letters, and more
than this, I formulated once for all, though I did not know it then,
such theory of life as I have found necessary ever since. What it may
have been does not so much matter: if I have failed to illustrate it
in my life, if I have, even, failed to make it reasonably clear in
this rough sketch of the most vital interests of my life, it cannot
have been very valuable.

Among my correspondents at this time neither Roger nor his wife was
numbered. This was not strange, for he was a poor letter-writer,
except for business purposes or in a real necessity, and she had never
been taught so much as to write her own name! But I heard from them
indirectly, and as Roger, it turned out, supposed me to have gone on a
long hunting trip through the Rockies, neither of us was alarmed by
the three months' silence.

A strange, dozing peace had settled over me; though I thought of them
often, it was as one thinks of persons and scenes infinitely removed,
with which he has no logical connection, only a veiled, softened
interest. Margarita seemed, against the background of the moist,
pearly English autumn, like some gorgeous and unbelievable tropical
bird, shooting, all orange and indigo, across a grey cloud. It was
impossible that I, a quiet chess-player sitting opposite his friend,
the impractical student of Eastern Religions, could have to do with
such a vivid anomaly as she must always be. It was unlikely that the
silent, moody man strolling for hours through mist-filled English
lanes, pipe in mouth, dog at heels should ever run athwart that lovely
troubler of man's mind, that babyish woman, that all-too-well-ripened
child.

My Christmas holidays were quietly passed with the Oriental Professor
in his tiny Surrey cottage, where he and his dear old sister, a quaint
little vignette of a woman, forgot the world among her pansy beds. She
was not visible at that time, however, owing to a teasing influenza
which kept her in bed, and our hostess was her trained nurse, a quiet,
capable little American, with a firm hand-grip and kind brown eyes,
already set in fine, watchful wrinkles. She rarely spoke, except in
the obvious commonplaces of courtesy, and our days were wonderfully
still. The Professor taught me Persian, in a desultory way, and chess
most rigorously, for he was hard put to it for an opponent even partly
worthy of his prodigious skill. He was a member of all the most select
societies of learning in the world, an E