Viola was to me, had always been, far more than a wife or a mistress is to a man; she was also the Idea to my brain, and what his Idea is to an artist an artist alone can know.  But it is something he will live and die for, and count his heart’s blood as nothing beside it.  That she was a sacred thing, to be protected and guarded from the sordid incidents of daily life that she hated, had always been my thought.  She was an artist, and as such had Art’s own penalties to pay—­the excessive nervous strain it puts upon the body, the long weakening tension, the extreme mental and bodily fatigue that sometimes accompanies or follows an artist’s flight into the Elysian fields, from which he brings back those deathless flowers of music, verse, song, or colour to plant in the world.  It is not fair that such a one should have to bear the common ills of life as well as pay those penalties.

That had always been my view.  Viola was apart from the world, a daughter of the gods, not suited for, nor designed for the common sufferings of the clay.  Love she might know, or rather must know, for love is always the handmaiden to Art, but motherhood, no.  For those thousands and thousands of women who inhabit this world and have no divine gifts to bestow maternity is a pleasing and natural occupation; for the one amongst those thousands who has heard the Divine whisper and walked and conversed with the gods, and who can repeat those whispers to mortals, it is a waste of divine energy—­a sacrilege.  For genius is not handed down.  It is given to one alone.  It is not hereditary.  For genius accumulated through heredity would at last produce a god.  And that the jealous gods will not allow.  Therefore the child of a genius is rarely a genius itself.  It is born with a veil across its eyes that it may not see divinity and so return to the common type.

Knowing all this and feeling it keenly to my heart’s core, I had given my promise to Viola.  A promise, which indeed was part of a religion to me, and this was how I had kept it!

The intense humiliation of it all rolled through me, stunning me like a physical agony.

I heard her voice speaking gently to me, but I could not understand what she said, could not respond.

In memory, I was listening again to her voice when she had come that first night to the studio: 

“You will not let our love drag us down to earth, will you?  Let it only inspire us more.  We will go to the Elysian fields together to gather the amaranth flowers.  You will not try to turn me into the ordinary married woman.  I could not accept those duties and that life.  I want to live in my music, in the heaven of Ideas, as I do now.  And to you I want always to be the vision, the dream, the spirit of your thoughts:  never the wife, the mother, the keeper of the household, occupied with worldly matters.”

And I had promised with all the rapture and the fervour of one who understood and thought her thoughts, and who had always longed to escape from the commonplace, the trivial matters of the world, to whom, as to her, the deathless amaranth flowers of beauty, of art, of Idea, of inspiration were all.