I drugged myself with Fiesole to avoid thinking of Vi. Fiesole was so vivid in her personality that, while she was present, she absorbed my whole attention and shut out memory.

She was a continual source of pleasure and surprise, for her mood was forever changing. She could be as naughty as a French novel and as solemn as the Church of England Prayer Book. When she tried to be both together she was at her drollest; it was like Handel played on a mouth-organ.

She would never let me take her seriously. There lay the safety of our comradeship. At the first hint of sentiment, she flew like a hare before a greyhound; the way she showed her alarm was by converting what should have been pathos into absurdity.

Day after day of memorable beauty I spent with her in that blowy Cotswold country. We would usually appoint our place of meeting somewhere on the outskirts of Oxford. It was not necessary to let everyone know just how much of our time was lived together. This care for public opinion lent our actions the zest of indiscretion.

As I set out to meet her, I would pass crowds of undergrads, capped and gowned, sauntering off to their morning lectures. I was playing truant, and that gave an added spice to adventure. Each college doorway frowned on my frivolity, calling me back to a sense of duty. But the young foliage glittered and the spring wind romped down the street, and the shadows quivered and jumped aside as the sunlight splashed them. The lure of the feminine beckoned. Where the houses grew wider apart I would find her, and we would commence our climb out of the valley. Now we would come to a farm-house, standing gray and mediaeval in a sea of tossing green. Now we would pass by flowery orchards, smoking with scattered bloom. Brooks tinkled; birds sang; across the hedge a plowman called to his horses and started them up a new furrow. And through all this commotion of new-found life and clamorous hearts we two wandered, glad in one another.

Only the atmosphere of what we talked about remains with me. There were moments when we skirted the seashore of affection, and perhaps pushed out from land a little way, speculating on love’s audacities and dangers. But these moments were rare, for Fiesole delighted in love’s pursuit and not in its certainty. We made no pretense that our attraction for one another was more than friendly and temporary. If we played occasionally at being lovers, it was understood that we were only playing.

Fiesole never admitted that she had prolonged her stay in Oxford for my sake. She kept me in constant attendance by the threat that this might be my last chance of being with her. The supposition that her visit was shortly to end gave us the excuse we needed for being always together. We lived the hours which we shared intensely, as friends do who must soon go their separate ways.

But beneath her veneer of wit and frivolity I began to discover a truer and kinder Fiesole. These flashes of self-revelation came when she was off her guard. They were betrayed by a tremor in her tone or a hesitancy in her gaiety. After a day of exquisite sensations, her independence would break down and the fear of loneliness would look out from her eyes. She would prolong her departure, again postponing it beyond the date appointed. I began to suspect that her dashing recklessness was a barrier of habit, which she had erected to defend her shyness from curious observers. Insincerity was a cloak for her sincerity. Hidden behind her tantalizing lightness lay the deep and urgent feminine desire for a man and little children. I had roused in her the mating instinct. I was not the man; she had yet to find him. With myself the same thing was true. I took delight in her partly for herself, but mainly as Vi’s proxy. Fiesole and I had come together in a moment of crisis. We saw in each other the shadow of what we desired.

When a month had gone by I began to debate with myself how far our conduct was safe and justifiable. I went so far as to ask myself the question, did I want to marry her. But that consideration was impossible in my state of mind. Besides, as Fiesole herself had said, she was the type of woman that a man may love and yet fear to marry. She had no sense of moral responsibility. She would demand too much of herself and her lover. Her passion, once aroused, would burn too ardently. It would be self-consuming. She was a wild thing of the wood, swift and beautiful, and un-moral.

May had slipped by. June was nearly ended. Still she delayed. A chance remark of Brookins brought me to my senses and forced me to face the impression we had created. Fiesole, when she visited me in college, invariably brought her maid; we would shut her up in my bedroom while we sat in my study. In this way, we supposed, appearances had been saved. But Brookins’s remark proved the contrary—that he hoped I’d let him know when I moved out of Lazarus as he’d like to have my rooms.

“I’m not moving out of Lazarus. What made you think that?”

“You’ll have to when you’re married.”

“But what makes you think that I’m going to be married?”

“We don’t have to think,” he tittered. “We only have to use our eyes.”

That decided me. In common fairness we must separate. Since I could not make the suggestion to her, I determined to leave Oxford myself. The term was nearly ended. My work on the Renaissance furnished an excuse for a visit to Italy. I had never been out of England as yet; at Pope Lane we had had all we could do to keep up a plausible appearance of stay-at-home respectability. But Fiesole with her talk of travel, had led me to peep out of the back-door of the world. I made up my mind to start immediately.

It was a golden summer’s evening. How well I remember it! I had not seen her for two days. I was finishing my packing. A trunk stood in the middle of the floor partly filled. Over the backs of chairs clothes hung disorderly. Piles of books lay muddled about the carpet, among socks and shirts and underwear. Through the open window from the garden drifted in the rumor of voices and the perfume of roses.

The door opened without warning. I was kneeling beside the trunk. Glancing over my shoulder I saw her. She slipped into the room like a ray of sunlight, and stood behind me. She wore a golden dress, gathered in at the waist with a girdle of silver. Her arms, bare from the elbow, hung looped before her with the fingers knotted.

I glanced at her a moment. Her face was pale with reproach. Her rebelliousness had departed. Her lips trembled. She looked like a sensitive child, trying not to cry when her feelings had been wounded. This was the true Fiesole I had long suspected, but had never before discovered. We had no use for polite explanations; in the past two months we had lived too near together. She knew what it all meant—the half-filled trunk, the scattered clothing, the piles of books. Feeling ashamed, with a hurried greeting I turned back to my packing.

“You’re going.”

She spoke in a low voice, with a tremble in it. It filled me with panic desire to be kind to her; yet I dared not trust myself. I did not love her. I kept telling myself that I did not love her. My whole mind and being were pledged to another woman. And yet pity is so near to love that I could not allow myself to touch her. I was mad from the restraint I had suffered. To touch her might result in irreparable folly. Kneeling lower over my trunk, I shifted articles hither and thither, pressed them closer, moved them back to their original places, doing nothing useful, simply trying to keep my hands busy.

She watched me. I could not see her, but I felt that behind my back the slow, sweet, lazy smile was curling up the corners of her mouth. I knew just how she was looking—how the eyebrows were twitching and nostrils panting, the long white throat was working. I fixed my mind upon Vi. I was doing this for her. Maybe, if Fiesole had come first, we might have married. But we should not have been happy. I must be true to Vi, I told myself. I was like a man parched with thirst in a burning desert, who sees arise a mirage of green waters and blue palm-trees—and knows it to be a mirage, and yet is tempted.

“You were going away without telling me.”

Her voice broke. I listened for the sob, but it did not follow. Outside in the garden a thrush awoke; his notes fell like flashing silver, gleaming dimmer and dimmer as they sank into the silence.

“You were going away because of me. I would have gone if you had spoken.”

Still kneeling, I looked up at her. “Fiesole, I didn’t dare to tell you. Something was said. We had to separate. I thought this way was best.”

“Said about me?”

“About us.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t like to tell you.”

“I can guess. They said you were in love with me. Was that it?”

I tried to rise, but she held me down with her hands upon my shoulders. Each time I bent back my head to answer, she stooped lower above me. Her breath was in my hair. The gold flashed up in the depths of her eyes. Her voice broke into slow laughter. With her lips touching my forehead she whispered, “And what if they did say it?”

For a moment we gazed at one another. I hoped and I dreaded. By one slight action of assent, the quiver of an eye-lid or the raising of a hand, I would thrust Vi from me forever. A marriage with Fiesole would at least be correct—approved by society; but I should have to sin against Vi to get it—to sin against a love which was half-sinful.

Fiesole straightened. The tension relaxed. She placed her hand on my head, ruffling my hair. As though imitating the thrush, a peal of silver laughter fell from her lips. “Oh, Dante, Dante! You are just as you were. You’re still afraid of girls.”

I rose to my feet. She was again a coquette, rash, luring attack, but always on the defensive. I gained control of myself as my pity ebbed. I had been mistaken in thinking I had hurt her. I should have known she was play-acting. And yet I doubted.

We walked over to the lounge by the window. I seated myself beside her, confident now of my power to restrain myself. “I was afraid for you—not of you.”

“Why should you be afraid for me when I’m not afraid for myself? No, Dante, it wasn’t that. You’re afraid of yourself. Someone told you long, long ago, when you were quite little, that it w............