ed:

"You will hardly believe me, but almost the only thing I can
revive--that is, have revived so far--is an occurrence that must
needs at the time have been a happiness and a delight. And yet it now
presents itself to me as an excruciating torment--as part of some
tragedy in which I had to be an actor, but of which I can seize no
detail that does not at once vanish, leaving mere pain and confusion."

"What was it? You don't mind...."

"Mind telling you? Oh no!--why should I? I may be happier if I can
tell it. It's like this. I am at a railway-station in the heat
somewhere, and am expecting a girl who is coming to marry me. I can
remember the heat and our meeting, and then all is Chaos again. Then,
instead of remembering more, I go over and over again the old thing as
at first.... No! nothing new presents itself. Only the railway-station
and the palm-trees in the heat. And the train coming slowly in, and
my knowing that she is in it, and coming to marry me."

"Do you mean that the vision--or scene--in your mind stops dead, and
you don't see her get out of the carriage?"

They had walked on slowly again a short distance. Fenwick made another
halt, and as he flicked away a most successful crop of cigar-ash that
he had been cultivating--so it struck Vereker--as a kind of gauge or
test of his own self-control, he answered:

"I couldn't say that. Hardly! I see a girl or woman get out of the
carriage, but _not her_...!"

Vereker was completely at a loss--began to be a little afraid his
companion's brain might be giving way. "How _can_ you tell that,"
said he, "unless you know who she ought to have been?"

Fenwick resumed his walk, and when he replied did so in a voice that
had less tension in it, as though something less painful had touched
his mind:

"It's rum, I grant you. But the whole thing is too rum to bear
thinking of--at least, to bear talking about. As to the exact reason
_why_ I know it's not her, that's simple enough!"

"What is it?"

"Because Mrs. Fenwick gets out of the train--my Rosey, here, Sally's
mother. And it's just the same with the only other approach to a
memory that connects itself with it--a shadowy, indistinct ceremony,
also in the heat, much more indistinct than the railway-station.
My real wife's image--Rosey's, here--just takes the place at the
altar where the other one should be, and prevents my getting at any
recollection of her. It is the only thing that makes the dream
bearable.