But there is a poem by a poetess, now little read, which contains the lines:
“Colours seen by candlelight
Do not look the same by day,”
and when the sun shone next morning through my bedroom window my plot seemed less original than I had thought it the night before. What was it, after all, but a conceit? It said “black” to someone else’s “white”; it turned an old coat inside out, and though it would no doubt cause surprise if I were to walk down the village with my coat inside out, it would not be a particularly original act, and it would be the same coat.
That is not the way to make a good story—to tack an old situation on to a new one. I should have to find a different ending somehow; it was no good setting out to write it yet. For want of anything better to do, I walked out and began to weed the garden. But though I weeded the flower-beds in front of the house, and did valiant work with a hoe among the cabbages, no idea had come to me by lunch-time. And, though I spent the whole afternoon before a jigsaw puzzle, the most restful of all pursuits, tea-time found my mind a blank, and in this state it remained until a friend, to whom I had related the incident, made a most pertinent remark:
“Why, if the girl could see her face reflected in the photograph, did she not see the young man take the money from her purse?”
I sat in surprised silence. Why had I not thought of that before?
“Yes,” I said, “but if she saw, why didn’t she say something?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
And for the next three days I searched my mind for reasons for her silence.
At last I began to see the glimmerings of a tale, the fifth that I had constructed about this romantic couple. And this is what I saw: a shy young man from the provinces comes up to London with an introduction to some wealthy friends. There is a daughter whom he thinks very beautiful, and with whom he thinks that he might in a short while find himself in love. And he suggests very timidly that it would be nice if she would show him “round the sights,” for he wants to see London, and has no other friends in it. And, as these wealthy people have advanced views, or perhaps because the daughter has succeeded in impressing her views upon her parents, his suggestion is accepted; the result is a lunch at the Criterion, a theatre, and tea afterwards. As they seem to be getting on rather well together, he suggests a dinner-party. He would like to see Soho.