her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the
fork of the frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but
afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better--and
on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction
climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion we had what seems now
to have been a long sustained conversation about the political
situation and the books and papers I had written.

I wonder if it was.

What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that
time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my
life! And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to
tell now of those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph
to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself
and sketching faces on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage
is oddly like little Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist
amidst a limitless wealth of memories. She sits below me on the low
wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms. She
is now the central fact in my life. It still seems a little
incredible that that should be so. She has destroyed me as a
politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life. When I
sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian
fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which
it had spread gigantic across the skies. . . .

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring
ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-
knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She
cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.