I wondered, as I walked slowly up Shaftesbury Avenue that night, whether she realised what she had said. I hoped not. I prayed not; because her words seemed to me to murder her own cherished hope--that he was safely past that turbulent phase and back at thirty-three again.
For that poignancy of remembrance, I am glad to think, is more frequently a man's than a woman's. It is the man who, slipping away, away from his youth and innocence, down, down, slip after slip into the mire of life, lifts his red and weeping eyes to what he used to be. And when does that vision shine most agonisingly fair? Not in the hours of his philosophy, when nothing unduly elates him and nothing too much casts him down, but when he is in the slough as deep as he can get. Oh, I know it, for I have sinned myself, have myself wept, for that impossible heart-break--to be as I once was. And if Julia was right, and he was not seeking Mrs Bassett at all, nor even Daphne Wade, but merely his remembered self at sixteen, then he was _not_ thirty-three at all. He had _not_ yet passed beyond that phase he had dreaded to re-live. He was still in the mud, to have had that tear-blurred vision; still a sinful man of thirty-five who remembered the morning star.
Well, Julia must not know that. This dark corollary was for my shouldering, not hers. And as I resolved to keep it from her I wondered at the marvel her own inner life had been.
For nearly thirty years it had consisted of Derwent Rose and of nothing whatever else! None would have guessed it, none but I knew it, nothing but Derry's unprecedented adventure would have dragged it from her. She was a busy painter, of but moderate talent, and with her living to earn. She could purr when she was pleased, but had claws ready to scratch with as well. And, deep and unguessed behind it all, lay the story of those Sussex fields and lanes, of that dreaming and ecstatic and unheeding boy, of that same boy, grown-up and still unheeding, who had stalked in and out of her studio, borne her off to Chalfont, held aloft her sewing-machine. It seemed to me that her case was little less extraordinary than his. I saw her as a woman who had never grown. She was as she had always been, her life stultified with beauty, a poised and arrested development of love.