n expectation to which she yielded herself as a wild sea-bird to the
rocking of the sea. They had started--those conversations--from her
attempt to penetrate the secret history of the man whose poems had
filled her with a thrilling sense of feelings and passions beyond her
ken--untrodden regions, full, no doubt, of shadow and of poison, but
infinitely alluring to one whose nature was best summed up in the two
words, curiosity and daring. She had not found it quite easy. Cliffe, as
we know, had resented the levity of her first attempt. But when she
renewed it, more seriously and sweetly, combining with it a number of
subtle flatteries, the flattery of her beauty and her position, of the
private interest she could not help showing in the man who was her
husband's public antagonist, and of an admiration for his poems which
was not so much mere praise as an actual covetous sharing in them, a
making their ideas and their music her own--Cliffe could not in the end
resist her. After all, so far, she only asked him to talk of himself,
and for a man of his type the process is the very breath of his being,
the stimulus and liberation of all his powers.

So that before they knew they were in the midst of the most burning
subjects of human discussion--at first in a manner comparatively veiled
and general, then with the sharpest personal reference to Cliffe's own
story, as the intimacy between them grew. Jealousy, suffering, the "hard
cases" of passion--why men are selfish and exacting, why women mislead
and torment--the ugly waste and crudity of death--it was among these
great themes they found themselves. Death above all--it was to a thought
of death that Cliffe's harsh face owed its chief spell perhaps in
Kitty's eyes. A woman had died for love of him, crushed by his jealousy
and her own self-scorn. So Kitty had been told; and Cliffe's tortured
vanity would not deny it. How could she have cared so much? That was the
puzzle.

But this vicarious relation had now passed into a relation of her own.
Cliffe was to Kitty a problem--and a problem which, beyond a certain
point, defied her. The element of sex, of course, entered in, but only
as intensifying the contrasts and mysteries of imagination. And he made
her feel these contrasts and mysteries as she had never yet felt them;
and so he enlarged the world for her, he plunged her, if only by
contact with his own bitter and irritable genius, into new regions of
sentiment and feeling. F