ing in her
temperament congenial to mine. It was odd I had not noted it on my
previous visits.

We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about
Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my
ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.

The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for the
house. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various starts and
we raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a little breathless,
we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-house at the end of the
herbaceous border.

We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she became
anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily disarranged, and
asked me to help her with the adjustment of a hairpin. I had never in my
life been so near the soft curly hair and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid
and warm soft cheek of a girl, and I was stirred--

It stirs me now to recall it.

I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.

"Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.

She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot the
little electric stress between us in a rather meandering analysis of her
principal girl friends.

But afterwards she resumed her purpose.

I went to bed that night with one proposition overshadowing everything
else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was a difficult,
but not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any shadow of a doubt
whether on the whole it was worth doing. The thing had come into my
existence, disturbing and interrupting its flow exactly as a fever does.
Sybil had infected me with herself.

The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs
sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.
I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the
outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain, when
she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a book.

I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. I quite forget what
our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I might
kiss her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her face.

"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"

That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed a
growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil, combined
with an intense desire to get t