They are trying to catch me, Julian! I come quite near, quite near, and they hold very quiet their hand with the crumbs in it. I see the other hand stealing round to close upon me--then there's a flutter--_un battement d'ailes--l'oiseau s'est de nouveau dérobé!_ They remain gazing after me, with their mouths wide open. They look so silly. And they haven't robbed me of one plume--not a single plume. 'Julian! Why this mania for capture? this wanting to take from me my most treasured possession--liberty? When I want to give, I'll give freely--largesse with both hands, showers of gold and flowers and precious stones--(don't say I'm not conceited!) but I'll never give my liberty, and I'll never allow it to be forced away from me. I should feel a traitor. I couldn't walk through a forest and hear the wind in the trees. I couldn't listen to music. (Ah, Julian! This afternoon I steeped myself in music; Grieg, elf-like, mischievous, imaginative, romantic, so Latin sometimes in spite of his Northern blood. You would love Grieg, Julian. In the fairyland of music, Grieg plays gnome to Debussy's magician.... Then "Khovantchina," of all music the most sublime, the most perverse, the most _bariolé_, the most abandoned, and the most desolate.) I could have no comradeship with a free and inspired company. I should have betrayed their secrets, bartered away their mysteries....' He had wondered then whether she were happy. He had visualised her, turbulent, defiant; courting danger and then childishly frightened when danger overtook her; deliciously forthcoming, inventive, enthusiastic, but always at heart withdrawn; she expressed herself truly when she said that the bird fluttered away from the hand that would have closed over it. He knew that she lived constantly, from choice, in a storm of trouble and excitement. Yet he read between the lines of her letters a certain dissatisfaction, a straining after something as yet unattained. He knew that her heart was not in what she described as 'my little round of complacent amourettes.'