The rising excitement of the overture warned him that it was about to bang to an end. His programme had fallen to the floor. He stooped for it with the idea of looking at the cast before the lights were lowered. At this moment the lady in the stall next to him took out her handkerchief. CHAPTER VIII As she did so the curtain went up, and showed a divided scene. On the right, the stage represented the office of a matrimonial agent; on the left, the office of an agent who obtained "reliable evidence for divorce." But Conrad was not attending. The two careers were followed by the same person under different names--his introductions in the first capacity led to business in the second. He explained this soon after he bustled on, and the audience laughed. But Conrad did not hear. The lady still held her handkerchief, a scrap of lawn and lace that was scented with chypre--and he had been heaved to Rouen and was seventeen years old there, by the side of The Woman We Never Forget. For in the life of every man, whether he will own it or not, there is at least one unmentioned woman whom he never permanently forgets while he keeps his faculties. She may not be the best, or the prettiest, or even the nicest woman he has loved--not her virtues, but his madness, graved so deep--and he will take the impression out sometimes when he has lost his figure and his hair, and when a boy who is storing experiences on his own account calls him "the governor." No, her qualities have as little to do with the matter as the date on her birth certificate. A woman isn't her age, or herself; she is what she makes us feel--like art, and nature, like a musical phrase, or a line of words, like everything of suggestion and mystery. The woman her husband hates and her lover adores, is an equally vivid personality to both men. That to herself she is vividly a third character makes no difference to the view of either of them. To say that on the few occasions Conrad had smelt chypre during the last twenty years it had never failed to "remind" him of Mrs. Adaile--to say this would be to imply that he yielded himself leisurely to reverie, and it would sound truer than the truth. But the fact is that there was nothing voluntary at all in what occurred. It was a physical swirl that the smell always caused him, and it left him vibrant for a few seconds with the very craving, the very sickness of the time when he had worshipped her. He often thought of her, even strummed a song she used to sing, but in such moments as these he was less conscious of thinking than of feeling. Normally he looked back at her, with the reflections of a man; when he smelt chypre he was near her again, with the tremors of a boy.