the street hurries without a glance by some familiar monument.

"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England. . . ." The words were an evocation. He saw her again as
she had looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius
with her long pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little
by the grace of youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then
of any hold upon the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was
wonderful, more wonderful, perhaps, than when later, to Glennard's
fancy at least, the conscious of memorable things uttered seemed
to take from even her most intimate speech the perfect bloom of
privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come
near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in
the intervals of its expression. Later, when to be loved by her
had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical
reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an
agony of conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old
papers, his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him with
inarticulate misery. . . .

"She had so few intimate friends . . . that letters will be of
special value." So few intimate friends! For years she had had
but one; one who in the last years had requited her wonderful
pages, her tragic outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with
the scant phrases by which a man evades the vulgarest of
sentimental importunities. He had been a brute in spite of
himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face had
faded, and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed
at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height