these things being said, but just how much we saw and
understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each other
then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon after this
that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with the
curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had happened plain
before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We just
assumed the new footing....

It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there was
thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other people
had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression of greenish
colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very much of our talk,
as though we were nearly all the time in the Tropical House. But I
also remember very vividly looking at certain orange and red spray-like
flowers from Patagonia, which could not have been there. It is a curious
thing that I do not remember we made any profession of passionate love
for one another; we talked as though the fact of our intense love for
each other had always been patent between us. There was so long and
frank an intimacy between us that we talked far more like brother and
sister or husband and wife than two people engaged in the war of the
sexes. We wanted to know what we were going to do, and whatever we
did we meant to do in the most perfect concert. We both felt an
extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness then, and, what
again is curious, very little passion. But there was also, in spite of
the perplexities we faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It
was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each
other, like people who unvizored to talk more easily at a masked ball.

I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the ordinary
observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous contrast with all
that really went on between us. I suppose there I should figure as a
wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl succumbed to my fascinations.
As a matter of fact, it didn't occur to us that there was any personal
inequality between us. I knew her for my equal mentally; in so many
things she was beyond comparison cleverer than I; her courage outwent
mine. The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the
response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching
sunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boa