deadened nerves. He was
trying to set in order the jumble that possessed his mind and to think
clear and straight.

The vague figure of a scented woman reading his letter haunted him,
and at moments Ingram was added to the picture, and he saw them
uniting in mockery of him--prosaic, prosperous author, and strange,
romantic serpent-woman!

Though that letter of five years before had been wrung from him, he
had written it with but the vaguest idea of sending it. A romantic
impulse had dictated its form as an appeal to a prominent novelist,
and it was only when he had finished it that the same romantic impulse
urged him to post it. His feeling about it was purely poetic, and he
scarcely realised he was addressing a real, living person. The
commercial world of literature was to him a mysterious, far-off chaos,
and at very bottom he had no belief the letter would be the means of
his getting nearer to it.

So far as he was concerned at the moment, he had sent his bolt flying
into the clouds, and the contingency of its being shown about had
never occurred to him; moreover, if Ingram had left his appeal
unanswered, the fact he now resented so much would never have come
within the sphere of his consciousness. But to become cognisant of it
years later at a moment of despair humiliated him unbearably. The mere
re-reading of the letter had already humiliated him, for the lapse of
time, the change of circumstance, the literary degeneration of Ingram,
and his very acquaintance with the man, had made him feel the words
very differently than when they had come spontaneously out of his
blood. His sense of their futility added to his resentment.

But as he now walked along he was beginning to be conscious that, side
by side with this resentment, had come something fantastic, something
luring, immanent in the far faintness of the scent that had perfumed
his letter.

He found himself repeating Browning's lines with a sense of the thrill
and romance of life.

"Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes
Of labdanum, and aloe balls,
Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes
From out her hair: such balsam falls
Down seaside mountain pedestals,
From treetops, where tired winds are fain,
Spent with the vast and howling main,
To treasure half their island-gain.

"And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud,
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;