were pleased to doubt the existence of your charming
self?"

She looked up with a smile of pleasure and of perfect comprehension. He
could hardly have said anything more delicately caressing to her
self-love. It seemed, then, that every word she had uttered in his
hearing had been weighed and treasured up. She could hardly be supposed
to know that this power of noticing and preserving such little personal
details was one of the functions of the literary organism. If a woman
like Miss Fraser had been flattered by it, what must have been its
effect on the susceptible Audrey?

"So you remember that too?" she said, softly.

"Yes; it impressed me at the time. Now I know you better I don't wonder
at it. It's the fault of your very lovely and feminine idealism, but you
seem to me to have hardly any hold on the fact of existence, to be
unable to realise it. If I could only give you the sense of life--make
you feel the movement, the passion, the drama of it! My books have a
little of that; they've got the right atmosphere, the _smell_ of life.
But never mind my books. I don't want you to have another literary
craze--I beg your pardon, I mean phase; you seem to have had an artistic
one lately."

He rose to go.

"I've always cared for the great things of life," said she.

"Ah yes--the great things, stamped with other people's approval. I want
you to love life itself, so that you may be yourself, and feel yourself
being."

Her whole nature responded as the strings of the violin to the bow of
the master. "Life" was one of those words which specially stirred her
sensibility. As Wyndham had foreseen, it was a word to conjure with; and
now, as he had willed, the idea of it possessed her. She repeated
mechanically--

"Life--to love life for itself----"

"And first--you must know life in order to love it."

She sighed slightly, as if she had taken in a little more breath to say
good-bye. The ideal was flown. She had received the stamp of Wyndham's
spirit, as if it had been iron upon wax. It was her way of being herself
and feeling herself being.

The same evening she wrote a little note to Ted that ran thus:--

"DEAREST TED,--I have been thinking it all over, ever since
yesterday, and I am convinced that my only right course is to break
off our engagement. It has all been a mistake--mine and yours. Why
should we not recognise it, instead of each persisting in making the
other miserable? I release you f