head--for Teddy Ashburnham, you remember, had cabled to me to
"come and have a talk" with him--that it was unbelievable that
anything essentially calamitous could happen to that place and
those people. I tell you it was the very spirit of peace. And
Leonora, beautiful and smiling, with her coils of yellow hair, stood
on the top doorstep, with a butler and footman and a maid or so
behind her. And she just said: "So glad you've come," as if I'd run
down to lunch from a town ten miles away, instead of having
come half the world over at the call of two urgent telegrams.

The girl was out with the hounds, I think. And that poor devil
beside me was in an agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb agony such
as passes the mind of man to imagine.

III

IT was a very hot summer, in August, 1904; and Florence had
already been taking the baths for a month. I don't know how it
feels to be a patient at one of those places. I never was a patient
anywhere. I daresay the patients get a home feeling and some sort
of anchorage in the spot. They seem to like the bath attendants,
with their cheerful faces, their air of authority, their white linen.
But, for myself, to be at Nauheim gave me a sense--what shall I
say?--a sense almost of nakedness--the nakedness that one feels on
the sea-shore or in any great open space. I had no attachments, no
accumulations. In one's own home it is as if little, innate
sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one
in an embrace, or take one along particular streets that seem
friendly when others may be hostile. And, believe me, that feeling
is a very important part of life. I know it well, that have been for