n the middle of his little private room in Lincoln's Inn Fields at a
considerable distance from Chelsea. The physical distance increased his
desperation. He began pacing in circles until the process sickened him,
and then took a sheet of paper for the composition of a letter which, he
vowed before he began it, should be sent that same evening.

It was a difficult matter to put into words; poetry would have done it
better justice, but he must abstain from poetry. In an infinite number
of half-obliterated scratches he tried to convey to her the possibility
that although human beings are woefully ill-adapted for communication,
still, such communion is the best we know; moreover, they make it
possible for each to have access to another world independent of
personal affairs, a world of law, of philosophy, or more strangely a
world such as he had had a glimpse of the other evening when together
they seemed to be sharing something, creating something, an ideal--a
vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances. If this golden
rim were quenched, if life were no longer circled by an illusion (but
was it an illusion after all?), then it would be too dismal an affair
to carry to an end; so he wrote with a sudden spurt of conviction which
made clear way for a space and left at least one sentence standing
whole. Making every allowance for other desires, on the whole this
conclusion appeared to him to justify their relationship. But the
conclusion was mystical; it plunged him into thought. The difficulty
with which even this amount was written, the inadequacy of the words,
and the need of writing under them and over them others which, after
all, did no better, led him to leave off before he was at all satisfied
with his production, and unable to resist the conviction that such
rambling would never be fit for Katharine's eye. He felt himself more
cut off from her than ever. In idleness, and because he could do nothing
further with words, he began to draw little figures in the blank spaces,
heads meant to resemble her head, blots fringed with flames meant to
represent--perhaps the entire universe. From this occupation he was
roused by the message that a lady wished to speak to him. He had
scarcely time to run his hands through his hair in order to look as much
like a solicitor as possible, and to cram his papers into his pocket,
already overcome with shame that another eye should behold them, when he
realized that his preparatio