But how much must happen before then! For the first time I envisaged it in its heartbreaking beauty. Lovely, apparently inevitable the close ... but the way there? What, steeling her heart, must she see before that meeting? She must see a man whose last kiss was his first one, who unlived a thousand adventures to become virgin in the end. She must see a man living so unutterably long that he lived to write his first poem again. She would see a man who had fought through a war of flame and poison puckering his smooth brows over his first percussion-cap pistol. She would see the dust of his athletic laurels stir, reassemble, bloom anew. She would see the miracle of youth synthesised, the grail of his purity mystically reappear. Not even Joshua saw what those liquid and already tired brown eyes of hers must see--the sun of a man's life pause at noon, swing contrary to its orbit, and move back to set where it rose. And all at once there came over me a whelming of passionate emotion for this woman so singled out. It was the emotion one feels over an infant whose eyes open for the first time on the world--compassion and ache and hapless tenderness and hope for the best. Would she be able to bear her destiny? Would she, had such a thing been possible, have elected never to have been born rather than bear it? Could I help her? If things should unfold as they were well in motion to unfold, could any power on earth help her? I began to suspect that, unless she renounced him once for all, and that quickly, no power on earth would be able to help her. * * * * * I don't know why I did not pack up my things and go back to Haslemere. I no longer pretended to be looking for Derwent Rose in London, and I had not given one single sitting for my portrait. Yet, though I could not help Julia, I felt myself unable to leave her. If I did not see her for an evening I was disturbed, lost what to do with myself. Several of these evenings came, and still I lingered on. Then, I think on the fourth evening after I had given Julia dinner in Jermyn Street, the history of Derwent Rose moved forward--or backward--once more. I had thought of looking up Madge Aird that evening, but at the last moment had changed my mind. I did not feel up to Madge's liveliness. So I hung round that now so-drearily-familiar neighbourhood instead--the neighbourhood between Leicester Square Tube Station and Tottenham Court Road. I walked till I was tired, and then, more for the sake of sitting down than for any other reason, I entered a picture-house on the west side of Shaftesbury Avenue. I did not choose that one in particular. It was just like any other picture-house except that it had a small organ built into the wall high up in one corner. This organ was ceasing to play as I entered. The principal drama of the programme was just over.