rk. But I have dreamt of the enchanted garden a thousand
dreams, and seen its door, or at least glimpsed its door, four times since
then. Yes--four times. For a while this world was so bright and
interesting, seemed so full of meaning and opportunity, that the
half-effaced charm of the garden was by comparison gentle and remote. Who
wants to pat panthers on the way to dinner with pretty women and
distinguished men? I came down to London from Oxford, a man of bold
promise that I have done something to redeem. Something--and yet there
have been disappointments...

"Twice I have been in love--I will not dwell on that--but once, as I went
to someone who, I knew, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a short
cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl's Court, and so
happened on a white wall and a familiar green door. 'Odd!' said I to
myself, 'but I thought this place was on Campden Hill. It's the place I
never could find somehow--like counting Stonehenge--the place of that
queer daydream of mine.' And I went by it intent upon my purpose. It had
no appeal to me that afternoon.

"I had just a moment's impulse to try the door, three steps aside were
needed at the most--though I was sure enough in my heart that it would
open to me--and then I thought that doing so might delay me on the way to
that appointment in which I thought my honour was involved. Afterwards I
was sorry for my punctuality--might at least have peeped in, I thought,
and waved a hand to those panthers, but I knew enough by this time not to
seek again belatedly that which is not found by seeking. Yes, that time
made me very sorry...

"Years of hard work after that, and never a sight of the door. It's only
recently it has come back to me. With it there has come a sense as though
some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world. I began to think of it
as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should never see that door again.
Perhaps I was suffering a little from overwork--perhaps it was what I've
heard spoken of as the feeling of forty. I don't know. But certainly the
keen brightness that makes effort easy has gone out of things recently,
and that just at a time--with all these new political developments--when I
ought to be working. Odd, isn't it? But I do begin to find life toilsome,
its rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago to
want the garden quite badly. Yes--and I've seen it three times."

"The garden?"

"No---the d