I said I thought there ought to be some explanation of how and why she got into touch with the fairy world.
He said it was perhaps to be found in the surroundings of her childhood. She perhaps inherited some strange spiritual, magic legacy. But whatever it was it must come from the outside. Perhaps there was a haunted wood near her home, and she was forbidden to go into it. Perhaps the legend of the place said that anyone of her family who visited that wood before they were fifteen years old, went to sleep for a hundred years. Perhaps she visited the wood and fell asleep and had a dream. That dream was the hundred years' sleep, but she forgot the dream as soon as she was awake.
I asked him if he thought this story fitted on to Miss Brandon's character or to the circumstances of her life.
He said he knew little about the circumstances of her life. Mrs. Lennox had told him that her niece had once nearly married someone, but that it had been an impossible marriage for many reasons, and that she did not think her niece regretted it. That several people had wanted to marry her abroad, but that she had never fallen in love.
"As to her character, I am confirmed," he said, "in what I thought about her the first time I saw her. All her looks are poetry and all her thoughts are prose. She is practical and prosaic and unimaginative and quite passionless. But I should not be in the least surprised if she married a fox-hunting squire with ten thousand a year. All that does not matter to me. I am not writing her story, but the story of her face. What might have been her story. And not the story of what her face looks like, but the story of what her face means. The story of her soul, which may be very different from the story of her life. It is the story of a numbed soul. A soul that has visited places which it had no business to visit and had had to pay the price in consequence.
"She reminds me of those lines of Heine:
"Sie waren langst gestorben und wussten
es selber kaum."
"That is, of course, only one way of writing the story I have planned to you. I shall not begin at the beginning at any rate. Perhaps I shall never write the story at all. You see, I do not intend to publish it in any case. People would say I was making a portrait. As if an artist ever made a portrait from one definite real person. People give him ideas. But on the other hand it is my holiday, and I do not want to have all the labour of planning a real story, and at the same time I want an occupation. This will keep me busy. I shall amuse myself by sketching the story as I see it now."
I asked who the hero would be.
"The man who wants to marry her and whom she consents to marry will be a foreigner," he said.