red name to offer her he
believed that he could have found happiness in her till the end of
his life. Nor, had she loved him, would she have been influenced by
worldly considerations. He had seen little of women of the great
normal middle class. Conditions had thrown him with the very high or
the very low, and experience taught him that the former when unmarried
were all angling for husbands, and the latter for patrons. Therefore
had he created a world of ideal women--one secret of his popularity,
for every woman that read his poems looked into the poet's magic
mirror and saw herself; and he had found happiness in creating, as
poets must. Even since his ostracism there had been many hours of
sustained happiness and moments of rapture when he had quite forgotten
his position among men. And Anne Percy, in her radiant presence, drove
his ideals into the shadows and covered them with cobwebs! And he
could never claim her! Even were he not a poor broken creature, with
little alive in him but that still flickering soul dwelling in his
faded unspeakable body, he would not even offer the commonest
attentions to this uncommon girl who was worthy of the best of men.
Nor did he wish to suffer any more deeply than he did at present. To
know her better would be to love her more. When she left the island
he hoped to relegate her to the plane upon which he dwelt in dreams,
and forget that she had not been a created ideal.

But he was sometimes surprised at the strength of his suffering and
his longing. He was so unutterably tired, had been for years, so weary
in mind and body through excess and misery and remorse, so bitterly
old, that he was amazed there should be moments when he experienced
the fleeting hopes and deep despair of any other lover of his years.
He left his bed at night and went out and walked about the island, or
rowed until he was lost under the stars; he dreamed miserably of her
over his books, or hid in the cane fields to watch her swing by in the
early morning, divested of that hideous hoop-skirt, and unconsciously
mimicking the undulating gait of the coloured women she passed. He had
replenished his wardrobe and was becoming as dandified as any blood in
Bath House, having borrowed from Hunsdon against his next remittance.
And as he was eating regularly for the first time in years--less and
less of the concoctions of his own worthless servants--and drinking
not at all, there was no doubt that he was improving in ap