have been ever since my pigtail went up and my skirts came down."

She gave his hand a final little pressure, patted and released it. He
felt, somehow or other, immeasurably grateful to her, flattered by her
confidence, curiously exalted by her hesitating words. Speech, however,
he found an impossibility.

"So you see," she concluded, sitting up and speaking once more in her
conversational manner, "I am not a bit modern really, am I? I am just as
primitive as I can be, longing for the things all women long for and
unashamed to confess my longing to any one who has the gift of
understanding, any one who walks with his eyes turned towards the
clouds."

Their taxicab stopped outside the building in which her little flat was
situated. She handed him the door key. "Please turn this for me," she
begged. "I am at home every afternoon between five and seven. Come and
see me whenever you can." He opened the door and she passed in, looking
back at him with a little wave of the hand before she vanished lightly
into the shadows. Tallente dismissed the cab and walked back towards
his rooms. His light-heartedness was passing away with every step he
took. The cheerful little groups of pleasure-seekers he encountered
seemed like an affront to his increasing melancholy. Once more he had
to reckon with this strange new feeling of loneliness which had made its
disturbing entrance into his thoughts within the last few years. It was
as though a certain weariness of life and its prospects had come with
the temporary cessation of his day-by-day political work, and as though
an unsuspected desire, terrified at the passing years, was tugging at
his heartstrings in the desperate call for some tardy realisation.