III + 

Slowly, she first, we went down the narrow stairs to my landing. In the sudden flare of my match there was revealed a threepenny-bit of flesh just above the heel of her left shoe, and I had occasion to rebuke myself on the depravity that is man. She said over her shoulder: “Hilary Townshend has told me about you.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But he has never told me about you!” + 

“Oh, he would if you provoked him!” + 

“And may I?” + 

But she did not seem to hear. Once Hilary had, I thought, said something about Gerald March having a sister, but I had not connected the vaguely heard name of Mrs. Storm with her. I don’t know why, but I had always imagined Gerald’s sister as a schoolgirl living somewhere in the country with a bankrupt old gentleman called Lord Portairley, Gerald’s uncle. + 

We were on my small landing now, in the light that plunged out of the half-open door of my sitting-room: she with a foot on the stairs leading downwards, away. + 

“Goodbye,” she said. “Really, I think you’ve been very kind.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She seemed to me very nice and gentle; yes, nice; and then it seemed to me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself. I was on another planet. Hilary tells me now that he also had that feeling with her; but Hilary must have struggled against it, whereas I am incapable of struggling against any feeling. + 

“Goodbye,” I said. + 

I was looking not at her but through the half-open door into my room. There lay the disorder of my life, the jumble, the lack of purpose, the silence, and the defeat of my life. I wasn’t, it seems almost an intrusion to say, very happy in those days; but that is by the way in the history of Gerald March and Iris Storm. + 

Now here is the difficult part of this history. Of the many gaps it will contain, this seems to me the most grave, the least excusable. One should write, if not well, at least plausibly, about the things that happen. And yet I cannot be plausible about this, because I do not know how it happened. I mean, how she came into my room and sat down. I did not ask her. Did she want to? Mrs. Storm was a lady who gave you a sense of the conventions. Mrs. Storm was a⁠ ⁠… and yet⁠ ⁠… I do not know anything about her. + 

I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add her together; and, of course, failing. She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her⁠—foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?⁠—as someone who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called being human, shall have finally annihilated each other in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality. + 

We have all of us a crude desire to “place” our fellows in this or that category or class: we like to know more or less what they are, so that, maybe, we may know more or less what we shall be to them. But, even with the knowledge that she was Gerald’s sister, that she was twenty-nine years old, that she was the niece of Lord Portairley, you could not, anyhow I couldn’t, “place” Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather despairing one, that she didn’t fit in anywhere, to any class, nay, to any nationality. She wasn’t that ghastly thing called “Bohemian,” she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society,” “county,” upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not. In her eyes you saw the landscape of England, spacious and brave; but you felt unreasonably certain that she was as devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart. She gave you a sense of the conventions; but she gave you⁠—unaware always, impersonal always, and those cool, sensible eyes!⁠—a much deeper sense that she was somehow outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge as to what is and what is not conventional. That was why, I am trying to show, I felt so profoundly incapable with her. It was not as though one was nonexistent; it was as though, with her, one existed only in the most limited sense. And, I suppose, she affected me particularly in that way simply because I am a man of my time. For that is a limitation a man can’t get beyond⁠—to be of his time, completely. He may be successful, a man like that⁠—indeed, should he not blow his brains out if he is not?⁠—but he who is of his time may never rise above himself: he is the galley-slave working incessantly at the oars of his life, which reflects the lives of the multitude of his fellows. Yes, I am of my time. And so I had with this woman that profound sense of incapability, of defeat, which any limited man must feel with a woman whose limitations he cannot know. She was⁠—in that phrase of Mr. Conrad’s which can mean so little or so much⁠—she was of all time. She was, when the first woman crawled out of the mud of the primeval world. She would be, when the last woman walks towards the unmentionable end. + 

“Goodbye,” I said, and then, as I looked from the disordered room and my disenchanted life at her, the eyes in the shadow of the green hat were brilliant with laughter, so that I was stunned. “Why are you laughing?” I asked, or perhaps I did not ask that, perhaps she had not been laughing at all, for when I was recovered from my stupor her eyes were quite grave, and dark as in a crypt. I pushed open the door of my room. + 

“How I would like,” she said, that husky voice, “a glass of cold water!” That was what she said, and so I let her go in alone into the sitting-room, whilst I turned on the tap in the bathroom. Fiercely and long I let the water run, pleased with the way it was filling the little house with its clean roar, pleased with the clean scent of the rushing water, which is always like the scent of cool sunlight. Then she said: “You have had a quick bath,” and so we became friends. + 

She stood among the littered books on the floor, looking round at the disorder, like a tulip with a green head. She sipped the water, looking round wisely over the rim of the tumbler. I explained that I was leaving tomorrow, and therefore the disorder. + 

We talked. + 

In that disordered room, so littered with books that you might hardly take a step without stumbling over one, it was not difficult to talk. Indeed, it is never so easy to talk about books as when they are about the floor, so that you may turn them over with your foot, see what they are, pick them up and drop them anywhere with no precious nonsense as to where they should exactly go. + 

She waved her glass of water about, sipping it. A drop of water clung like a gem to the corner of her painted mouth. It was not fair. + 

Talking with her in that room was like talking with her as we walked on a windy heath: she threw out things, you caught all you could of them, you missed what you liked, and you threw something back. Now and then something would turn up in a voice which was suddenly strong and clear, and every time her voice was strong and clear you were so surprised that you did not hear so well as when she spoke inaudibly. She had none of the organised, agonised grimaces of the young lady of fashion. But one knew she was not a young lady of fashion, for she hadn’t a sulky mouth. + 

Hers was that random, uninformed, but severely discriminating taste which maddens you: you try unsuccessfully to think that there is nothing at the back of it, nothing but a misty criterion of enjoyment. She used some words as though she had never heard anyone else using them. “Nice,” for instance, she used in a calmly immense sense. The word seemed turned topsy-turvy, and to turn everything else topsy-turvy. She used the word “common,” I think, to denote a thing attempted and achieved scratchily. Mr. Ernest Bramah was, for instance, not “common.” But Miss Clemence Dane in Legend was. “Oh, come!” I said, for to me Legend is an achievement in literature. + 

“All those women talking and dissecting and yearning together,” she said. “Their breath smells of⁠ ⁠… oh, red hair!” She thought Miss Romer Wilson was among the greatest writers of the time: The Grand Tour particularly. She was loyal to girlish admirations for Mr. Locke, Mr. Temple Thurston, Oscar Wilde. D. H. Lawrence was “nice.” “Nice?” I said. “Well, wonderful,” she said, with wide eyes, so that I was made to seem slow and stupid. M. Paul Morand was “common,” a “stunt” writer. + 

“I detest the word ‘stunt,’ ” I said. + 

“That is why,” she said, “I used it about Monsieur Morand. He is an abbreviation, like nightie for nightshirt.” I did not agree with her. She did not like abbreviations, even lunch for luncheon. “What,” she asked, “is the hurry?” I could not tell her. She thought that perhaps English was not the language for abbreviations and diminutives. She deferred to my judgment about that, and I said what I said. One just didn’t discuss Barrie: there he was. “You can’t laugh me out of him,” she smiled, “by calling him whimsical.” She had once enjoyed a book by Mr. Compton Mackenzie, a garden catalogue called Guy and Pauline. There was Hergesheimer. She put up a gallant, insincere defence for the Imagistes, but it turned out that she had never read any, and wasn’t at all sure what they were. “They’re short for poetry,” I said coldly, “like nightie for nightingale.” But perhaps the book she most profoundly liked was The Passionate Friends, with perhaps the last part of Tono-Bungay. “And, of course,” she said, “The Good Soldier,” Mr. Ford Maddox Hueffer’s amazing romance. From a table she picked up Joyce’s Ulysses, looked at it vaguely, dropped it absently on the floor amongst the others. I held a watching financial brief for it. One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s. + 

“It’s a funny thing,” she mused.⁠ ⁠… + 

“What’s a funny thing?” + 

“Satirists.⁠ ⁠… They are all very plain men. Grubby, too. Why?” + 

“Why?” I said. “But, really⁠—” + 

She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Genius,” I said, “has⁠—” + 

“Of course, genius. But⁠—” + 

“They are striving,” I said, “for⁠—” + 

“Yes, I know. But why are they always so ugly? I mean, these people called ‘satirists.’ One sees them abroad, at the Rotonde, or in Rome, Florence.⁠ ⁠…” I saw her among them, the small white face, the cool, sensible, huge eyes, very attentive, deferring. “They marry plain, too. Always. Invariably. Why? And man and wife hang on to each other like grim death, despising everything hard. And they come out in spots. Why? One just wonders.⁠ ⁠… It seems to need very ugly men with very unattractive wives to despise things, to show us our ugliness. Has ever any even fairly human-looking person ever been a ‘satirist’? But I suppose if they weren’t so plain they wouldn’t have so much time to be obscene on paper. Or am I talking nonsense?” + 

“It’s absurd,” I said, “to make it a question of looks⁠—” + 

“But it makes me furious!” she said in that suddenly strong clear voice. “These despisers. These grubby clever men with their grubby genius. The heroes of the weekly reviews. Their impotent little obscenities. I’ve tried to find, in knowing them and reading them, a great, real contempt, something as fierce and clean as fire, a nightmare of contempt, so that from the pillars of burning smoke we can build beings of better shape than ourselves. I’ve read, watched, listened, wanting to know.⁠ ⁠…” + 

I said things, too. But who am I? For instance, I said: “You don’t allow to all men one common failing, which shows particularly when the men are satirical writers: they must always write about women rather in the spirit of uncleanminded undergraduates. You should be more tolerant, Mrs. Storm.⁠ ⁠…” + 

We talked of vulgarity. She had once read a book of mine, and I complained bitterly of my vulgarity, saying, you know, that one didn’t begin by being vulgar, “but one began,” I suggested, “by being just bumptious. The meeker you are, the more bumptious you probably are inside, but that does not harm. Not that I was ever really meek. And at the beginning there’s a tremendous humility in you to yourself. You can’t have any achievement without that humility, and yet you lose it later on because you find out all the wrong things about yourself. People are only too ready to show you the wrong things about yourself. They like doing it. They seem to think there is something wrong with conceit. It irritates fools, because they think it is unwarranted. How do they know if it is unwarranted, and what does it matter if it is or not? Or it irritates them because they too once had in themselves a humility to themselves, and then allowed it to be, according to that Bottomley-Kipling-John-Bull gospel, ‘knocked out of them.’ And so if a young man is not very strong he lets the mischievous fools take his conceit away from him, he turns his back on his real conceit, which is himself⁠—he has it ‘knocked out of him,’ just as any taste for music was knocked out of him by his public-school⁠—and goes out for one of the spurious conceits which are called ‘being as others are.’ Then he has put his feet on the endless and never-ending road of vulgarity, and there are very few turnings.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She sat in the deep wicker armchair, which had come with me from Chelsea six years before but would travel nevermore. It creaked madly as she sat down, and she glanced at it in surprise. “Of course,” she said, “it’s contagious.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You are quite wrong,” I said. “The real sticky part seems to come from inside one. And there, you see, is where a writer has a sense of defeat⁠—a writer, I mean, who must earn his living by writing, and so must always write. For it is more difficult for a second-rate writer not to be vulgar than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. It uncoils from somewhere inside you, like a nasty, sticky snake. So slick it is, too. So helpful, often. And when you see it for the first time you stare at it transfixed, and you say, ‘But I am not vulgar!’ But you get used to it later on. Very few people notice it. Most people like it. And, of course, it pays.” + 

“The golden snake,” she said. “It’s quite a good snake. It is silly to despise money.” + 

“Writers,” I said, and, I think, said rightly, “love money, they adore money! Successful writers, I mean. The ones who have become venerable, the ones who have made great names by writing about the irony of life and the incapabilities of wealth, the writers of the people for the people. They worship money, they hoard money. One and all despise rich people, and are perfectly beastly about the upper-classes. You should ask any publisher about the business capacity of any great author who writes about the Irony of Life. To really intelligent men of the middle-classes, living in sin does not seem nearly so wicked as living in luxurious sin. I only know one successful author who has the decency to get drunk with his easily-earned money. One should keep a sense of proportion about money, and you can only do that by throwing it away. The Jews, for instance⁠—” + 

“Jews,” she said, “are charming. The rich ones, I mean, and preferably the fat shiny ones. They understand luxury and elegance, and elegance is an enchantment that the skin loves. But nowadays only Jews have an idea of enchantment, only Jews and Americans. Furs, jewels, spacious rooms, trellised terraces, all lovely baubles, silks of China, myrrh, frankincense, and motorcars. The Jews are disenchanted, but at least they’re brave enough to insist on having all the enchantments of disenchantment. Luxury, ease, splendour, spaciousness. You’ll say they’re florid. Well, they may be, they are, but they’re also the last towers of chivalry. Mr. Chesterton goes running after them shouting about beer and the Pope, but if you’re going to leave chivalry to beer-drinkers and the Pope, God help enchantment. You’ll say that the Americans’ indulgent admiration for their wives almost borders on the gaga, but they fight for it very really, they don’t just talk and indulge. They fight with money, they have the courage of their cheques, they dare tremendous duels, they get up at unearthly hours in the morning to dash towards the rendezvous, and they draw a cheque just as gallantly as any rather caddish cavalier ever drew a sword.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Englishmen,” I said, “respect their women.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Maybe,” she said absently. + 

We were impersonal. Now and then the wicker armchair creaked beneath her, and she looked at it with faint surprise. Now and then a car screamed on Piccadilly, an electric-landau sounded its bells through Shepherd’s Market towards its garage by Camelot House. Now and then her slightly husky voice expired. Then we waited a while. She stared deeply into the eyes of a mask which a Russian artist had once given me in exchange for a poker debt. It lay sideways against a corner of the fender. I waited for her to say something about that, for it was the mask of a Florentine gentleman that was a lecher. I had grown used to it, as one can grow used to anything, but people would remark on it adversely. The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where you are. + 

We became personal. She said: “Let us talk about our friends now.” + 

“Tonight,” I said, “I have been to a party at the Hallidays’.” + 

“Ah, the pitiless vulgarians! Surely, between us, we can do better than that!” + 

“There’s Hilary.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“The sweet! Can you not love Hilary? But tonight,” she said very seriously, “I have been dining with old Maurice Harpenden. How he would hate me to say old! I went out all the way to Sutton Marle to do that, because he expects it of me when I am in England. We are enemies, and we watch each other. He was very courtly. They are difficult to deal with, handsome old men who have known one since one was so high. You need to be a woman to know what I mean, but you must try to pretend for a minute. Thank you. Organically, of course, they are perfect. Good features and long legs and iron-grey hair. Character and clothes by Robert Hichens. They are very courtly, and then they touch one. Now, why do they do that? They pretend to do it in a friendly way, as any gentleman of the old school might to the daughter of another gentleman of the old school: but they make opportunities.⁠ ⁠…” The husky voice committed suicide, was buried, and in the third second rose from the dead. “I do not understand men. I do not understand the ‘old school’ type of man, nor what ‘old school’ means, unless it means that you never did anything at school except win the Battle of Waterloo. Then as soon as you left school you were qualified by good-looks, a charm of manner, and a habit of becoming popular with elderly men which is peculiar to right-minded young Englishmen, to become Major-General Sir Maurice Harpenden, K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., and to lead your troops in battle with that gallant inefficiency patented by English infantry-commanders who know a good horse when they see one. After which you can spend the rest of your life in bantering. You can see that I do not like Maurice. We dine, and we are enemies, and we watch each other.” + 

“The sire doesn’t seem very like the son. Napier is a saint.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The chair creaked. She was looking at me from under her hat, gravely as a Red Indian. “There were two roads leading from a certain tree, and when we were eighteen life said to me, ‘You go this way,’ and life said to Napier, ‘You go that way.’ And so we did that, and so it has been.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Now I was staring at her mouth, which was a silky red mouth engraved with I don’t know how many deep downward lines, and my heart beat twice so loudly that I wondered if she had heard it, for she whispered sharply: “Listen!” But it was only a clock striking somewhere in London, and its striking was quickly done. + 

“I must go,” she said, but not even the armchair creaked, and her green hat was still crushed against the back of the chair, and her eyes were still staring profoundly over my shoulder. There was only the window there. The curtains were not drawn, and I thought I would draw them, but it seemed a pity to move. Her eyes glowed like an animal’s. She was staring, absorbed, over my right shoulder, but there was only the window there. She was asleep. Then her eyes dilated into glowing points, and her lips said: “On a envie.” + 

Then she made a gesture of distaste. + 

She said: “There are desires.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Heavens, do you need to tell me that!” + 

“Oh, not those desires!” Expressionless, blazing eyes absorbed over my shoulder, she waved away “those desires.” I was snubbed. + 

“They call it,” she said, “the desire-for-I-know-not-what. They will find it one day when we are dead and all things that live now are dead. They will find it when everything is dead but the dreams we have no words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine, nor opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that is unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there. Life’s best gift, hasn’t someone said, is the ability to dream of a better life.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The green hat crushed recklessly against the back of the chair, she stared, still and absorbed, at the names that friends of long-ago had written on the ceiling with smoke of candle-flame. Her eyes glowed, glowed like an animal’s. The light of the reading-lamp on the littered table by my elbow kissed her lip, and the light kissed the faint, faint down on her lip into a few minutes of existence as a garden of gold dust. A sword lay in my mind, twisting and shining among the inner grotesqueries where we keep ourselves, in the real sense, to ourselves. + 

I forced my mind to a more legal aspect of her. There were two rings on her wedding finger. A narrow circle of platinum, a narrow circle of gold. I wondered if she had been married twice. I tried to imagine her husbands. They would be tall, handsome men, and she would be passionately in love with them. She would, like all women in love with tall, handsome men, be worshipful as a dog. Physically they would be very courteous to her, but no more than courteous, and mentally they would, if I may say so, treat her rough. They would go to sleep quickly, and she would lie awake far into the night, pressing her breasts, because they hurt her. She would think. She would not think. Then one day, when she was between thinking and not thinking, she would be unfaithful, and the tall, handsome man who was her husband would apologise to her for not having understood her better. But she would say, with cold eyes: “There is nothing to understand. On a envie.” Then he would say, “Oh!” and instruct her lawyers to divorce him. + 

“I was trying,” I said, “to imagine your husband.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The chair creaked, and from the shadow of the hat one blue eye looked at me like a blue stone worn by fire. “Two,” she said. “They are dead.” + 

I wondered what she saw, looking over my shoulder. She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains. Then suddenly the headlines of a penny paper of two years ago unrolled before my mind, stood livid against my memory, slashed with the name of Storm. I had not a doubt but that he had been her second husband. “V.C. murdered. Sinn Feiners kill Captain Storm, V.C. Left on roadside with five bullet wounds.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She said suddenly: “I am a house of men.” + 

“What!” I said. “You surprise me.” + 

“A house of men. Of their desires and defeats and deaths. Of their desires, yes, of their deaths, yes and yes. It is, you can see, a great responsibility for me, and I have lodged complaints about it, but it is no use. I am a house of men. Ah me, ah me! Oh, dear! My friend, there is a curse, a quite visible curse. On us, the Marches. You will see it in my eyes one day, and you will be sorry for me.” + 

“You mustn’t believe in curses,” I said. “Good God, curses!” + 

“The Marches,” she said, “are never let off anything. That is the curse.” + 

Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as wind is stronger than air, and always in them was the magic of wide open places. I looked down, and far below, like pearls in the dust, shone two ankles clasped in silk the colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of her. I thought of corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of love’s delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of the sighs of Anaïtis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought how charming men would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily as they can in their minds. I said: “And so the house of March, fatal and damned, can never avoid its destiny.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Yes,” she said reasonably, “it can avoid it. By not being weak enough to desire so strongly.” + 

“Oh, I see,” I said. + 

“I’m glad you see,” she said gravely. They listen to voices whispering dreams. While they listen, they do queer weak things. Of the soil sordid⁠—there is your March. But there is another March, who listens to voices whispering dreams. My father, Barty March, was, I think, one of the most loved men of his time. Like Napier is now, but of course Napier behaves. A policeman found Barty early one morning on the doorstep of a house we had then in Cambridge Square. He used to say he was never drunk until he closed his eyes, but this time he had closed his eyes into pneumonia. He only opened them once again, to look at Gerald and me, sixteen years old apiece. He smiled, you know, because Barty couldn’t help smiling. Besides, he was happy at last. “Avoid dreams,” he said. “Never stop to listen to the clouds passing overhead. You will be run over. Never sympathise with the moon when you can hear it, cold and lonely and blind, crooning to itself like a corpse singing a hymn. You will catch pneumonia. Never dream of a world in which men are men and women are women. You will go mad.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Her right hand hung limp over the arm of the chair. It was just faintly dirty, and the nails shone like pink ivory. The emerald on the third finger held my eyes enchanted for a long while. She smiled at my look, and as she lay her eyes swept falcon-like down to the stone. It made me rise out of myself, that falcon-like sweep of her clear eyes, and I thought of the pitiless misbehaviour of life, that had not let her stay within the sensible stability of marriage. + 

“It’s a bit loose,” she was saying. + 

“I was wondering. It’s such a beauty! Aren’t you afraid of it falling?” + 

She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her childishness did not jar. She was always herself. “Oo, no! I have a knuckle. I crook it. And lo, it doesn’t fall.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But this sounds like a plot!” + 

“It is a law,” she said. “There are four laws, variously entitled a, b, c, d. The law (a) declares, against all formerly-held beliefs, that a flower is less beautiful because it is sure to die. That is a religious law, having to do with the unworth of perishable things, if you see what I mean. The law (b) has something to do with the fact that all men with long legs make poor lovers. That is a pagan law. You might write an essay on the long arm of coincidence and the short legs of corespondents. It would be fun for you. The law (c) has something to do with exhorting a woman never to trust a man of honour, for he serves two mistresses. That is the law of good sense for amorous women, and will save them disappointment. The law (d) has to do with this ring, which is a bit loose, according to the directions of Jehovah.” + 

“You have mighty friends, Iris Storm!” + 

“Ah, I need them! Desire is a child with hungry eyes, and for him a dragon lies waiting. This ring is a charm against dragons.” The slightly husky voice dreamed. It was an hour for dreaming. She would mask unhappy things with passing talk. “I called him Jehovah because the same was a jealous God. And I would mock him with that, saying that it was I who should be jealous of him, for doesn’t a man of honour serve two mistresses, while it is well known of women of dishonour, I would mock him, that they never serve but one god at a time. But he never was a worldly man, and so eaten by doubt that you would have laughed if he hadn’t been such a pet.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“And so he gave you the emerald to be as a witness against you, and to testify against your frailty?” + 

“Now take,” dreamed the husky voice, the great eyes fixed on the ceiling; and there was a smile in them, like a distant wave of music; “now take a night in Algeria. Take also a hill, and on the hill a garden.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“The Hotel St. George, Mustapha Supérieur, Algiers⁠—” + 

“Ah, don’t forget the American Bar!” + 

“And the Benares bowls⁠—” + 

“And calorifères too hot or too cold⁠—” + 

“And Arab carpets from Victoria Street⁠—” + 

“And Americans with low heels⁠—” + 

“And a passion for ‘mailing postals⁠—’ ” + 

“Not to mention veal every day⁠—” + 

“And a Soirée de Gala every Saturday⁠—” + 

“And the best-dressed women⁠—” + 

“Of Tunbridge Wells.” + 

“But take instead some red and purple flowers against a yellow wall, some oranges, a tangerine or two, three gazelles on a tennis-court, poppies tall as choirboys, the cactus, the palm, and the pyramid cypress-tree. And watch, my friend, two shadows that walk in the wicked shadow of the pyramid cypress, that stands in the garden like a dark torch keeping watch over disillusion. It is night, or have I already told you that? Ah me, ah me, now will she who walks there ever forsake her love, will she ever be disloyal to her vows, that were made with so much pomp and circumstance in the Guards’ Chapel at Westminster before a congregation notable for the absence of all her husband’s relations? Why, her heart is confident, her heart is fragrant with the honey of that moon’s passage, and she knows what she knows. And yet, and here is a most pitiful thing, there must be something in her, some fatal abandon, that sets men doubting, for he who walked with her in the wicked shadow of the pyramid cypress wore the silence of the destroyer, so that her heart cried that he was misnamed, for the mortal disease of his heel was suspicion. Now I must tell you that it was Christmas Eve, and after a little desultory conversation he said: ‘Here is a present for you, sweet,’ and he gave me this emerald which you are kind enough to admire. ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘it is a little big for me! It may fall from my finger, don’t you see?’ ” + 

“ ‘Yes, it may fall,’ said he. ‘But if you are careful, my sweet, if you curve your knuckle in time, it won’t dream of falling, not it!’ And then I cried miserably, knowing there was a catch in this somewhere, for at that time I was not yet broken in and was still fearful of suspicion. And I cried: ‘Hector Storm, what do you mean?’ ” + 

“ ‘I mean, Iris, that you are as that ring⁠—’ ” + 

“ ‘Beautiful but loose, Hector?’ Ah, timeo Danaos!” + 

“ ‘Iris, will you never be serious! Yes, you are as that ring, which you must always wear on the third finger of your right hand. And as that ring may fall, Iris, so you may fall, for that is the sort of woman you are. But as that ring may be kept from falling, so may you keep yourself from falling. Oh, God,’ he said, ‘my life is darkness without you, I love you so, and it’s a perfect hell with you, I love you so!’ And he said much more that is unmentionable, and I learnt something, for it is only by listening to their husbands in moments of intimacy that well-brought-up women can become acquainted with certain good old English words. And though I pleaded bitterly that he was unfair to me, saying I was chained to him as my wrist might be chained to a star, which was no more than the truth, he insisted that I could be constant only to inconstancy, and so I was tired and went to bed. But look! Oh, look! Please look! Ah, the discourtesy of time! Really I must go now!” + 

I drew my eyes from her eyes to see that the dawn had slyly thrown a grey handkerchief over the window. It was but the shape of the dawn creeping out into the night, it was but a ghostly breath in the night, but it was the dawn. And I did not know what to say, for can a man deny the dawn, that speaks good sense in its vast elemental language? + 

The chair creaked and creaked. She was going now, there was no doubt about it. The texture of her face was grave, she was busy with the angle of her green hat. I examined the sword in my mind. The chair creaked and creaked, and then it was as though snapped by silence, and our startled eyes joined over the emerald that lay on the floor like the echo of the kiss, which was an unfair kiss. She shivered faintly, and drew herself taut, and was very proud. She was remote as the evening star, and very proud. Her eyes were dark as in a crypt, and her eyes looked lost, as though she had strayed into a maze. I lit a cigarette, and found my throat dry and parched. + 

She found difficulty in speaking. I was amazed. + 

“No,” she said. She shook her head. “Certainly not. My ring, please.” + 

Imperiously her finger pointed to the floor, but her eyes were as plaintive as a nun’s who has strayed into one of the corridors of hell. That I might walk with her there I again made myself a Judas to her hand, and she shivered with her whole body as in a torment, and she seemed to bite her lip from within. + 

“It means nothing,” she said coldly. + 

“I know,” I said. + 

She breathed deeply, with a hand pressed to one breast, as though it hurt her. I think it must have hurt her very much. I was sorry. She shook her head, as though she was in a cage, and then she was as still as a cut flower. The whole brim of the green hat was between me and her face, we were both terribly alone. Her right hand drooped naked over the arm of the chair, and I was bending down to pick up the emerald to replace it on the third finger when a cautious knocking came from below. + 

That was the second or third time of knocking, and each time it was less cautious, and I knew it to come from the policeman on the beat, who would be wishing to have the primrose car put in its proper place, which was not on the King’s highroad. I wondered if she had heard, but I could not see her face. I wondered if she heard me move. As I came to the door I switched out the light and the dawn pounced on her green hat, but she who wore it fought her battles carved in stone. She said something, I did not catch what, and I went downstairs and spoke with the policeman, who was an amiable middle-aged man of my acquaintance. + 

“My brother is with me,” I said, “but he will be gone soon.” Shepherd’s Market was creeping out into the dawn, draped and mysterious with the shadows of night. A window here and there was alight against the dark pile of Camelot House. The great car stood like a bruise against the passage of eternity, dawn fought for it, night draped it, and the silver stork flew unseen. The small noises of dawn stirred sharply in the night, and the lamps wore pale, tired faces. “Summer’s well on,” said the policeman. + 

I reentered the sitting-room, saying impersonally: “I’m afraid you must go, as.⁠ ⁠…” The room was empty. The figure that had been carved in stone was wrapped in air. The disorder of the room lay jeering at me on the dim carpet of the dawn. It was all like a purposeless limbo stretched between the night and the day, the room, my life, hers, everything, the strong, the silly and the brave. The hundreds of books lay in soiled confusion on the floor, the wisdom of the world that has gone to the making of the soiled nothings that we are. + 

I was seized by a catholic anger against the woman. Through all the disenchantments of youth, despite the contagious impurities of life, in defiance of the crimes against love that we call love, I had kept romance for my ghostly companion. Romance was more than a silly lithe goddess coming down from a marble column. Romance was more than the licence to be shameless with clouded eyes. Romance did not steal through the fleshy portals of the heart, did not shiver at a Judas kiss, did not coil white trembling limbs into the puerile lusts of the mind. Romance was all that and was as much greater than that as a religion is greater than a church. To romance, which was the ultimate vision of common sense, sex, as sex, was the most colossal bore that had ever distracted man from his heritage. And she would palm a facet of this colossal bore off on me! She would have me barter my ghostly companion for the fall of an emerald, she would invade my thoughts, perhaps my life, in exchange for a puny pleasure that needs love to exalt it above the matchless silliness of what, with an excessive zeal for scientific classification, is known to our civilisation as the sexual act. + 

I picked up the emerald from the floor, and it smiled in the palm of my hand. + 

In the dusk of the bedroom, she lay coiled on the bed. The hush of her breathing was no more than the trembling servant of the silence. Then she coughed a small cigarette cough. It was the usual cough, and gave me back my confidence. “Iris Storm!” I said, but I wondered if I had spoken, the frail silence was so undisturbed. She was asleep. + 

Perhaps it was then that I realised that she was beautiful. She was asleep. Could any but the shape of beauty dare to wear that impertinence! She lay on her side, she lay anyhow. The green hat was gone. + 

“Iris!” I said. Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music, and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair. It was like a boy’s hair, swept back from the forehead, which was a wide, clear forehead, clean and brave and sensible as a boy’s. Sensible, oh dear! The tawny cornstalks danced their formal dance on the one cheek that I could see, and the tip of a pierced ear played beneath them, like a mouse in the cornfield. Above her neck her hair died a very manly death, a more manly death than “bobbed” hair was ever known to die, and so it comes about that Iris Storm was the first Englishwoman I ever saw with “shingled” hair. This was in 1922. + 

I decided that I did not know what to do. I decided that that was just as well. “I will play,” I thought, “a waiting game,” and lit a cigarette. But in her tawny hair the night was tangled like a promise, and it smelled as grass might smell in a faerie land, and always about her there was that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. Her mouth drooped like a flower, and there was a little shiny bit in the valley between her cheek and her nose. To this I applied a little Quelques Fleurs talc powder on a handkerchief, that when she awoke she should not think so ill of herself as I did. Hers was a small, straight nose with an imperceptible curve, just as any straight line might have, and its tip quivered a little as she breathed. Her leather jacket pour le sport, that had a high collar trimmed with some minks, was flung open, and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknown destination. Towards her feet her hat lay with my hat. + 

Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself, for was I not being better than myself? I would replace the emerald on the third finger of her right hand. I would, when hair that was not my own was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip, and when the red elephants marching towards an unknown destination stirred breasts full of shadows, and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: “But enough of this hell!” + 