tivating the gift of detachment. The
very chimney-pots have a remote abstracted air; the slopes of the slates
rise up around you, shutting you in on three sides, and throwing you so
far back on yourself; while before you lies the vast, misty network of
roofs, stretching eastward towards the heart of the city, and above you
is the open sky. It is even pleasant here on a day like this, a day with
all the ardour of summer in it, and all the languor of spring, with the
sun warming the slates at your back, and a soft breeze from the river
fanning your face. You must go up on to the leads on such a day to feel
the beauty and infinity of blue sky, the only beautiful and boundless
thing here, where there is no green earth to rival heaven.

Ted had certainly no taste for detachment, but he was so far advanced
towards metaphysical speculation that he was engaged in an analysis of
sensation. Off and on, ever since that day of unreasonable mirth and
subsequent madness, he had been a prey to remorse. He had kept away from
Audrey for a fortnight, during which time his imagination had run riot
through past, present, and future. Audrey had been sweet and confiding
from the first; she had believed in him with childlike simplicity, and
when she had trusted to his guidance in her innocent aestheticism, he,
like the coarse-minded villain that he was, had made fun of all her dear
little arrangements, those pathetic efforts to make her life beautiful.
He had made her cry, and then taken a brutal advantage of her tears. To
Ted's conscience, in the white-heat of his virgin passion, that
premature kiss, the kiss that transformed a boyish fancy into full-grown
love, was a crime. And yet she had forgiven him. All the time she had
been thinking, not of herself, but of him. Her words, hardly heeded at
the moment, came back to him like a dull sermon heard in some exalted
mood, and henceforth transfigured in memory. She had done well to
reproach him for his frivolity and want of purpose. She was so ready to
say pleasant things, that blame from her mouth was sweeter than its
praise. It showed that she cared more. By this time he had forgotten the
traits that had impressed him less pleasantly.

Happily for him, his passion for Audrey was at first altogether bound up
with his art. We are not all geniuses, but to some of us, once perhaps
in a lifetime, genius comes in the form of love. To Ted love came in the
form of genius, quickening his whole nature,