and yet that misery was pierced, ever and again its gray curtain was stabbed through and through by joys of an intensity, by perceptions of a keenness that it seems to me are now altogether gone out of life.  Is it the Change, I wonder, that has robbed life of its extremes, or is it perhaps only this, that youth has left me—­even the strength of middle years leaves me now—­and taken its despairs and raptures, leaving me judgment, perhaps, sympathy, memories?

I cannot tell.  One would need to be young now and to have been young then as well, to decide that impossible problem.

Perhaps a cool observer even in the old days would have found little beauty in our grouping.  I have our two photographs at hand in this bureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fitting ready-made clothing, and Nettie—­Indeed Nettie is badly dressed, and her attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see her through the picture, and her living brightness and something of that mystery of charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind.  Her face has triumphed over the photographer—­or I would long ago have cast this picture away.

The reality of beauty yields itself to no words.  I wish that I had the sister art and could draw in my margin something that escapes description.  There was a sort of gravity in her eyes.  There was something, a matter of the minutest difference, about her upper lip so that her mouth closed sweetly and broke very sweetly to a smile.  That grave, sweet smile!

After we had kissed and decided not to tell our parents for awhile of the irrevocable choice we had made, the time came for us to part, shyly and before others, and I and my mother went off back across the moonlit park—­the bracken thickets rustling with startled deer—­to the railway station at Checkshill and so to our dingy basement in Clayton, and I saw no more of Nettie—­except that I saw her in my thoughts—­for nearly a year.  But at our next meeting it was decided that we must correspond, and this we did with much elaboration of secrecy, for Nettie would have no one at home, not even her only sister, know of her attachment.  So I had to send my precious documents sealed and under cover by way of a confidential schoolfellow of hers who lived near London. . . .  I could write that address down now, though house and street and suburb have gone beyond any man’s tracing.

Our correspondence began our estrangement, because for the first time we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds sought expression.

Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was in the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and subterfuges.  Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man’s lips.  I was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrow faith in certain religious formulae,