ad the persuasion "This matters. Nothing
else matters so much as this." We were both infinitely grave in such
happiness as we had. I do not remember any laughter at all between us.

Twelve days it lasted from that encounter in my chalet until our
parting.

Except at the end, they were days of supreme summer, and there was a
waxing moon. We met recklessly day by day. We were so intent upon each
other at first so intent upon expressing ourselves to each other, and
getting at each other, that we troubled very little about the appearance
of our relationship. We met almost openly.... We talked of ten thousand
things, and of ourselves. We loved. We made love. There is no prose
of mine that can tell of hours transfigured. The facts are nothing.
Everything we touched, the meanest things, became glorious. How can I
render bare tenderness and delight and mutual possession? I sit here at
my desk thinking of untellable things.

I have come to know so much of love that I know now what love might be.
We loved, scarred and stained; we parted--basely and inevitably, but at
least I met love.

I remember as we sat in a Canadian canoe, in a reedy, bush-masked
shallow we had discovered operating out of that pine-shaded Woking
canal, how she fell talking of the things that happened to her before
she met me again....

She told me things, and they so joined and welded together other things
that lay disconnected in my memory, that it seemed to me I had always
known what she told me. And yet indeed I had not known nor suspected it,
save perhaps for a luminous, transitory suspicion ever and again.

She made me see how life had shaped her. She told me of her girlhood
after I had known her. "We were poor and pretending and managing. We
hacked about on visits and things. I ought to have married. The chances
I had weren't particularly good chances. I didn't like 'em."

She paused. "Then Carnaby came along."

I remained quite still. She spoke now with downcast eyes, and one finger
just touching the water.

"One gets bored, bored beyond redemption. One does about to these huge
expensive houses I suppose--the scale's immense. One makes one's
self useful to the other women, and agreeable to the men. One has to
dress.... One has food and exercise and leisure, It's the leisure, and
the space, and the blank opportunity it seems a sin not to fill. Carnaby
isn't like the other men. He's bigger.... They go about making love.
Everybody's making love