which this claw of an elemental force had thrust itself to grip.

The stranger who had come in got what he wanted; the girl considered
that she thought she had never loved the botanist, had had only
friendship for him--though little she knew of the meaning of those
fine words--they parted a little incoherently and in tears, and it
had not occurred to the young man to imagine she was not going off
to conventional life in some other of the endless Frognals he
imagined as the cellular tissue of the world.

But she wasn't.

He had kept her photograph and her memory sweet, and if ever he had
strayed from the severest constancy, it seemed only in the end to
strengthen with the stuff of experience, to enhance by comparative
disappointment his imagination of what she might have meant to
him.... Then eight years afterwards they met again.

By the time he gets to this part of his story we have, at my
initiative, left the bridge and are walking towards the Utopian
guest house. The Utopian guest house! His voice rises and falls,
and sometimes he holds my arm. My attention comes and goes.
"Good-night," two sweet-voiced Utopians cry to us in their
universal tongue, and I answer them "Good-night."

"You see," he persists, "I saw her only a week ago. It was in
Lucerne, while I was waiting for you to come on from England. I
talked to her three or four times altogether. And her face--the
change in her! I can't get it out of my head--night or day. The
miserable waste of her...."