That night the melancholia was heavy as a nightmare, without the partial unconsciousness of sleep.  This blackness must be “the horrors” she had heard women of her stage-world speak of.  She wanted to spring out of bed, to run to her mother’s room.  But that would have meant hysteric confession, so she bit her lips and stuck her nails into the sheet.  Perhaps suicide would be simplest.  She was nothing; it would not even be blowing out a light.  No, she was something, she was a retailer of gross humours, a vile sinner; it might be kindling more than a light, an eternal flame.  “Child of Mary,” indeed!  She deserved to be strangled with her white ribbon.  And she exaggerated everything with that morbid mendacity of the confessional.

Two days later she went for a walk along the springy turf of the valley.  The sun shone overhead, but from her spirit the mist had not quite lifted.  Suddenly a small white ball came scudding towards her feet.  She looked round and saw herself amid little flags sticking in the ground.  Distant voices came to her ear.

“This must be the new game that’s creeping in from Scotland,” she thought.  “Perhaps I ought to have a song ready if ever it catches on.  Ah, here comes one of the young fools—­I’ll watch him—­”

He came, clothed as in a grey skin that showed the beautiful modelling of his limbs.  His face glowed.

“Ouida’s Apollo,” she thought, but in the very mockery she trembled, struck as by a lightning shaft.  The blackness was sucked up into fire and light.  “Am I in the way?” she said with her most bewitching smile.

He raised his hat.  “I was afraid you might have been struck.”

“Perhaps I was,” she could not help saying.

“Oh, gracious, are you hurt?” His voice was instantly caressing.

“Do I look an object for ambulances?”

He smiled dazzlingly.  “You look awfully jolly.”  Later Eileen remembered how she had taken this reply for a line of poetry.

A week later the Hon. Reginald Winsor, younger brother of an English
Earl, was teaching Eileen golf.

It had been a week of ecstasy.

She thought of Reginald the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning and dreamed of him all night.

Now she knew what her life had lacked—­to be caught up into another’s personality, to lose one’s petty individuality in—­in what?  Surely not in a larger; she couldn’t be so blind as that.  In what then?  Ah, yes, in Nature.  He was gloriously elemental.  He wasn’t himself.  He was the masculine.  Yes, that was the correlative element her being needed.  The mere manliness of his pipe made its aroma in his clothes adorable.  Or was it his big simplicity, in which she could bury all her torturing complexity?  Oh, to nestle in it and be at rest.  Yet she held him at arm’s length.  When they shook hands her nerves thrilled, but she was the colder outwardly for very fear of herself.