QUIDNUNC


I was so fired by that extraordinary adventure, that I think I could
have overcome my constitutional timidity and made myself acquainted
with the only actor in it who was accessible if I had not become
involved in another matter of the sort. But I don't know that I should
have helped myself thereby. To the night the things of the night
pertain. If I could have had speech with Mrs. Ventris in that season
of her radiancy there would have been no harm; but by day she was
another creature. Thereby contact was impossible because it would have
been horrible. It is true that a certain candour of conduct
distinguished her from the frowsy drabs with whom she must have
jostled in public-house bars or rubbed elbows at lodging-house doors,
a sort of unconsciousness of evil, which I take to have been due to an
entire absence of a moral sense. It is probable that she was not a
miserable sinner because she did not know what was miserable sin. Heat
and cold she knew, hunger and thirst, rage and kindness. She could not
be unwomanly because she was not woman, nor good because she could
not be bad. But I could have been very bad; and to me she was,
luckily, horrible. I could not divorce her two apparent natures, still
less my own. We are bound--all of us--by our natures, bound by them
and bounded. I could not have touched the pitch she lived with, the
pitch of which she was, without defilement. Let me hope that I
realised that much. I shall not say how my feet burned to enter that
slum of squalor where hovered this bird of the night, unless I add, as
I can do with truth, that I did not slake them there. I saw her on and
off afterward for a year, perhaps; but tenancies are short in London.
There was a flitting during one autumn when I was away on vacation,
and I came back to see new faces in the half-doorway and other elbows