of his friends thought, a little prematurely. I was never of their opinion.
I only saw twice, and for a few moments only, the young girl to whom most
of his verses were to be written, and whose presence in his life may be
held to account for much of that astonishing contrast between the broad
outlines of his life and work. The situation seemed to me of the most
exquisite and appropriate impossibility. The daughter of a refugee, I
believe of good family, reduced to keeping a humble restaurant in a foreign
quarter of London, she listened to his verses, smiled charmingly, under her
mother's eyes, on his two years' courtship, and at the end of two years
married the waiter instead. Did she ever realise more than the obvious part
of what was being offered to her, in this shy and eager devotion? Did it
ever mean very much to her to have made and to have killed a poet? She had,
at all events, the gift of evoking, and, in its way, of retaining, all that
was most delicate, sensitive, shy, typically poetic, in a nature which I
can only compare to a weedy garden, its grass trodden down by many feet,
but with one small, carefully tended flowerbed, luminous with lilies. I
used to think, sometimes, of Verlaine and his "girl-wife," the one really
profound passion, certainly, of that passionate career; the charming,
child-like creature, to whom he looked back, at the end of his life, with
an unchanged tenderness and disappointment: "Vous n'avez rien compris a ma
simplicite," as he lamented. In the case of Dowson, however, there was a
sort of virginal devotion, as to a Madonna; and I think, had things gone
happily, to a conventionally happy ending, he would have felt (dare I say?)
that his ideal had been spoilt.

But, for the good fortune of poets, things rarely do go happily with them,
or to conventionally happy endings. He used to dine every night at the
little restaurant, and I can always see the picture, which I have so often
seen through the window in passing: the narrow room with the rough tables,
for the most part empty, except in the innermost corner, where Dowson would