but if she looked too long they disappeared from her
eyes. She remembered nothing of what they had
said, only that the colour of the evening was pale
blue, with a little east wind in it, and that was yesterday!
They had talked and walked, and been tremulously interested
in each other; but she remembered nothing that had
been said until they turned to go home. Then
arose an exact vision of herself and Ulick walking
under the graceful trees which overhung the Piccadilly
railings. There the park had been shaped into
little dells, and it had reminded her of the picture
in the Dulwich Gallery. There his pleading was
more passionate. He had begged her to go away
with him, and she had had to answer that she could
not give Owen up. She had felt that it was better
to speak frankly, though she was sorry to have to
say things that would give him pain. She had
told him the truth, and was glad she had done so, but
she liked him very much, and had said it was a pity
they had not met earlier. “I missed you
by about a year,” he answered. His words
came back to her, and she wondered if there was a
cause for the accident, and if it could have been
predicted. They had walked slowly up the pathways,
and seeing the young summer in the sky and trees, they
had walked as upon air, borne up by the sadness of
finding themselves divided. They had thought
of what forms and colours their lives would have taken
if she had waited a few months, if she had not gone
away with Owen; or, better still, if she had never
met Owen. She was conscious that such thoughts
amounted to an infidelity, and she knew that she did
love Ulick as she loved Owen. But the temptation
was cruelly intense, and she could not wrench herself
out of its grip. Their voices had fallen, they
suffocated in the silence. Ulick had mentioned
Blake’s name, and she had accepted an artistic
discussion as an escapement, but their hearts were
overloaded, and it was in answer to his own thoughts
that Ulick had spoken of the eighteenth-century mystic.
For the question had arisen in him whether the passions
of the flesh are not destructive of spiritual exaltation,
and he told her that exaltation was the gospel according
to Blake. We must seek to exalt ourselves, to
live in the idea; sexual passion was a merely inferior
state, but mean content was the true degradation.
“Then passion is the highest plane to which the materialist can rise?” asked Evelyn, thinking of Owen.
“Yes; I don’t think I’m wrong in admitting that, in the main, that is Blake’s contention.”
But at this point he had broken off his discourse, and told an anecdote in his half-witty, half-wistful way about an article which he had written on Blake and which had somehow strayed into the hands of a man and his wife living in Normandy. This couple were at the time engaged in continuing the tradition of Bastien Lepage. They laboriously copied what they saw in the fields—grey days, hobnailed boots and the rest of it. His article had, however,