ne's
self. I used to sit working in one of those tall, panelled rooms, very
high up in the air. I was writing at the series of articles for the
_Bi-Monthly_, for Polehampton. I was to get the atmosphere of Paris, you
remember. It was rather extraordinary, that process. Up there I seemed
to be as much isolated from Paris as if I had been in--well, in Hampton
Court. It was almost impossible to write; I had things to think about:
preoccupations, jealousies. It was true I had a living to make, but that
seemed to have lost its engrossingness as a pursuit, or at least to have
suspended it.

The panels of the room seemed to act as a sounding-board, the belly of
an immense 'cello. There were never any noises in the house, only
whispers coming from an immense distance--as when one drops stones down
an unfathomable well and hears ages afterward the faint sound of
disturbed waters. When I look back at that time I figure myself as
forever sitting with uplifted pen, waiting for a word that would not
come, and that I did not much care about getting. The panels of the room
would creak sympathetically to the opening of the entrance-door of the
house, the faintest of creaks; people would cross the immense hall to
the room in which they plotted; would cross leisurely, with laughter and
rustling of garments that after a long time reached my ears in whispers.
Then I should have an access of mad jealousy. I wanted to be part of her
life, but I could not stand that Salon of suspicious conspirators. What
could I do there? Stand and look at them, conscious that they all
dropped their voices instinctively when I came near them?

That was the general tone of that space of time, but, of course, it was
not always that. I used to emerge now and then to breakfast
sympathetically with my aunt, sometimes to sit through a meal with the
two of them. I danced attendance on them singly; paid depressing calls
with my aunt; calls on the people in the Faubourg; people without any
individuality other than a kind of desiccation, the shrivelled
appearance and point of view of a dried pippin. In revenge, they had
names that startled one, names that recalled the generals and _flaneurs_
of an impossibly distant time; names that could hardly have had any
existence outside the memoirs of Madame de Sevigne, the names of people
that could hardly have been fitted to do anything more vigorous than be
reflected in the mirrors of the _Salle des Glaces_. I was so absolute