The light certainly was too strong. A sudden flash blinded me, and when I recovered my sight I was apparently no longer in the Grocery. I was in a dimly-lighted conservatory and the middle of a sentence. I have never been able to find out what could have been the beginning of it. “... which it is not, and never was,” I was saying. “I am content only to have told you, and now I relinquish you. Let this be my farewell, my good-bye to you before I sail from England. In books that we read, a man would have asked you for one clasp of the hands, or even one kiss, but I neither ask nor wish for that.” I looked up, and saw the girl to whom I was speaking. I had certainly never seen her before, but yet the figure was familiar. She sat in her white dress, shaded from the light by some tropical plant. It was with passionate and hopeless adoration that I looked at her, and yet I was full of a strange content; it seemed to be enough to have loved her. I saw that her head was slightly turned away from me, and that she was sobbing. “I am sorry,” I went on, “that I have made you cry. I want you to be happy, and I know there is only one way.” “I never knew it was going to be like this,” she said tremulously. For the matter of that, neither had I when I first ordered the first sample pure white. But it struck me as being all quite natural. Some of that peace which must come to men of a great soul, had come to me. “Good-bye,” I said. “I am not going to do anything desperate, anything that could cause you regret. It is enough for me to have loved you, and to feel that in comparison the rest of my life is one....” Just as I had begun in the middle of a sentence so I ended in the middle of a sentence. The dim-lit conservatory and the maiden vanished, and I found myself once more in the Celestial Grocery. “Do you like it?” asked Mr. Joseph’s voice. “Yes,” I said, hesitatingly, “it is grand, it is sublime. But I don’t think I could stand very much of it. How much is it a pound?” “We don’t sell it by the pound; we sell it by the spasm.” “Then,” I said, “I’ll take six spasms.” “James, six of the pure white.” “Right,” said the voice of James. For a moment I tried to recall the beautiful girl in white whom I had just seen. I wondered how my first sentence began and how my last sentence would have ended. I seemed to have walked for a while upon those heights of love that reach beyond the fires of passion, and on which lie the snows of perpetual purity. I felt that my self-respect had considerably increased in consequence. Here I was interrupted by Mr. Joseph. “What will be the next order?” “I have often longed,” I replied, “for a little real happiness.”