mmon stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, with a huge new
interest shining through the rent.

When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her face,
her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft shadowed
throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her proximity....

Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach their
house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of small houses
near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any intimation, they
vanished and came to the meeting place no more, they vanished as a
moth goes out of a window into the night, and left me possessed of an
intolerable want....

The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my work
and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded up and down
that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, with a thwarted
sense of something just begun that ought to have gone on. I went
backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing place, and at last
explored the forbidden road that had swallowed them up. But I never saw
her again, except that later she came to me, my symbol of womanhood, in
dreams. How my blood was stirred! I lay awake of nights whispering in
the darkness for her. I prayed for her.

Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when her
first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen to my
imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a man.

I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was about
her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed nonsense
about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine could not
possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put the book
aside....

I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this thing
because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and secretive
about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in to us darkly
and shamefully like a thief in the night.

One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year
before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the Strand
an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its dusky
encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-shouldered, bare-breasted
Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling faintly. I looked at it, went my way,
then turned back and bought it. I felt I must have it. The odd thi