blanched steps that showed through the bars of iron gates. They had
three stories above a basement. Still, he looked for No. 8. But just as
the street had no name, so the houses had no numbers. No. 16 alone could
be distinguished; it had figures on its faintly illuminated fanlight. He
walked back, idly counting.

Then, amid the curtained and shuttered facades, he saw, across the road,
a bright beam from a basement. He crossed and peeped through a gate, and
an interior was suddenly revealed to him. Near the window of a room sat
a young woman bending over a table. A gas-jet on a bracket in the wall,
a few inches higher than her head and a foot distant from it, threw a
strong radiance on her face and hair. The luminous living picture,
framed by the window in blackness, instantly entranced him. All the
splendid images of the past faded and were confuted and invalidated and
destroyed by this intense reality so present and so near to him.
(Nevertheless, for a moment he thought of her as the daughter of Sir
Thomas More.) She was drawing. She was drawing with her whole mind and
heart. At intervals, scarcely moving her head, she would glance aside at
a paper to her left on the table.... She seemed to search it, to drag
some secret out of it, and then she would resume her drawing. She was
neither dark nor fair; she was comely, perhaps beautiful; she had
beautiful lips, and her nose, behind the nostrils, joined the cheek in a
lovely contour, like a tiny bulb. Yes, she was superb. But what mastered
him was less her fresh physical charm than the rapt and extreme vitality
of her existing.... He knew from her gestures and the tools on the table
that she could be no amateur. She was a professional. He thought:
Chelsea!... Marvellous place, Chelsea! He ought to have found that out
long ago. He imagined Chelsea full of such pictures--the only true home
of beauty and romance.