changed.  If she had broken with him a week ago, he would have found easy consolation in the list, but now it was not women, but a woman that he desired.  A mere sexual curiosity, and the artistic desire to save a beautiful voice from being wasted, had given way to a more personal emotion in which affection was beginning.  Looking at him, thinking over what he had just said, unable to stifle the hope that those women in the picture were the wise ones, she heard life calling her.  The art call and the love call, subtly interwoven, were modulated now on the violins now on the flutes of an invisible orchestra.  At the same moment his immeshed senses, like greedy fish, swam hither and thither, perplexed and terrified, finding no way of escape, and he dreaded lest he had lost his balance and fallen into the net he had cast so often.  He had begun to see that she was afraid of the sin, and not at all of him.  She had never asked him if he would always love her—­that she seemed to take for granted—­and he had, or fancied he had, begun to feel that he would never cease to love her.  He looked into the future far enough to see that it would be she who would tire of him, and that another would appear two or three years hence who would appeal to her sensual imagination just as he did to-day.  She would strive to resist it, she would argue with herself, but the enticing illusion would draw her as in a silken net.  He was now engaged in the destruction of her moral scruples—­in other words, making the way easy for his successor.

They were in the gallery alone, and, taking her hand, he considered in detail the trouble this liaison would bring in its train.  He no longer doubted that she would go abroad with him sooner or later.  He hoped it would be sooner, for he had begun to perceive the absurdity of his visits to Dulwich.  The question was whether she was worth an exile in a foreign country.  He would have to devote himself to her and to her interests.  She would have a chaperon.  There would be no use in their openly living together—­that he could not stand.  But at that moment the exquisite happiness of seeing her every day, coming into the room where she was reading or singing, and kissing her as he leaned over her chair affectionately, as a matter of course, deriving his enjoyment from the prescriptive right to do so, and then talking to her about ordinary affairs of life, came upon him suddenly like a vision; and this imagined life was so intense that for one moment it was equivalent to the reality.  He saw himself taking her home from the theatre at night in the brougham.  In the next instant they were in the train going to Bayreuth.  In the next he saw her as Kundry rush on to the stage.  He felt that, whatever it cost him, that was the life he must obtain.  He felt that he could not live if he did not acquire it, and so intense was the vision that, unable to endure its torment, he got up and proposed they should go into the garden and sit under the cedar.