And now, having attempted five different stories, all of them unsatisfactory, I know that it is my duty to provide a conclusion that shall be unexpected and that shall ridicule my previous conjectures. I know that I ought to meet in the restaurant at a later date the hero or heroine, or both of them together, and learn from them the true story; there should be--I know it--a punch in the last paragraph; but that is exactly what I cannot give, for I do not know the real end of the story and have been unable to invent one. Unsatisfactory, perhaps, but intriguing all the same. In a world where so much is ordered by the inviolable laws of mathematics, it is pleasant to find something that is truly incomplete. For the first time in my life I was the witness of a dramatic episode, the sort of thing that one would not see again in a thousand years. It was a fragment in the lives of two people, and it must remain a fragment, a baffling, fascinating fragment. And, on the whole, I am glad to have it so. Such another moment will never come to me. When the voice of the lecturer begins to fade, when the sun beats down upon the mound at Lord’s and the cricket becomes slow: at all times when the mind detaches itself from its surroundings I shall return in my imagination to that evening in the restaurant. It will be a treasure for all time, a book in which I shall read for ever without weariness. Perhaps one day I shall hit upon the meaning of it; but I hope not. I prefer to keep it an enigma, to be able to shut my eyes and watch the growing embarrassment of a young man who is planning an unnatural theft, to see a young girl stand in the doorway of a restaurant, a fur cap fitting tightly over her head, a gloved hand raised across her throat. XII Certain motives, I said, after a while get written out, and must be sent like coins for renewal to the mint. And so of a particular technique, of certain ways of narrative, the chronicle novel for example. In 1911 everyone was telling the story of a generation’s passage through youth to middle age; it had become the fashionable medium for social satire; it seemed the destined channel for the main stream of early twentieth-century narrative. But already a dam has been placed across its path, the dam of the years 1914-1918.