She must have been sitting there twenty minutes.

She was afraid to look up at the clock, afraid to move an eyelid lest she should disturb him.

The library had the same nice, leathery, tobaccoey smell. Rough under her fingers the same little sharp tongue of leather scratched up from the arm of her chair. The hanging, half-open fans of the ash-tree would be making the same Japanese pattern in the top left hand pane of the third window. She wanted to see it again to make sure of the pattern, but she was afraid to look up.

If she looked up she would see him.

She mustn't. It would disturb him horribly. He couldn't write if he thought you were looking at him.

It was wonderful that he could go on like that, with somebody in the room, that he let you sit in it when he was writing. The big man.

She had asked him whether she hadn't better go away and come back again, and he had said No, he didn't want her to go away. He wouldn't keep her waiting more than five minutes.

It was unbelievable that she should be sitting there, in that room, as if nothing had happened; as if they were there; as if they might come in any minute; as if they had never gone. A week ago she would have said it was impossible, she couldn't do it, for anybody, no matter how big or how celebrated he was.

Why, after ten years—it must be ten years—she couldn't even bear to go past the house while other people were in it. She hated them, the people who took Greffington Hall for the summer holidays and the autumn shooting. She would go round to Renton by Jackson's yard and the fields so as not to see it. But when the brutes were gone and the yellow blinds were down in the long rows of windows that you saw above the grey garden wall, she liked to pass it and look up and pretend that the house was only waiting for them, only sleeping its usual winter sleep, resting till they came back.

It was ten years since they had gone.

No. If Richard Nicholson hadn't been Mr. Sutcliffe's nephew, she couldn't, no matter how big and how celebrated he was, or how badly he wanted her help or she wanted his money.

No matter how wonderful and important it would feel to be Richard
Nicholson's secretary.

It wasn't really his money that she wanted. It would be worth while doing it for nothing, for the sake of knowing him. She had read his Euripides.

She wondered: Supposing he kept her, how long would it last? He was in the middle of his First Series of Studies in Greek Literature; and there would be two, or even three if he went on.

He had taken Greffington Hall for four months. When he went back to London he would have to have somebody else.

Perhaps he would tell her that, after thinking it over, he had found he didn't want her. Then to-day would be the end of it.

If she looked up she would see him.

She knew what she would see: the fine, cross upper lip lifted backwards by the moustache, the small grizzled brown moustache, turned up, that made it look crosser. The narrow, pensive lower lip, thrust out by its light jaw. His nose—quite a young nose—that wouldn't be Roman, wouldn't be Sutcliffe; it looked out over your head, tilted itself up to sniff the world, obstinate, alert. His eyes, young too, bright and dark, sheltered, safe from age under the low straight eyebrows. They would never have shabby, wrinkled sagging lids. Dark brown hair, grey above his ears, clipped close to stop its curling like his uncle's. He liked to go clipped and clean. You felt that he liked his own tall, straight slenderness.

The big library rustled with the quick, irritable sound of his writing.

It stopped. He had finished. He looked at the clock. She heard a small, commiserating sound.

"Forgive me. I really thought it would only take five minutes. How on earth do you manage to keep so quiet? I should have known if a mouse had moved."

He turned towards her. He leaned back in his chair. "You don't mind my smoking?"

He was settling himself. Now she would know.

"Well," he said, "if I did keep you waiting forty minutes, it was a good test, wasn't it?"

He meditated.

"I'm always changing my secretaries because of something. The last one was admirable, but I couldn't have stood her in the room when I was writing…. Besides, you work better."

"Can you tell? In a week?"

"Yes. I can tell…. Are you sure you can spare me four months?"

"Easily."

"Five? Six?"

"If you were still here."

"I shan't be. I shall be in London…. Couldn't you come up?"

"I couldn't, possibly."

His cross mouth and brilliant, irritated eyes questioned her.

"I couldn't leave my mother."

II.

Five weeks of the four months gone. And to-morrow he was going up to
London.

Only till Friday. Only for five days. She kept on telling herself he would stay longer. Once he was there you couldn't tell how many days he might stay. But say he didn't come back till the middle of July, still there would be the rest of July and all August and September.

To-day he was walking home with her, carrying the books. She liked walking with him, she liked to be seen walking with him, as she used to like being seen walking with Roddy and Mark, because she was proud of them, proud of belonging to them. She was proud of Richard Nicholson because of what he had done.

The Morfe people didn't know anything about what he had done; but they knew he was something wonderful and important; they knew it was wonderful and important that you should be his secretary. They were proud of you, glad that they had provided him with you, proud that he should have found what he was looking for in Morfe.

Mr. Belk, for instance, coming along the road. He used to pass you with a jaunty, gallant, curious look as if you were seventeen and he were saying, "There's a girl who ought to be married. Why isn't she?" He had just sidled past them, abashed and obsequious, a little afraid of the big man. Even Mrs. Belk was obsequious.

And Mr. Spencer Rollitt. He was proud because Richard Nicholson had asked him about a secretary and he had recommended you. Funny that people could go on disapproving of you for twenty years, and then suddenly approve because of Richard Nicholson.

And Mamma. Mamma thought you wonderful and important, too.

Mamma liked Mr. Nicholson. Ever since that Sunday when he had called and brought the roses and stayed to tea. She had gone out of the room and left them abruptly because she was afraid of his "cleverness," afraid that he would begin to talk about something that she didn't understand.

And he had said, "How beautiful she is—"

After he had gone she had told Mamma that Richard Nicholson had said she was beautiful; and Mamma had pretended that it didn't matter what he said; but she had smiled all the same.

He carried himself like Mr. Sutcliffe when he walked, straight and tall in his clean cut grey suit. Only he was lighter and leaner. His eyes looked gentle and peaceable now under the shadow of the Panama hat.

The front door stood open. She asked him to come in for tea.

"May I? … What are you doing afterwards?"

"Going for a walk somewhere."

"Will you let me come too?…"

He was standing by the window looking at the garden. She saw him smile when he heard Catty say that Mamma had gone over to Mrs. Waugh's and wouldn't be back for tea. He smiled to himself, a secret, happy smile, looking out into the garden…. She took him out through the orchard. He went stooping under the low apple boughs and laughing. Down the Back Lane and through the gap in the lower fields, along the flagged path to the Bottom Lane and through the Rathdale fields to the river. Over the stepping stones.

She took the stones at a striding run. He followed, running and laughing.

Up the Rathdale fields to Renton Moor. Not up the schoolhouse lane, or on the Garthdale Road, or along the fields by the beck. Not up Greffington Edge or Karva. Because of Lindley Vickers and Maurice Jourdain; and Roddy and Mark.

No. She was humbugging herself. Not up Karva because of her secret happiness. She didn't want to mix him up with that or with the self that had felt it. She wanted to keep him in the clear spaces of her mind, away from her memories, away from her emotions.

They sat down on the side of the moor in the heather.

Indoors when he was working he was irritable and restless. You would hear a gentle sighing sound: "D-amn"; and he would start up and walk about the room. There would be shakings of his head, twistings of his eyebrows, shruggings of his shoulders, and tormented gestures of his hands. But not out here. He sat in the heather as quiet, as motionless as you were, every muscle at rest. His mind was at rest.

The strong sunlight beat on him; it showed up small surface signs. Perhaps you could see now that he might really be forty, or even forty-five.

No, you couldn't. You couldn't see or feel anything but the burning, inextinguishable youth inside him. The little grey streaks and patches might have been powder put on for fun.

"I want to finish with all my Greek stuff," he said suddenly. "I want to go on to something else—studies in modern French literature. Then English. I want to get everything clean and straight in five pages where other people would take fifty…. I want to go smash through some of the traditions. The tradition of the long, grey paragraph…. We might learn things from France. But we're a proud island people. We won't learn…. We're a proud island people, held in too tight, held in till we burst. That's why we've no aesthetic restraint. No restraint of any sort. Take our economics. Take our politics. We've had to colonise, to burst out over continents. When our minds begin moving it's the same thing. They burst out. All over the place…. When we've learned restraint we shall take our place inside Europe, not outside it."

"We do restrain our emotions quite a lot."

"We do. We do. That's precisely why we don't restrain our expression of them. Really unrestrained emotion that forces its way through and breaks down your intellectual defences and saturates you with itself—it hasn't any words…. It hasn't any words; or very few."

* * * * *

The mown fields over there, below Greffington Edge, were bleached with the sun: the grey cliffs quivered in the hot yellow light.

"It might be somewhere in the South of France."

"Not Agaye."

"No. Not Agaye. The limestone country…. I can't think why I never came here. My uncle used to ask me dozens of times. I suppose I funked it…. What the poor old chap must have felt like shut up in that house all those years with my aunt—"

"Please don't. I—I liked her."

"You mean you liked him and put up with her because of him. We all did that."

"She was kind to me."

"Who wouldn't be?"

"Oh, but you don't know how kind."

"Kind? Good Lord, yes. There are millions of kind people in the world.
It's possible to be kind and at the same time not entirely brainless."

"He wouldn't mind that. He wouldn't think she was brainless—"

"He wasn't in love with her—there was another woman—a girl. It was so like the dear old duffer to put it off till he was forty-five and then come a cropper over a little girl of seventeen."

"That isn't true. I knew him much better than you do. He never cared for anybody but her…. Besides, if it was true you shouldn't have told me. I've no business to know it…."

"Everybody knew it. The poor dear managed so badly that everybody in the place knew it. She knew, that's why she dragged him away and made him live abroad. She hated living abroad, but she liked it better than seeing him going to pieces over the girl."

"I don't believe it. If there was anything in it I'd have been sure to have heard of it…. Why, there wasn't anybody here but me—"

"It must have been years before your time," he said. "You could hardly even have come in for the sad end of it."

* * * * *

Dorsy Heron said it was true.

"It was you he was in love with. Everybody saw it but you."

She remembered. His face when she came to him. In the library. And what he had said.

"A man might be in love with you for ten years and you wouldn't know about it if he held his tongue."

And her face. Her poor face, so worried when people saw them together. And that last night when she stroked your arm and when she saw him looking at it and stopped. And her eyes. Frightened. Frightened.

"How I must have hurt him. How I must have hurt them both."

* * * * *

Mr. Nicholson had come back on Friday as he had said.

III.

He put down his scratching pen and was leaning back in his chair, looking at her.

She wondered what he was thinking. Sometimes the space of the room was enormous between her table by the first tall window and his by the third; sometimes it shrank and brought them close. It was bringing them close now.

"You can't see the text for the footnotes," she said. "The notes must go in the Appendix."

She wanted to make herself forget that all her own things, the things she had saved from the last burning, were lying there on his table, staring at her. She was trying not to look that way, not to let herself imagine for a moment that he had read them.

"Never mind the notes and the Appendix."

He had got up. He was leaning now against the tall shutter of her window, looking down at her.

"Why didn't you tell me? Before I let you in for that horrible drudgery? All that typing and indexing—If I'd only known you were doing anything like this…. Why couldn't you have told me?"

"Because I wasn't doing it. It was done ages ago."

"It's my fault. I ought to have known. I did know there was something. I ought to have attended to it and found out what it was."

He began walking up and down the room, turning on her again and again, making himself more and more excited.

"That translation of the Bacchae—what made you think of doing it like that?"

"I'd been reading Walt Whitman—It showed me you could do without rhyme. I knew it must sound as if it was all spoken—chanted—that they mustn't sing. Then I thought perhaps that was the way to do it."

"Yes. Yes. It is the way to do it. The only way…. You see, that's what my Euripides book's about. The very thing I've been trying to ram down people's throats, for years. And all the time you were doing it—down here—all by yourself—for fun … I wish I'd known … What are you going to do about it?"

"I didn't think anything could be done."

He sat down to consider that part of it.

* * * * *

He was going to get it published for her.

He was going to write the Introduction.

"And—the other things?"

"Oh, well, that's another matter. There's not much of it that'll stand."

He knew. He would never say more or less than he meant.

Not much of it that would stand. Now that she knew, it was extraordinary how little she minded.

"Still, there are a few things. They must come out first. In the spring. Then the Bacchae in the autumn. I want it to be clear from the start that you're a poet translating; not the other way on."

He walked home with her, discussing gravely how it would be done.

IV.

It had come without surprise, almost without excitement; the quiet happening of something secretly foreseen, present to her mind as long as she could remember.

"I always meant that this should happen: something like this."

Now that it had happened she was afraid, seeing, but not so clearly, what would come afterwards: something that would make her want to leave Morfe and Mamma and go away to London and know the people Richard Nicholson had told her about, the people who would care for what she had done; the people who were doing the things she cared about. To talk to them; to hear them talk. She was afraid of wanting that more than anything in the world.

She saw her fear first in Mamma's eyes when she told her.

And there was something else. Something to do with Richard Nicholson. Something she didn't want to think about. Not fear exactly, but a sort of uneasiness when she thought about him.

His mind really was the enormous, perfect crystal she had imagined. It had been brought close to her; she had turned it in her hand and seen it flash and shine. She had looked into it and seen beautiful, clear things in it: nothing that wasn't beautiful and clear. She was afraid of wanting to look at it again when it wasn't there. Because it had made her happy she might come to want it more than anything in the world.

In two weeks it would be gone. She would want it and it would not be there.

V.

When she passed the house and saw the long rows of yellow blinds in the grey front she thought of him. He would not come back. He had never come before, so it wasn't likely he would come again.

His being there was one of the things that only happened once. Perhaps those were the perfect things, the things that would never pass away; they would stay for ever, beautiful as you had seen them, fixed in their moment of perfection, wearing the very air and light of it for ever.

You would see them sub specie ceternitatis. Under the form of eternity.

So that Richard Nicholson would always be like that, the same whenever you thought of him.

Look at the others: the ones that hadn't come back and the ones that had. Jimmy Ponsonby, Harry Craven, Mr. Sutcliffe. And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers. If Maurice Jourdain had never come back she would always have seen him standing in the cornfield. If Lindley Vickers had never come back she wouldn't have seen him with Nannie Learoyd in the schoolhouse lane; the moment when he held her hands in the drawing-room, standing by the piano, would have been their one eternal moment.

Because Jimmy Ponsonby had gone away she had never known the awful thing he had done. She would go through the Ilford fields for ever and ever with her hot hand in his; she happy and he innocent; innocent for ever and ever. Harry Craven, her playmate of two hours, he would always be playing, always laughing, always holding her hand, like Roddy, without knowing that he held it.

Suppose Mr. Sutcliffe had come back. She would have hurt them more and more. Mrs. Sutcliffe would have hated her. They would have been miserable, all three. All three damned for ever and ever.

She was not sure she wanted Richard Nicholson to come back.

She was not sure he wasn't spoiling it by writing. She hadn't thought he would do that.

A correspondence? Prolonging the beautiful moment, stretching it thin; thinner and thinner; stretching it so thin that it would snap? You would come to identify him with his letters, so that in the end you would lose what had been real, what had been perfect. You would forget. You would have another and less real kind of memory.

But his letters were not thin; they were as real as his voice. They were his voice talking to you; you could tell which words would take the stress of it. "I don't know how much there is of you, whether this is all of it or only a little bit. You gave me an impression—you made me feel that there might be any amount gone under that you can't get at, that you may never get at if you go on staying where you are. I believe if you got clean away it might come to the top again.

"But I don't know. I don't know whether you're at the end or the beginning. I could tell better if you were here."

She counted the months till April when her poems would come out. She counted the days till Tuesday when there might be a letter from Richard Nicholson.

If only he would not keep on telling you you ought to come to London.
That was what made you afraid. He might have seen how impossible it was.
He had seen Mamma.

"Don't try to dig me out of my 'hole.' I can 'go on living in it for ever' if I'm never taken out. But if I got out once it would be awful coming back. It isn't awful now. Don't make it awful."

He only wrote: "I'll make it awfuller and _aw_fuller, until out you come."