said. "I am off to Ashbridge in two
days. Give Hermann my love, and a jolly Christmas to you both. I'll let
you know when I am back in town."

She had no reply to this; she saw its justice, and acquiesced.

"Good-bye, then," said Michael.

He walked home from Chelsea in that utterly blank and unfeeling
consciousness which almost invariably is the sequel of any event that
brings with it a change of attitude towards life generally. Not for a
moment did he tell himself that he had been awakened from a dream, or
abandon his conviction that his dream was to be made real. The rare,
quiet determination that had made him give up his stereotyped mode of
life in the summer and take to music was still completely his, and, if
anything, it had been reinforced by Sylvia's emphatic statement that
"she wanted to care." Only her imagining that their old relations could
go on showed him how far she was from knowing what "to care" meant. At
first without knowing it, but with a gradually increasing keenness of
consciousness, he had become aware that this sisterly attitude of hers
towards him had meant so infinitely much, because he had taken it to be
the prelude to something more. Now he saw that it was, so to speak, a
piece complete in itself. It bore no relation to what he had imagined
it would lead into. No curtain went up when the prelude was over; the
curtain remained inexorably hanging there, not acknowledging the prelude
at all. Not for a moment did he accuse her of encouraging him to have
thought so; she had but given him a frankness of comradeship that meant
to her exactly what it expressed. But he had thought otherwise; he had
imagined that it would grow towards a culmination. All that (and here
was the change that made his mind blank and unfeeling) had to be cut
away, and with it all the budding branches that his imagination had
pictured as springing from it. He could not be comrade to her as he was
to her brother--the inexorable demands of sex forbade it.

He went briskly enough through the clean, dry streets. The frost of last
night had held throughout the morning, and the sunlight sparkled with
a rare and seasonable brightness of a traditional Christmas weather.
Hecatombs of turkeys hung in the poulterers' windows, among sprigs of
holly, and shops were bright with children's toys. The briskness of
the day had flushed the colour into the faces of the passengers in the
street, and the festive air of the imminent holiday wa