The craving for immortality in her did not wear a religious aspect. All she desired was to leave behind some ineffaceable indisfigurable thing that she had felt, or that had been a part of her. I am not worth preserving, she told herself. No angel business for me. But my feelings, my sensations, my strange moods and aspects, these are exquisite, different from everything else that has ever existed--divine, imperishable, everlasting. When people have forgotten who I was I shall not mind if they will only remember some solitary fragment of what I have felt.... This was her aim in playing. She projected her personality into the music. Chopin was passionately Chopin when she played him: he was also passionately herself. But she was tragically lonely. Her loneliness made her do strange things. One Saturday afternoon in Epping Forest she found a boy fishing with a jam jar in a small pond. He was busy with tadpoles. He had glorious golden hair and blue eyes, and might have been about twelve or thirteen years old. “Hullo!” she called. “Caught anything yet?” He had waded ten or fifteen yards from the bank. He held up a jar. “Do let me see!” she cried enthusiastically. He waded back, and they sat down on a grassy bank and examined the contents of the jar. For over half an hour she tried to comprehend his enigmatic Cockney. She hated insects of all kinds, and tadpoles produced in her the same kind of revulsion as did insects. But for half an hour she conquered that revulsion. She held tadpoles in her hand, though her flesh shrank in horror. She was so utterly lonely that this was not too great a price to pay for chatter and companionship. He was an ordinary gutter-urchin, the kind that runs after the wagonettes touting for halfpennies. His clothes were tattered and not too clean, but she did not mind. She wished she could have talked in his language. She wished he would tell her his secrets. As it was, their conversation was confined to tadpoles, of which subject she was lamentably ignorant. In a dim, formless way she wished he might sprain his ankle or be taken ill so that she could wait on him and mother him. She wanted some excuse for touching his soft hair and his eyes and his beautiful bare feet. But when his mates appeared suddenly round the corner of a bush he took up his jar and left her without a word.... Still, she was happy and smiling, though her flesh still crept at the thought of tadpoles. Children were very nice ... especially boys. But the maternal instinct was not very strong in her. It was only her loneliness that had intensified what of it that there was. The thirteenth mazurka of Chopin filled her with strange ecstasy. It was so lonely.... § 2