It was three years after that the Colonel asked me to go to see some friends who lived in the Clondalkin district, and we followed the quays talking of the woman we were going to see and her sisters in Galway, but when we reached the long road leading to the Moat House, a group of trees (one of Stella's motives) recalled her, and so vividly, that I could not keep myself from speaking of her.

I have no peace since her death. Not every day, I said, nor every night, else I should be dead by now, or mad; consciousness is spasmodic, and no warning is given. Any sight or sound is enough. She painted those trees; they hang in my room, feathery against a blue sky that has changed to grey, to everlasting grey. A touch of rhetoric had come into my speech.... Yet I was speaking truthfully, and the Colonel tried to soothe me.

Blame! Of course no blame attaches to me, and yet ... I may have wronged Florence. But I never felt any remorse on her account, only on Stella's. The question isn't whether I gave her the best advice that might have been given in the circumstances; I gave her the only advice that was possible for me to give. I knew nothing but good of the man; and the advice I gave was the only advice she would have taken. No, I cannot reproach myself with anything, and yet, and yet—Why did I speak in his favour? And that is what I am afraid no one will ever be able to tell me. Was it because I wished to free myself from all responsibility? There was none. She took her chance with me and I took mine with her—an equal chance in these days when women desert their lovers as frequently as men desert their mistresses. We were bound by no contract; it was no passing fancy, no infidelity that parted us. Again and again I have given thanks to my stars, to my destiny, to the Providence that watches over me that it is impossible to trace any connection between my confession to her and her announcement to me of her marriage. More than a year intervened.

I can't see that any blame attaches to you for the advice that you gave.

Nor can I, yet her death overshadows my life, and for no reason. You see I told her, but not till she had admitted that she was going to be married, or was thinking of being married, that I had gotten a letter from Elizabeth, inviting me to come to see her. She had neglected me for years, ever since her marriage, but she is the only woman of whom I did not weary. A sister-mistress, I said. The Colonel, who does not understand these subtleties, kept silence. I had expected him to ask why I had told Stella of the letter, but the Colonel never asks personal questions, and I doubt if he was very much interested in my story. It may have been to drive her into this marriage that I told her that this other woman had written to me. What do you think?

I don't think it at all likely. She was determined on her marriage before she spoke to you about it. You have no reason to suppose that her marriage was not a happy one?

On the contrary, there are many reasons to think that it was a very happy one.

I don't see there is any cause for blame.

Nor do I, but her death is the one thing that I wish had not happened to me.

I waited for the Colonel to continue the inquiry, but he showed no inclination to do so, and his indifference exasperated me without shocking me as Edward had done when I had gone to him for sympathy, throwing all the blame upon myself, and he had answered: Why didn't she mind herself?—the pure peasant speaking through him; and to escape from the atmosphere of the cabin I looked toward the Colonel. Any mention, I thought, of Sarsfield and the Siege of Limerick would rouse him; but having no desire for a historical disquisition at that moment, I began to think out the whole story again, finding some consolation in remembering that it was not for any mere woman I had crossed two seas, but for her whom I had sought for twenty years, turning from many fallacious forms and vain appearances, till at length I discovered the divine reciprocation of all my instincts and aspirations, the prophetic echo of my eternity, one summer's day among a luncheon-party in the Savoy Hotel. Certain moments cannot pass from us, and I do not think I shall ever outlive the moment when I rose from my chair to meet my fate in the Savoy Hotel. My readers do not need telling that the moving tints of a shot-silk gown did not cover a dusky body from Italy or Spain; they have guessed already that my fate came to me out of Flanders in all the fair bloom of her twentieth summer; the full, flower-like eyes, the round brow, the golden hair, a dryad by Rubens in appearance and withal a dryad's nature. If Ruben's dryad were to come upon a traveller's fire in a forest, she would sit by it warming her shins as long as it lasted, and then depart for lack of thought to rouse the ashes into flame, and I have often thought that Elizabeth treats the arts as the dryad the traveller's fire; she warms her shins and departs, and overtaking satyrs and fauns in mossy dells abandons herself again to her instincts. I can pick up a thread, I have heard her say, but continuity I cannot abide; and feeling that it would have been stupid to answer: You look upon me as a thread that can be picked up and dropped with every change of fancy, I fell to thinking how after a long day's journey I had come upon Elizabeth in a hilly country fronting great prospects of pasture in which kine wandered in long herds, and how she led me day after day through the woods, through sunny interspaces that I remember for many a pleasant frolic in the warm fragrant grass. I remember the tasselled branches of the larches, the blackbird in the underwood, the thrush on the high branch, and the mocking laughter of the yaffle when he crossed from wood to wood; but Elizabeth remembers nothing; the dryad is without our human memories.

All the whiles of this summer pleasance somebody was dying near us; we were parted for many months, and when we came together again our love story was no longer told in the woods. Yet she seemed contended with me for a lover, and so docile was she in this Michaelmas summer of our love that I said: There will be no change. I wonder, I asked her in my folly, if we shall love each other always, if in ten years' time—She laughed, and three weeks after she took me aside to confide a strange project to me.

You don't mind, darling, if I don't see you tonight? I prefer to tell you —— has asked me if he might come. I can't well refuse. You don't mind?

It would be vain for me to try to oppose your wishes, and you would hate me if I did.

How well you know me! How clever you are!

The pair of shanks and ears that had come into our garden through the underwood disappeared soon after, never to return; and we resumed our love story; and then another pair of shanks and another pair of ears appeared, and these were succeeded by more shanks and ears, and the thought became clear that the last leaves were falling, and that no renewal of our love would ever happen in my life again. Love, she had said, is for the young and for the middle-aged, and I was growing old, the love of the senses was burning out, and it would be better to quench it by a sudden resolve than to keep blowing upon the ashes. By fifty, I said to myself, we should have learnt that human life is a lonely thing and cannot be shared, and that we are further from our mistresses when they throw their arms about us than we are when we sit by the fire, elderly men, dreaming of the kisses given and the words said in distant years. Recollection is the resource of the middle-aged, so says Turgenev in one of his many beautiful stories. So did I reason with myself, and for two or three months I believed that love would never flame up in my life again, but one evening a lady whom I had known many years ago crossed a restaurant, and I ran to her for news of a friend of hers. She had not heard of Doris for some years, and in reply to my question if Doris were married she said she had not heard of any marriage, and becoming suddenly anxious about this girl I wrote to her relations, who answered that Doris was not married; but my letter had been forwarded to her, and to this letter came a delightful answer from Florac, a town that will be sought vainly on the map. It will be discovered, however, in a story entitled The Lovers of Orelay, and if the reader of Vale be wishful to know what happened at Orelay he can do so in a volume entitled Memoirs of my Dead Life, but he need not read this novel to follow adequately the story of Vale. The difference between one man and another is so little that I could come to no other conclusion than that dear Edward was right and that women cannot be adjudged an aesthetic sense. Man, I said to Dujardin, possesses an aesthetic sense, but he is not an aesthetic animal like cats, horses, or women, and he had answered me that woman's point of view is different from man's, an argument that calls into question the reality of the visible world. I don't think the point has ever been fairly argued out; however this may be, I have never been able to get it out of my head that women are idealists, and that it is their natural idealism which enables them to ignore our ugliness. Extraordinary! I said, for looking into Doris's face I could see that she was pleased and happy; and the thought came into my mind that if Lewis Hawkins were to see us together he would be astonished by it, for it had always been his conviction that no woman could ever love me. I remembered his hardly concealed pity of my ugliness, his sudden inspiration that I should grow a beard for my chin deflected, and how I had been taken to a tailor, and instructed when the clothes came home how I must lean against the doorpost and look through the ballroom. The company should be gazed at with indifference; a nonchalant air, he said, attracted women, and many years of my life were spent trying to imitate him. Time, he said to me, wears away everything, even ugliness; you will be more interesting after thirty than before. And it was he who told me that Goethe had said, We had better take care what we desire in youth, for in age we will get it.

The pedant that was in Goethe muddied this utterance. We do not choose our desires; he should have said, If we desire in youth ardently, our desires will be fulfilled in age. But what is truth? the sage has often asked, and the aesthetician in me regretted Doris's taste for elderly men, and, stopping before the armoire à glace at Orelay, I had felt intensely that this love story was no frolic of nymph and satyr, but a disgraceful exhibition of Beauty and the Beast.

Theories, however, avail us nothing, and it was not till several months after parting with Doris that I began to reconsider the important question—important, for no man lives who can say he is not interested in the question when a man should begin to try—how shall I put it? Well, to avoid unplatonic love encounters. But is an encounter ever platonic? A question for grammarians, for me it is to tell that a few months after my return to Dublin a lady called to see my pictures, and that the encounter of our lips sent the blood rushing to my head, and so violently that for ten minutes I lay where I had fallen on the sofa, holding my splitting temples. My time for love encounters is over, I said, reaching out my hand to her sadly.... She was too frightened to answer, and after proposing a glass of water was glad to get away out of the house. A sigh escaped me; my head was quieter, and, struggling to my feet, I stood by the window watching the hawthorns blowing. At last words came to me: Love's period is over for me. Life is for ever changing, and very little remains after fifty for a man and still less for a woman. We are for ever dying. Woolly bear is succeeded by the cricket bat, the bat is followed by the rod, the gun, the horse, the girl, and between fifty and sixty we discover that our love-life is over and done. Our interest in sex, however, remains the same, but it is an intellectual interest, changed, transformed, lifted out of the flesh. Our eyes follow the movement of the body under the silken gown, a well-turned neck and shapely bosom please us, and we like to look into the feminine eyes and read the feminine soul; but we do not kiss the point of white shoulders when thoughtless ladies lead us away after dinner into a corner of a shadowy drawing-room and cry in our ears, No, all is not over yet.

I wandered out into the garden, finding consolation in the thought that one does not grieve for a lost appetite, for a lost power, for a lost force. Horrible, I said, and my eyes wandered over my garden, for the month was October. The dahlias were blackening and the Michaelmas daisies were growing slattern; soon there would be no flowers left but the flower that never fails to remind me of the mops with which coachmen wash their carriage wheels. The swallows must be by now half-way across the Mediterranean. Soon they will be nesting among the stones of Cheops' Pyramid, and, my thoughts returning to myself, I said, My mother used to say that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Celibacy is set above all the other virtues in Ireland, and the Irish people will listen to my exhortations now that I have become the equal of the priest, the nun, and the ox. Chastity is the prerogative of the prophet, why no man can tell, and dear Edward, to whom the virtue of chastity is especially dear, believes that it was the stories of what the newspapers would call my unbridled passions that had caused the Irish people to turn a deaf ear to my exhortations that they should speak Irish and write Irish, and to my prophesying that a new literature would arise out of the new language, or the old language revived.

My thoughts unfolded, and I remembered how strangely I had been moved the night in the Temple when Edward said he would like to write his plays in Irish. The Tale of a Town had brought me to Tillyra, and I had caught sight of Cathleen ni Houlihan in the dusk over against the Burran mountains as I returned through the beech-woods and the dank bracken. The rewriting of The Tale of a Town had awakened the Irishman, that was dormant in me, and the Boer War had turned my love of England to hatred of England, and a voice heard on three different occasions had bidden me pack my portmanteau and return to Ireland. The voice was one that had to be obeyed, but Ireland had not listened to me and until now it seemed that I had misread the signs. But Nature is not a humorist. She intended to redeem Ireland from Catholicism and has chosen me as her instrument, and has cast chastity upon me so that I may be able to do her work, I said. As soon as my change of life becomes known the women of Ireland will come to me crying, Master, speak to us, for, at the bidding of our magicians, we have borne children long enough. May we escape from the burden of child-bearing without sin? they will ask me, and I will answer them: Ireland has lain too long under the spell of the magicians, without will, without intellect, useless and shameful, the despised of nations. I have come into the most impersonal country in the world to preach personality—personal love and personal religion, personal art, personality for all except for God; and I walked across the greensward afraid to leave the garden, and to heighten my inspiration I looked toward the old apple-tree, remembering that many had striven to draw forth the sword that Wotan had struck into the tree about which Hunding had built his hut. Parnell, like Sigmund, had drawn it forth, but Wotan had allowed Hunding to strike him with his spear. And the allegory becoming clearer I asked myself if I were Siegfried, son of Sigmund slain by Hunding, and if it were my fate to reforge the sword that lay broken in halves in Mimi's cave.

It seemed to me that the garden filled with tremendous music, out of which came a phrase glittering like a sword suddenly drawn from its sheath and raised defiantly to the sun.