living so intimately with it, he felt quite lost without it.  It was a little odd, if you came to think of it, that the thing he called his genius, and the thing he called his love, should have chosen the same moment to abandon him.  Was it—­was it possible—­that there was some vital connection between them?  As the singing of birds in the pairing season, was his genius merely a rather peculiar symptom of the very ordinary condition known as falling in love?  So that, failing that source of inspiration—?  That no doubt was what was the matter with him.  His imagination languished because his passion for Poppy was played out, and he had nothing to put in its place.

Well, yes, there was something; something that was not an instinct or a passion, but an acquired taste.  To be sure he had acquired it very quickly, it had only taken him three days.  In those three days he had developed a preference for the society of ladies (the women of his own class were not ladies but “young ladies,” a distinction he now appreciated for the first time).  It was a preference that, as things stood, he would never be able to gratify; there was something about it ruinous and unhappy, like a craze for first editions in an impecunious scholar, for ever limited to the twopenny bundle and the eighteenpenny lot.  He could not hope to enjoy Miss Harden’s society for more than three weeks at the outside.  He only enjoyed it at all through an accident too extraordinary, too fantastic to occur again.  Between him and her there stood the barrier of the counter.  The barrier itself was not insuperable:  he might get over the counter, so might Miss Harden; but there were other things that she never could get over.  Though in some ways he was all right, in others, again, he was not—­he could see very well that he was not—­what Miss Harden would call a gentleman.  He was, through that abominable nervousness of his, an impossible person, hopelessly, irredeemably involved in social solecisms.  Or if not impossible, he was, at any rate, highly improbable.

Perceiving all this, he was still unable to perceive the meaning of his insight and his misery.  He did not know, and there was nobody to tell him, that this emptiness of his was the emptiness created by the forerunners and servants of Love, who sweep and purify the death-chamber where a soul has died and another soul is waiting to be born.  For in the house of Love there is only one chamber for birth and for dying; and into that clean, unfurnished place the soul enters unattended and endures its agony alone.  There is no Mother-soul to bear for it the birth-pains of the new life.