and I thought
that might interfere with her work. If their friendship stole some hours
from Isabel's writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our
walks or our talks, or the close intimacy we had together.

4

Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.

The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find it
impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebble
started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the
barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been wearing down
unperceived.

And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the cycle
of nature, like the onset of spring--a sharp brightness, an uneasiness.
She became restless with her work; little encounters with men began to
happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the earlier proposals;
and then came an odd incident of which she told me, but somehow, I felt,
didn't tell me completely. She told me all she was able to tell me.
She had been at a dance at the Ropers', and a man, rather well known in
London, had kissed her. The thing amazed her beyond measure. It was the
sort of thing immediately possible between any man and any woman, that
one never expects to happen until it happens. It had the surprising
effect of a judge generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his
wig in court. No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the
same quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a
remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things it
seemed to open to her.

"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I
suppose every woman does."

She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."

This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to these
things. "Some one presently will--solve that," I said.

"Some one will perhaps."

I was silent.

"Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have to
stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master.... I'll be sorry to
give them up."

"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he
should be--oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts of new
topics, and open no end of attractive vistas.... You can't, you know,
always go about in a state of pupillage."

"I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently I've
begun to doubt about it."

I remember