We often sat on her bedroom balcony reading, talking, or watching the sky growing pale beyond Mount Valerian, the shadow drifting and defining and shaping the hill. In hours like the present, dreaming in a studio, we remember those who deceived us, those who made us suffer, and in these hours faces, fragments of faces, rise out of a past, the line of a bent neck, the whiteness of a hand, and the eyes. I remember her eyes; one day in an orchard, in the lush and luxuriance of June, her husband was walking in front with a friend, and I was pleading. "Well," she said, raising her eyes, "you can kiss me now." But her husband was in front, and he was a thick-set man, and there was a stream, and I foresaw a struggle--and an unpleasant one: confess and be done with it!--I didn't dare to kiss her, and I don't think she ever forgave me that lack of courage. All this is twenty years ago, and is it not silly to spend the afternoon thinking of such rubbish? But it is of such rubbish that our lives are made. Shall I go to her now and see her in her decadence? Grey hair has not begun to appear yet in the blonde, it will never turn grey, but she was shrivelling a little the last time I saw her. And next year she will be older. At her age a year counts for double. Others are more worthy of a visit. If I do not go to her this year, shall I go next? In imagination I go past her house, thinking of a man she used to talk about, "the man she left her 'ome for"; that is how the London street girl would word it. He had been the centre of a disgraceful scandal in his old age, a sordid but characteristic end for the Don Juan of the nineteenth century. Perhaps she loved the big, bearded man whose photograph she had once shown me. He killed himself for not having enough money to live as he wished to live. That was her explanation. I think there was some blackmail; she had to pay some money to the dead man's relations for letters. These sensual American women are like orchids, and who would hesitate between an orchid and a rose? It was twenty years ago since she turned round on me in the gloom of her brougham unexpectedly, and it was as if some sensual spirit had come out of a world of perfume and lace. * * * * *