I should have hated to be obliged to explain to my incredulous American friends what I "did" in those long months, when every week I planned to be off for the South and every week found me still lingering by the emerald close, the grey tower, the quiet, formal place of this backwater of the world. In their sense, of course, I "did" nothing at all. I watched the youth around me (any one of them I might have been, had my father lived) I renewed the quiet, cordial friendships, which, if they never rooted very deep, never, on the other hand, desiccated and blew away; I wrote many letters, and more than this, I formulated once for all, though I did not know it then, such theory of life as I have found necessary ever since. What it may have been does not so much matter: if I have failed to illustrate it in my life, if I have, even, failed to make it reasonably clear in this rough sketch of the most vital interests of my life, it cannot have been very valuable. Among my correspondents at this time neither Roger nor his wife was numbered. This was not strange, for he was a poor letter-writer, except for business purposes or in a real necessity, and she had never been taught so much as to write her own name! But I heard from them indirectly, and as Roger, it turned out, supposed me to have gone on a long hunting trip through the Rockies, neither of us was alarmed by the three months' silence. A strange, dozing peace had settled over me; though I thought of them often, it was as one thinks of persons and scenes infinitely removed, with which he has no logical connection, only a veiled, softened interest. Margarita seemed, against the background of the moist, pearly English autumn, like some gorgeous and unbelievable tropical bird, shooting, all orange and indigo, across a grey cloud. It was impossible that I, a quiet chess-player sitting opposite his friend, the impractical student of Eastern Religions, could have to do with such a vivid anomaly as she must always be. It was unlikely that the silent, moody man strolling for hours through mist-filled English lanes, pipe in mouth, dog at heels should ever run athwart that lovely troubler of man's mind, that babyish woman, that all-too-well-ripened child.