But it would pass quickly enough, that fleeting sorrow, in the bright sunlight of an April day. And she would tell me that she was not really the daughter of a Tyneside miner, but of an impoverished country Squire, married to a rich cad, in part settlement of an overdue account. “I could not stand it,” she would say, “I ran away. But he found me, he dragged me back. He is with me now in the hotel at Boscastle.” But she should never go back to him. We should rush to Padstow and catch the next train to town. I should hurry round to Grant Richards. “Trouble,” I should say, “I’m going to Austria to-morrow. I must have a hundred pounds at once. My address to no one.” A terrific story, I felt, ending perhaps with a duel on the steps of a Viennese hotel. I had indeed already begun to wonder what editor I should approach with its scenario when the dream was broken. I detected her, shortly before lights out, leaning in the dark corner of a wall against the beating breast of a junior lance-sergeant. If I had been sixty instead of twenty-two, I should have been doubtless highly thrilled by the discovery. I should not, indeed, have even included myself in my romantic reverie. I should have selected an attractive member of my platoon and ordaining that he should fall in love with her, I should have watched their love-making with that mixture of subjective and objective interest with which we watch the love-making of the cinema and the stage, I should have identified myself, through my imagination, with their rapture. It would have been a focussing of myself, like the writing of a love-story is when, for a while, one ceases to be oneself, or perhaps becomes oneself more truly in the persons of one’s hero and one’s heroine. There must be rough sea, though, before the calm waters of harbourage are reached. Many stories of first love have been written, but I cannot at the moment remember a single story about last love. I do not mean the “Père Goriot,” or “Poor Folk”; the “gaga” love affairs. I mean a story of purposeful, commanding love; a love that is at its dawn fine and fresh and vigorous; but that comes too late in life, that pilfers the last years of manhood, that wastes and exhausts itself; but to which its object clings desperately, knowing it is for the last time, knowing that he will not have the faith, the strength, the confidence to begin again. And it must come very often, such a love; must be, as often as not, an inevitable stage in the natural development of man; must mark the passage of the borderland between middle-age and age.