And one evening I happened to look down and I saw, between the thickly clothed branches of the lime-trees, the woman of my dreams sitting in a neighbour's garden, nursing a baby, and rocking herself to and fro while she turned her childish features and pale blue eyes toward the house with an expectant smile. I sat at my window looking at this woman, some neighbour's recently married daughter no doubt, my thoughts in a flurry of fear, for she was just as I had imagined her. I wonder if I can make you understand that I did not want to imagine her at all, that I was helpless in the grip of my forebodings? For in the dream it was I who would come out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn, who would advance in an alpaca coat, put on after my return from business, a gold watch-chain stretched athwart my stomach, carpet slippers on my soft, untravelled feet, and would bend down to that clinging form.... As I have told you, it was about that time that I left the _faubourgs_ and went to live in a studio among artists. Without knowing it, I took the most certain method of depriving that woman of her power. Beyond the shady drives and prim gardens of the _faubourg_ her image began to waver, and she haunted my dreams no more. And I was glad of this because at that time I was an apprentice to Life, and there were so many things at which I wanted to try my hand that I had not time for what is known, rather vaguely, as love and romance and sentiment and so forth. I resented the intrusion of these sensuous phantoms upon the solitudes where I was struggling with the elementary rules of art. I was consumed with an insatiable ambition to write, to read, to travel, to talk, to achieve distinction. And curiously, I had an equally powerful instinct to make myself as much like other young men, in manner and dress and ideas, as possible. I was ashamed of my preoccupation with these creatures of my imagination, believing them peculiar to myself, and I hurried from them as one hurries from shabby relations. But before I was aware of it I had fallen into the toils of another dream-woman, an experienced, rapacious, and disdainful woman. I saw her in studios, where she talked without noticing me save out of the corner of her eye. I saw her at picture exhibitions, where she stood regarding the pictures satirically, speaking rapidly and disparagingly from between small white teeth and holding extravagant furs about her thin form. I had a notion, too, that she was married, and I waited in a temper of mingled pride, disgust, and fortitude for her to appear in the body. And then things began to happen to me with bewildering rapidity. In the space of a week I fell in love, I lost my employment, and I ran away to sea.