only person she could think of as having a real life at all like her own.
She had thought of him as mixed up for ever with her real life, so that
whether she saw him or not, whether she remembered him or not, he would
be there. He was in the songs she made, he was in the Sonata
_Appassionata_; he was in the solemn beauty of Karva under the moon. In
the _Critique of Pure Reason_ she caught the bright passing of his mind.

Perhaps she had forgotten a little what he looked like. Smoky black eyes.
Tired eyelids. A crystal mind, shining and flashing. A mind like a big
room, filled from end to end with light. Maurice Jourdain.


V.

"I don't think I should have known you, Mary."

Maurice Jourdain had come. In the end Uncle Victor had let him. He was
sitting there, all by himself, on the sofa in the middle of the room.

It was his third evening. She had thought it was going to pass exactly
like the other two, and then her mother had got up, with an incredible
suddenness, and left them.

Through the open window you could hear the rain falling in the garden;
you could see the garden grey and wet with rain.

She sat on the edge of the fender, and without looking up she knew that
he was watching her from under half-shut eyelids.

His eyelids were so old, so tired, so very tired and old.