“Well”, he said and sighed, “I have served that career.  I have done—­much work, much hard work.  But I have dreamt of the enchanted garden a thousand dreams, and seen its door, or at least glimpsed its door, four times since then.  Yes—­four times.  For a while this world was so bright and interesting, seemed so full of meaning and opportunity that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by comparison gentle and remote.  Who wants to pat panthers on the way to dinner with pretty women and distinguished men?  I came down to London from Oxford, a man of bold promise that I have done something to redeem.  Something—­and yet there have been disappointments . . . . .

“Twice I have been in love—­I will not dwell on that—­but once, as I went to someone who, I know, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a short cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl’s Court, and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door.  ‘Odd!’ said I to myself, ’but I thought this place was on Campden Hill.  It’s the place I never could find somehow—­like counting Stonehenge—­the place of that queer day dream of mine.’  And I went by it intent upon my purpose.  It had no appeal to me that afternoon.

“I had just a moment’s impulse to try the door, three steps aside were needed at the most—­though I was sure enough in my heart that it would open to me—­and then I thought that doing so might delay me on the way to that appointment in which I thought my honour was involved.  Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality—­I might at least have peeped in I thought, and waved a hand to those panthers, but I knew enough by this time not to seek again belatedly that which is not found by seeking.  Yes, that time made me very sorry . . . . .

“Years of hard work after that and never a sight of the door.  It’s only recently it has come back to me.  With it there has come a sense as though some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world.  I began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should never see that door again.  Perhaps I was suffering a little from overwork—­perhaps it was what I’ve heard spoken of as the feeling of forty.  I don’t know.  But certainly the keen brightness that makes effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just at a time with all these new political developments—­when I ought to be working.  Odd, isn’t it?  But I do begin to find life toilsome, its rewards, as I come near them, cheap.  I began a little while ago to want the garden quite badly.  Yes—­and I’ve seen it three times.”

“The garden?”

“No—­the door!  And I haven’t gone in!”

He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as he spoke.  “Thrice I have had my chance—­thrice! If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities.  I will go and never return.  This time I will stay . . . . .  I swore it and when the time came--I didn’t go.