his life had run through it since first he and Euphemia
on a tandem bicycle and altogether very young had sought their ideal
home in the South of England--set his mind swinging and generalizing.
How freshly youthful he and Euphemia had been when first he came along
that road, how crude, how full of happy expectations of success; it had
been as bright and it was now as completely gone as the sunsets they had
seen together.

How great a thing life is! How much greater than any single romance, or
any individual affection! Since those days he had grown, he had
succeeded, he had suffered in a reasonable way of course, still he could
recall with a kind of satisfaction tears and deep week-long moods of
hopeless melancholy--and he had changed. And now dominating this
landscape, filling him with new emotions and desires and perplexing
intimations of ignorance and limitations he had never suspected in his
youth, was this second figure of a woman. She was different from
Euphemia. With Euphemia everything had been so simple and easy; until
that slight fading, that fatigue of entire success and satisfaction, of
the concluding years. He and Euphemia had always kept it up that they
had no thought in the world except for one another.... Yet if that had
been true, why hadn't he died when she did. He hadn't died--with
remarkable elasticity. Clearly in his case there had been these
unexplored, unsuspected hinterlands of possibility towards which Lady
Harman seemed now to be directing him. It came to him that afternoon as
an entirely fresh thought that there might also have been something in
Euphemia beyond their simple, so charmingly treated relationship. He
began to recall moments when Euphemia had said perplexing little things,
had looked at him with an expression that was unexpected, had
been--difficult....

I write of Mr. Brumley to tell you things about him and not to explain
him. It may be that the appetite for thorough good talks with people
grows upon one, but at any rate it did occur to Mr. Brumley on his way
to talk to Lady Harman, it occurred to him as a thing distressingly
irrevocable that he could now never have a thorough good talk with
Euphemia about certain neglected things between them. It would have
helped him so much....

His eyes rested as he thought of these things upon the familiar purple
hill crests, patched that afternoon with the lingering traces of a
recent snowstorm, the heather slopes, the dark mysterious wo