I might have wired asking for another day. Impossible. The day would have been spoilt by the discomfort of knowing him thinking me ungrateful and insatiable.... Only being able to say when I came back that I waited to see a man dying of cancer. He would have thought that morbid. The minute the telegram was sent the feeling of guilt passed away. Whilst Hypo was chuckling over it at the top of the stairs there was nothing and no one. Only the feeling of having broken through and stepped forward into space. Strong happiness. All the next day was in space; a day taken out of life; standing by itself. Mr. Graham was old-fashioned ... and modern too. He seemed to have come from so far back, to see backwards, understanding, and to see ahead the things he had always known. Serene and interested, in absolutely everything. As much in the tiny story of the threepenny-bit as in anything else, making it seem worth telling, making me able to tell it. Seeing everything as _real_. Really finding life marvellous in the way no one else seemed to do.... Ill as he was he looked up my trains, carefully and thoughtfully.... The horror and fear of death was taken away from me while I watched him.... Perhaps he had always felt that the marvellousness of there being such a thing as life was the answer to everything.... And now that he was dying knew it more completely? They were both so serene. Everybody was lifted by being with them into that part of life that goes on behind the life that seems to be being lived.... All the time it was as if they had witnessed that past fortnight and made it immaterial ... a part of the immaterial _story_ of life.... * * * * * That fortnight had the shape of an arranged story, something playing itself out, with scenes set and timed to come in in the right place. Upset by that one little scene that had come in of itself.... The clear days after the two men had gone back to town. The long talks kept undisturbed.... All the long history of Gissing.... Gissing's ideal women over-cultivated, self-important creatures, with low-pressure vitality and too little animal.... "You're rather like that you know." ... "Men would always rather be made love to than talked at." "Your life is a complex system of evasions. You are a mass of _health_, unused. You're not doing any thing with yourself...." "... Two kinds of women, the kind that come it over one, tremendously, and nurses." "Most good men are something like chimpanzees. The best man in those relationships is the accomplished rake ... that's the secret of old Grooge.... Yes; you'd hate him. He's one of the old school; expert knowledge about women. That's nonsense of course. There _is_ no expert knowledge about women. Men and women are very much alike. But there's the honest clean red-blooded people and the posers and rotters and anæmic people. And there are for your comfort a few genuine monogamists. Very few."