could span it. I saw her walking one day on ..."

"You must mean Lady Alice Hargood, a very tall girl?"

"Yes; five feet seven, quite. I saw her walking on the terrace with
your uncle. Once she passed our house, and I smarted with shame of it
as of some restless wound, and for days I remembered I was little
better than a peasant. Originally we came, as you know, of good
English stock, but nothing is vital but the present. I cried and
cursed my existence, my father and the mother that bore me, and that
night I climbed out by my window and roved through the dark about the
castle so tall in the moonlight. The sky that night was like a soft
blue veil, and the trees were painted quite black upon it. I looked
for her window, and I imagined her sleeping with her copper hair
tossed in the moonlight, like an illustration in a volume of Shelley.

"You remember the old wooden statue of a nymph that stood in the
sycamores at the end of the terraces; she was the first naked woman I
saw. I used to wander about her, sometimes at night, and I have often
climbed about and hung round those shoulders, and ever since I have
always met that breast of wood. You have been loved more truly; you
have been possessed of woman more thoroughly than I. Though I clasp a
woman in my arms, it is as if the Atlantic separated us. Did I never
tell you of my first love affair? That was the romance of the wood
nymph. One evening I climbed on the pedestal of my divinity, my cheek
was pale ..."

"For God's sake, leave out the poetics, and come to the facts."

"If you don't let me tell my story in my own way I won't tell it at