just as well have written to the station master or the municipal
gasworks. As a matter of fact Jane and he were as much lost to one
another as if the whole of England had been primaeval forest.

It was a calamity which he regarded with dismay. He had many friends
of the easy theatrical sort, who knew him as Paul Savelli, a
romantically visaged, bright-natured, charming, intellectual, and
execrably bad young actor. But there was only one Jane who knew him
as little Paul Kegworthy. No woman he had ever met--and in the
theatrical world one is thrown willy-nilly into close contact with
the whole gamut of the sex--gave him just the same close, intimate,
comforting companionship. From Jane he hid nothing. Before all
the others he was conscious of pose. Jane, with her cockney
common-sense, her shrewdness, her outspoken criticism of follies,
her unfailing sympathy in essentials, was welded into the very
structure of his being. Only when he had lost her did he realize
this. Amidst all the artificialities and pretences and
pseudo-emotionalities of his young actor's life, she was the one
thing that was real. She alone knew of Bludston, of Barney Bill, of
the model days the memory of which made him shiver. She alone (save
Barney Bill) knew of his high destiny--for Paul, quick to
recognize the cynical scepticism of an indifferent world, had not
revealed the Vision Splendid to any of his associates. To her he
could write; to her, when he was in London, he could talk; to her he
could outpour all the jumble of faith, vanity, romance, egotism and
poetry that was his very self, without thought of miscomprehension.
And of late she had mastered the silly splenetics of childhood. He
had an uncomfortable yet comforting impression that latterly she had
developed an odd, calm wisdom, just as she had developed a calm,
generous personality. The last time he had seen her, his quick