able lady. She is
one of my relaxations. All Paris talks about her, I can assure you."

"I had no idea," I said.

"Oh, cultivate her," he said; "you will be amused."

"I will," I said, as I took my leave.

I went straight home to my little room above the roofs. I began at once
to write my article, working at high pressure, almost hysterically. I
remember that place and that time so well. In moments of emotion one
gazes fixedly at things, hardly conscious of them. Afterward one
remembers.

I can still see the narrow room, the bare, brown, discoloured walls, the
incongruous marble clock on the mantel-piece, the single rickety chair
that swayed beneath me. I could almost draw the tortuous pattern of the
faded cloth that hid the round table at which I sat. The ink was thick,
pale, and sticky; the pen spluttered. I wrote furiously, anxious to be
done with it. Once I went and leaned over the balcony, trying to hit on
a word that would not come. Miles down below, little people crawled over
the cobbled street, little carts rattled, little workmen let down casks
into a cellar. It was all very grey, small, and clear.

Through the open window of an opposite garret I could see a sculptor
working at a colossal clay model. In his white blouse he seemed big, out
of all proportion to the rest of the world. Level with my eyes there
were flat lead roofs and chimneys. On one of these was scrawled, in big,
irregular, blue-painted letters: "_A has Coignet_."

Great clouds began to loom into view over the house-tops, rounded,
toppling masses of grey, lit up with sullen orange against the pale
limpid blue of the sky. I stood and looked at all these objects. I had
come out here to think--thoughts had deserted me. I could only look.

The clouds moved imperceptibly, fatefully onward, a streak of lightning
tore them apart. They whirled like tortured smoke and grew suddenly
black. Large spots of rain with jagged edges began to fall on the lead
floor of my balcony.

I turned into the twilight of my room and began to write. I can still
feel the tearing of my pen-point on the coarse paper. It was a hindrance
to thought, but my flow of words ignored it, gained impetus from it, as
a stream does at the breaking of a dam.

I was writing a paean to a great coloniser. That sort of thing was in the
air then. I was drawn into it, carried away by my subject. Perhaps I let
it do so because it was so little familiar to my lines of thought. It
was fr