And when at the end of a week he received an invitation to a ball where he thought she would be, he must perforce obey, and go with tremulous heart.  She was engaged in a quadrille that passed to and fro beneath blue tapestry curtains, and he noticed the spray of lilies of the valley in her bodice, so emblematic did they seem of her.  Beneath the blue curtain she stood talking to her partner after the dance; and he did not go to speak to her, but remained looking.  They only danced together twice; and that evening was realized by him in a strangely intense and durable perception of faint scent and fluent rhythm.  The sense of her motion, of her frailness, lingered in his soul ever afterwards.  And he remembered ever afterwards the moments he spent with her in a distant corner—­the palm, the gold of the screen, the movement of her white skirt as she sat down.  All was, as it were, bitten upon his soul—­exquisite etchings!  Even the pauses in the conversation were remembered; pauses full of mute affection; pauses full of thought unexpressed, falling in sharp chasms of silence.  In such hours and in such pauses is the essence of our lives, the rest is adjunct and decoration.  He watched, fearing each man that looked through the doorway might claim her for the next dance.  His thought swept through his soul edgeways.  Did he love her?  Would he love her always?  And he was conscious of the contrast his speech presented, to the tumult that raged and shrieked within him.  Yet he couldn’t speak the word, and he cursed his little cowardice.

The ball came and went—­a little year with its four seasons; and when in the hall he stood by her, helping her with her cloak (silk and gray fur, folding the delicate line of the neck), and became aware that even those last moments did not hold the word his soul was whispering, he cursed his cowardice, and, weary of himself, he turned down the dark street, feeling that he had lost his life.

“Now all is ended,” he thought, “I’m like a convict who attempted escape and has been brought back and yoked again in the sweaty and manacled gang; and I must continue in and bear with this life of gross sensuality and dirty journalism, ’which I have borne and yet must bear’—­a wearisome repetition of what has been done and re-done a thousand times, ‘till death-like sleep shall steal on me,’ and I may hear some horrible lodging-house keeper ’breathe o’er my dying brain a last monotony.’  And in various degradations my intellect will suffer, will decay; but with her refining and elevating influence, I might be a great writer.  It is certain that the kernel of Art is aspiration for higher things; at all events, I should lead a cleanly life.  If I were married to her I should not write this book.  It certainly is a disgraceful book; and yet it amuses me.”

His thoughts paused, then an idea came, and with his pen he pursued it and the quickly rising flight which followed for a couple of hours.