expressed as in real life; but he showed them to be subtle creatures, something higher than clever animals, with different shades of meaning in every word--what fool was it who said that a word spoken must be a word meant!--with barriers of reserve and strangeness between each person; and their conversation is not just a string of words, but a thing of different values, in which the mind of the speaker and the listener is alive and rigid to every current of refined thought which is often unexpressed but understood. I think 'thin' is the right epithet for the minds of James' characters; and the difference between them and ordinary people is that within us there is a sort of sieve between the mind and the mouth, or in whatever way we choose to be articulate, which, unlike ordinary sieves, allows only the coarse grains to drop through and be given out, but keeps the subtleties and the refinement to itself; but between the minds and the articulation of James' people there are no sieves, and the inner subtleties and shades are given expression. There is a strangeness, a kind of mental tautness, a never-ceasing etiquette, about them all." But then I laughed, and when she asked me why I did not go on, I said that I had suddenly realised that I had strayed from the subject, and that whereas she had begun to talk of love I had ended by talking of Henry James. "It is all about the same thing," she said, "for we are both grumbling at that mental limpness which makes people think that they need make no effort, but that life will go on around them just the same. And that is why I think one of the most dreadful sights is a man asleep. No one should see another person asleep; it seems to me the most private thing in the world, and if I were a man and a woman had watched me as I lay asleep, I should want to kill her so that she should not go about and tell people how I had looked as I lay stupidly unconscious of everything around me. Only once I have seen a man asleep, and that was the end of a perfect love affair. I had suddenly gone to see him in his chambers, and when his man showed me into his room I found him lying there on the sofa, with his head thrown back on a cushion, sleeping. His man said that he must be very tired as he had been working all night, and that it would be kind of me not to wake him. I waited in the room for an hour, trying not to look at him but to read a book, but his breathing filled the room and I could not take my eyes away from him; and at the end of an hour I felt that my love had gone from me minute by minute as I had looked at him, and that now I might just as well get up and go away, for I did not care any longer if he was asleep or awake. So I went away, but I do not know if he woke up as the door closed behind me." "And did you ever tell him why you had ceased to love him?" I asked.