had followed from London to Venice and from Venice back to London
again. I afterwards learned that her version of this episode was
profusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had been determined
by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connexion with what had
gone before--a coincidence at all events superficially striking. At
Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, he
had found himself at the table d'hote of his inn opposite to the full
presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy had made him dream
and desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so vertiginous as to
involve a retreat from the board; but the next day he had dropped with a
resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition. On the following,
with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters,
whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a
fate of which he had already felt the cold breath. That fate, in London,
very little later, drove him straight before it--drove him one Sunday
afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the Hammond Synges. He marched in
other words close up to the cannon that was to blow him to pieces. But
three weeks, when he reappeared to me, had elapsed since then, yet (to
vary my metaphor) the burden he was to carry for the rest of his days was
firmly lashed to his back. I don't mean by this that Flora had been
persuaded to contract her scope; I mean that he had been treated to the
unconditional snub which, as the event was to show, couldn't have been
bettered as a means of securing him. She hadn't calculated, but she had
said "Never!" and that word had made a bed big enough for his long-legged
patience. He became from this moment to my mind the interesting figure
in the piece.

Now that he had acted without my aid I was free to show him this, and
having on his own side something to show me he repeatedly knocked at my
door. What he brought with him on these occasions was a simplicity so
huge that, as I turn my ear to the past, I seem even now to hear it
bumping up and down my stairs. That was really what I saw of him in the
light of his behaviour. He had fallen in love as he might have broken
his leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanently
lame. It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of him
left in the same position as before. The tremendous cleverness, the
literary society, the poli