Somewhere in these papers I have said that Shelmerdene left England, but I touched on it very lightly, for I am only half-heartedly a realist, and may yet live to be accused of shuffling humanity behind a phrase.... Youth must endure its periods of loneliness with what grace it can; and youth could endure them as resignedly as its preceptors, if it were not for its grotesque self-importance, which inflates loneliness to such a size that it envelopes a young man's whole being, leaving him at the end a sorry wreck of what was once a happy mortal. Anyway, that is what happened to me; I took the whole affair in the worst possible spirit, and, during that probation time to wisdom, thought and wrote and did so many silly things, smashed ideals and cursed idols with such morbid thoroughness and conviction (after the fashion of all the bitterest young men), that I must have been as detestable a person as ever trickled wheezily from the, well, pessimistic pen of a Mr. Wyndham Lewis.... But it takes very little effort to forget that time entirely, to let it bury itself with what mourning it can muster from the Shades which sent it to plague me. Enough that it passed, but not before it had, as they say, "put me wise" about the world and its ways. For Shelmerdene had left behind her much more than just loneliness; much that was more precious and, thankfully, more lasting; for she had found a young man shaped entirely of acute angles and sharp corners, and had rubbed and polished them over with such delicate tact that it was only months, after she had gone that I suddenly realised how much more fit I was to cope with a complicated world since I had known her. But, more importantly, Shelmerdene to me was England. Before I met her I did not know England; I knew English, but England only as a man knows the landmarks about him in a strange country. But when she had come and gone England was a discovered country, a vast and ever-increasing panorama in which discoveries were continually made, leaving yet more hidden valleys of discoveries still to be made--and to be enjoyed! So much and much more, O unbeliever, I learnt from Shelmerdene, and in the learning of it lay the best and gladdest lesson of all.