t compelled
one's startled admiration, even when one least wanted to accord it.
By Jove, how well he used to talk, on those evenings, when we sat and
dangled our legs from the window-sill, looking out at the barges! The
best talk I ever heard. You could have taken it all down in shorthand,
and not a word to alter.

"Then he got a regular job which kept him out for three evenings a week,
but he told me that mustn't make any difference to my habits: I was to
drop in just the same, whenever I wanted to; and since I hadn't anywhere
else to go, and since the house had become a home to me, I took him
at his word. In a way I missed him, on the evenings he wasn't there;
although I could no longer pretend to myself that I was fond of him, he
was a perpetual interest and stimulation to me, an angry stimulation,
if you can understand what I mean, and I missed his presence, if only
because it deprived me of the occupation of picking holes in him, and of
making mental pounces for my own satisfaction upon everything he said.
Not upon its intellectual value. That was above reproach. Only upon it
as a signpost to his character. I took a delight in silently finding
fault with him. But presently this desire passed from me, and I came
to prefer the repose of the evenings I spent alone with his wife to the
strenuousness of the evenings when we were all three together. We talked
very little, his wife and I, when he was not there. She had about her an
amazing quality of restfulness, of which I quickly got into the habit of
taking advantage, after the vulgar, competitive days of a journalist's
existence. You can't imagine what it meant to me, to drift into the
seclusion of that little Chelsea room, with the mistiness of the trees
and the river outside the window, to be greeted by her smile, and to
sink into my familiar arm-chair, where I might lounge sucking at my pipe
and watching the cool glimmer of her beautiful hands over the rhythm of
her needle. Can you wonder that we didn't talk much? And can you wonder
that our silence became heavy with the things we hadn't said?

"Not at first. Our love-affair ran a course contrary to the usual
ordering of such things. If it indeed ended in all the fever and pain of
passion, it certainly began with all the calm of the hearth; yes, I went
through a long phase of accepting that room as my home, and that gentle
woman as my natural companion therein. I don't think I examined the
situation at all closely