must be a word meant!—with barriers of reserve and strangeness between each person; and their conversation is not just a string of words, but a thing of different values, in which the mind of the speaker and the listener is alive and rigid to every current of refined thought which is often unexpressed but understood. I think 'thin' is the right epithet for the minds of James' characters; and the difference between them and ordinary people is that within us there is a sort of sieve between the mind and the mouth, or in whatever way we choose to be articulate, which, unlike ordinary sieves, allows only the coarse grains to drop through and be given out, but keeps the subtleties and the refinement to itself; but between the minds and the articulation of James' people there are no sieves, and the inner subtleties and shades are given expression. There is a strangeness, a kind of mental tautness, a never-ceasing etiquette, about them all."

But then I laughed, and when she asked me why I did not go on, I said that I had suddenly realised that I had strayed from the subject, and that whereas she had begun to talk of love I had ended by talking of Henry James. "It is all about the same thing," she said, "for we are both grumbling at that mental limpness which makes people think that they need make no effort, but that life will go on around them just the same. And that is why I think one of the most dreadful sights is a man asleep. No one should see another person asleep; it seems to me the most private thing in the world, and if I were a man and a woman had watched me as I lay asleep, I should want to kill her so that she should not go about and tell people how I had looked as I lay stupidly unconscious of everything around me. Only once I have seen a man asleep, and that was the end of a perfect love affair. I had suddenly gone to see him in his chambers, and when his man showed me into his room I found him lying there on the sofa, with his head thrown back on a cushion, sleeping. His man said that he must be very tired as he had been working all night, and that it would be kind of me not to wake him. I waited in the room for an hour, trying not to look at him but to read a book, but his breathing filled the room and I could not take my eyes away from him; and at the end of an hour I felt that my love had gone from me minute by minute as I had looked at him, and that now I might just as well get up and go away, for I did not care any longer if he was asleep or awake. So I went away, but I do not know if he woke up as the door closed behind me."

"And did you ever tell him why you had ceased to love him?" I asked.

"I couldn't do that," she said, "because if he had not understood me I should have hated him, and I do not like hating people whom I have loved. But now I dine with him from time to time, and I can see that he is still wondering how it was that on Monday I loved him and on Tuesday I didn't."

As we walked through the Park towards the Park Lane gates, it seemed to me wonderful that this day, one among many days, should already be passing, irrevocably, and that what we had said and what we had felt as we sat on chairs in the sun would never be repeated, would never come again except perhaps in a different way and with different surprises. And when I asked her if she felt the happiness of the afternoon, she laughed slightly and said that she liked the Park this spring afternoon. "It is perfect now," she said, "but when we come here in a month's or two months' time it will be too warm to sit in the sun and talk about love and Henry James, and in the autumn we will sit down for a moment and shiver a little and pity the brown leaves falling, and in the winter we will walk quickly through because it will be too cold; and then in Park Lane you will put me into a taxi and stand by the door with your hat in your hand, and say good-bye. For the seasons will have gone round, and we shall each have given what the other will take, and when I look at you you will be different, and when you look at me you will not see, as you see now, my eyes looking far away over your shoulder, and you will not wonder what it is that I am looking at. For then, as you stand by the door of the taxi and smile your good-bye at me, the end will have come, and there will be nothing to look at in the distance over your shoulders. And next year you will be an 'old friend,' and I shall ring you up and say that I am very sorry I can't lunch and walk in the Park with you that day because an Oxfordish young man has fallen in love with me, and it will be amusing to see what sort of lunch he will order when he is in love.

"But is a rose less beautiful because it is sure to die?" she said.

But the winter she spoke of was not of the seasons, for it rushed incontinently in upon us between the summer and the autumn, and I, too, was delicately added to the sedate statuary of Shelmerdene's "old friends...."

And now I am in this strange library whose rows of books stare so unfamiliarly at me. The table at which I write is by the big French windows, and I must be careful to keep my elbows from sprawling as they would, for everything is covered with dust, and if I were fussy and wiped it away I should raise a great cloud of it around my head.... All is quiet and leisurely this morning. Outside there is no sun or mildness to make me restless and self-conscious about my laziness; it is one of those days on which one need not think of doing anything which will be "good for one," and until about tea-time the outside world will be better to look at than to breathe. For the windows show me a very dark, wet-laden garden, and the steady rain falling among the last leaves of the trees and their myriad dead comrades on the grass and gravel makes that "swish" which comes so coolly and pleasantly to ears which need not be wet with it. But at about five o'clock, if the rain has stopped by then, I shall go out and walk about the garden for an hour or so; I shall walk to the top of the Divvil Mound, which lies above half the county to the west and, on a fine day, gives your eyes a rugged length of the distant Cheviots, and there I shall look up to the sky and draw in long draughts of the fresh rain-scented air, and feel that I shall never be ill again in all my life; and as I walk back under the trees the wet will drip on to me and I shall splash myself here and there; but I shall not swear, for my clothes are done for the day, and when I get in I shall have a bath and change, and feel all new and clean for whatever the evening may bring.

Beside me now is an envelope with an American stamp, and the vaguely woebegone look which readdressed envelopes have; for it followed me here some ten days ago from London, reaching me the same morning that I sat down to write this (for it has taken me more than a week of long mornings to write these few thousand words) which was at first to have been an essay on London, but seems now to have fallen into the state of a personal confession. Many times I have taken out this letter and re-read it, for it is a strange letter, such a one as a man may receive only once in his life. This letter needs no answer, for it is dead like the person who sent it; and that the sender should not now care if I read it or not gives me a queer feeling of triviality; for in her letter she asks me to write back, not knowing then that a letter from a dead person is the only sort one need not answer without blame or reproach.

The day has long passed when, if you felt inclined, you could moralise on death and the frailty of human life to your heart's content and be sure of a hearing. I am sorry that the commonplaces on death find now only impatient readers, for they make pleasant reading in the pioneer essayists from poor Overbury to Steele; for death, with all its embroideries and trappings of destiny and Nemesis, is a pretty way of exercising that philosophy which no one is without. I envy the courage of the man who could now write an essay "On Death" as Bacon did once, laying down the law of it with no hint of an apology for the monotony of his subject; but there is now no essayist or philosopher with the calm and aloof assurance and arrogance of a Bacon, that you might see, after the last written words on the most trivial theme, this last seal, as though he were God, "Thus thought Francis Bacon." But of death there is nothing trivial and pleasant left to be said, and as a subject it has grown monotonous, except for the inevitable slayer and the slain, and that prevalent instinct for fair play ("the essential quality of the looker-on") which interests itself in the manner of the slaying.

But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall never again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when writing it, dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar Wilde I might wonder now if English-women who die in America come back to London; for there is much of London in the letter: "I should like to be in London to-day—Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea London, London of the small restaurants and large draughts of wine, London of the intellectual half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and racy epigrams, with a thin fog outside; London of a resigned good humour, of modulated debauch moving like her traffic, strips of colour through dusk, and drab, optimistic, noisy solitude, tranquillity of incessant sound: autumn lamplight, busy park, sheep, men, women, prostitutes: doors slamming, people coming in and sitting by the fire, more cigarettes, cakes, shops, myriads of people...."

But I would not like to be in London this month of November.