f disappointment, humiliation
and anger with this realization. I can still feel myself writing and
destroying letters to her, letters of satire, of protest. Oddly enough I
cannot recall the letter that at last I sent her, but it is eloquent of
the weak boyishness of my position that I sent it in our usual furtive
manner, accepted every precaution that confessed the impossibility of
our relationship. "No," she scribbled back, "you do not understand. I
cannot write. I must talk to you."

We had a secret meeting.

With Beatrice Normandy's connivance she managed to get away for the
better part of the day, and we spent a long morning in argument in the
Botanical Gardens--that obvious solitude--and afterwards we lunched upon
ham and ginger beer at a little open-air restaurant near the Broad Walk
and talked on until nearly four. We were so young that I think we both
felt, beneath our very real and vivid emotions, a gratifying sense of
romantic resourcefulness in this prolonged discussion. There is
something ridiculously petty and imitative about youth, something too,
naively noble and adventurous. I can never determine if older people are
less generous and imaginative or merely less absurd. I still recall the
autumnal melancholy of that queer, neglected-looking place, in which I
had never been before, and which I have never revisited--a memory of
walking along narrow garden paths beside queer leaf-choked artificial
channels of water under yellow-tinted trees, of rustic bridges going
nowhere in particular, and of a kind of brickwork ruined castle, greatly
decayed and ivy-grown, in which we sat for a long time looking out upon
a lawn and a wide gravel path leading to a colossal frontage of
conservatory.

I must have been resentful and bitter in the beginning of that talk. I
do not remember that I had any command of the situation or did anything
but protest throughout that day. I was too full of the egotism of the
young lover to mark Mary's moods and feelings. It was only afterwards
that I came to understand that she was not wilfully and deliberately
following the course that was to separate us, that she was taking it
with hesitations and regrets. Yet she spoke plainly enough, she spoke
with a manifest sincerity of feeling. And while I had neither the grasp
nor the subtlety to get behind her mind I perceive now as I think things
out that Lady Ladislaw had both watched and acted, had determined her
daughter's ideas, sown her mi