I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add her together; and, of course, failing. She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her--foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?--as some one who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called being human, shall have finally annihilated each other in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality. We have all of us a crude desire to “place” our fellows in this or that category or class: we like to know more or less what they are, so that, maybe, we may know more or less what we shall be to them. But, even with the knowledge that she was Gerald’s sister, that she was twenty-nine years old, that she was the niece of Lord Portairley, you could not, anyhow I couldn’t, “place” Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather despairing one, that she didn’t fit in anywhere, to any class, nay, to any nationality. She wasn’t that ghastly thing called “Bohemian,” she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society,” “county,” upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not. In her eyes you saw the landscape of England, spacious and brave; but you felt unreasonably certain that she was as devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart. She gave you a sense of the conventions; but she gave you--unaware always, impersonal always, and those cool, sensible eyes!--a much deeper sense that she was somehow outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge as to what is and what is not conventional. That was why, I am trying to show, I felt so profoundly incapable with her. It was not as though one was non-existent; it was as though, with her, one existed only in the most limited sense. And, I suppose, she affected me particularly in that way simply because I am a man of my time. For that is a limitation a man can’t get beyond--to be of his time, completely. He may be successful, a man like that--indeed, should he not blow his brains out if he is not?--but he who is of his time may never rise above himself: he is the galley-slave working incessantly at the oars of his life, which reflects