tuation came suddenly and unexpectedly, but
in a way that I suppose was almost inevitable.

My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion.

I won't pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct. I was a young
and fairly vigorous male; all my appetite for love had been roused
and whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love affair and my
marriage. I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty to the disregard of
all else, and it had failed me. It had faded when I had hoped it would
grow brighter. I despaired of life and was embittered. And things
happened as I am telling. I don't draw any moral at all in the matter,
and as for social remedies, I leave them to the social reformer. I've
got to a time of life when the only theories that interest me are
generalisations about realities.

To go to our inner office in Raggett Street I had to walk through a room
in which the typists worked. They were the correspondence typists; our
books and invoicing had long since overflowed into the premises we had
had the luck to secure on either side of us. I was, I must confess,
always in a faintly cloudily-emotional way aware of that collection of
for the most part round-shouldered femininity, but presently one of
the girls detached herself from the others and got a real hold upon
my attention. I appreciated her at first as a straight little back,
a neater back than any of the others; as a softly rounded neck with a
smiling necklace of sham pearls; as chestnut hair very neatly done--and
as a side-long glance; presently as a quickly turned face that looked
for me.

My eye would seek her as I went through on business things--I dictated
some letters to her and so discovered she had pretty, soft-looking hands
with pink nails. Once or twice, meeting casually, we looked one another
for the flash of a second in the eyes.

That was all. But it was enough in the mysterious free-masonry of sex to
say essential things. We had a secret between us.

One day I came into Raggett Street at lunch time and she was alone,
sitting at her desk. She glanced up as I entered, and then became very
still, with a downcast face and her hands clenched on the table. I
walked right by her to the door of the inner office, stopped, came back
and stood over her.

We neither of us spoke for quite a perceptible time. I was trembling
violently.

"Is that one of the new typewriters?" I asked at last for the sake of
speaking.

She looked up a