I


For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love--and by love I
mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the
soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to
the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of
my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in
amorous dreams.

I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the
piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to
conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me:
warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round
on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and
I asked myself: 'Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?' For
even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and
the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at
the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of
those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort
of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian
room, large and stately and symmetrical, full--but not too full--of
twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes,
gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and
here and there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, recalled the Empire
period and the deserted Napoleonic palaces of France. The expanse of
yellow and green carpet had been married to the floor by two generations
of decorous feet, and the meaning of its tints was long since explained
away. Never have I seen a carpet with less individuality of its own than