“I was just thinking,” I told her, “that if one could judge by appearances, which of course one must never do, in that white cloak in this mean lane you look as nearly an angel as this world could ever see.”
“Don’t let’s mock the angels. What does it mean, Gerald’s light being on?”
“Only what it has always meant, that I must turn it out.”
“Ah, you’ve been very good to Gerald....”
And I am glad that, just then, I said that I was very fond of Gerald.
Then we were on the narrow landing of my old flat, in the darkness. The musty stillness of that little old house brought six years of nights into my mind, and I wondered how people ever regretted their first youth, those intolerable uncertainties and enthusiasms that stare at you from the dead past like condemned gargoyles. The incapability of youth goes on long enough, Heaven knows, if not so long as the savagery of childishness. In the darkness I could feel the soft ermine of her cloak against me, and that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. She was very, very still, and I could not even hear her breathing.
“It is very kind of you to come with me,” she said suddenly, seriously. We were very still on that landing, and I drew back my arm where it touched her cloak. It was very soft, that cloak. “I have thought of you, and decided that if you ever thought of me you had a right to think with dislike....” She was talking smoothly, calmly, when suddenly her voice completely broke, into little bits. “Oh!” she whispered. I was silent. She said quickly: “To me there’s something terribly indecent about humanity, all humanity. It’s as though, in the whole lovely universe, humanity was cooped in this musty little house, talking vaguely of dislike, eternally talking of like and dislike, love and unlove, of doings and undoings, purposeless yet striving and savage. The other night I was motoring alone from Paris to Calais, and it seemed to me that no law was strong enough, no crime was big enough, not even disloyalty, to stop us, when we had the chance of rising above the beastly limitation of living as we were born to live. Because we humans are not born to live, we are born to die....”
“Something has happened to you to-night,” I said. She was a faint white shape in the darkness, and it seemed to me that that was as much of her as I should ever see; and I was right.
“No, nothing at all. Just a dream. But, oh, failing the dream, how I would like a child!”