V.
When she passed the house and saw the long rows of yellow blinds in the grey front she thought of him. He would not come back. He had never come before, so it wasn't likely he would come again.
His being there was one of the things that only happened once. Perhaps those were the perfect things, the things that would never pass away; they would stay for ever, beautiful as you had seen them, fixed in their moment of perfection, wearing the very air and light of it for ever.
You would see them sub specie ceternitatis. Under the form of eternity.
So that Richard Nicholson would always be like that, the same whenever you thought of him.
Look at the others: the ones that hadn't come back and the ones that had. Jimmy Ponsonby, Harry Craven, Mr. Sutcliffe. And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers. If Maurice Jourdain had never come back she would always have seen him standing in the cornfield. If Lindley Vickers had never come back she wouldn't have seen him with Nannie Learoyd in the schoolhouse lane; the moment when he held her hands in the drawing-room, standing by the piano, would have been their one eternal moment.
Because Jimmy Ponsonby had gone away she had never known the awful thing he had done. She would go through the Ilford fields for ever and ever with her hot hand in his; she happy and he innocent; innocent for ever and ever. Harry Craven, her playmate of two hours, he would always be playing, always laughing, always holding her hand, like Roddy, without knowing that he held it.
Suppose Mr. Sutcliffe had come back. She would have hurt them more and more. Mrs. Sutcliffe would have hated her. They would have been miserable, all three. All three damned for ever and ever.
She was not sure she wanted Richard Nicholson to come back.
She was not sure he wasn't spoiling it by writing. She hadn't thought he would do that.
A correspondence? Prolonging the beautiful moment, stretching it thin; thinner and thinner; stretching it so thin that it would snap? You would come to identify him with his letters, so that in the end you would lose what had been real, what had been perfect. You would forget. You would have another and less real kind of memory.
But his letters were not thin; they were as real as his voice. They were his voice talking to you; you could tell which words would take the stress of it. "I don't know how much there is of you, whether this is all of it or only a little bit. You gave me an impression—you made me feel that there might be any amount gone under that you can't get at, that you may never get at if you go on staying where you are. I believe if you got clean away it might come to the top again.
"But I don't know. I don't know whether you're at the end or the beginning. I could tell better if you were here."
She counted the months till April when her poems would come out. She counted the days till Tuesday when there might be a letter from Richard Nicholson.
If only he would not keep on telling you you ought to come to London.
That was what made you afraid. He might have seen how impossible it was.
He had seen Mamma.
"Don't try to dig me out of my 'hole.' I can 'go on living in it for ever' if I'm never taken out. But if I got out once it would be awful coming back. It isn't awful now. Don't make it awful."
He only wrote: "I'll make it awfuller and _aw_fuller, until out you come."