contained one particular book which would speak directly to her sorrow. It would be like finding a new friend, one whose perceptions were so subtly and delicately attuned to hers as to see further into her heart than she herself was capable of doing. But since she had no idea what kind of book, or by whom, she spent a great deal of her time idly turning the pages of the catalogue, or gazing sightlessly into the black leather surface of her desk, or wandering the circumference of the labyrinth-the image that came most frequently to her mind, given the catacombs filled with shelf upon shelf of books that she imagined stretching away into darkness beneath the floor.
It had been many months since she and Frederick Liddell had parted, and yet the pall of grief had in no way diminished; instead, it had darkened into something quite beyond her experience. A thick veil seemed to have fallen between her and the world; she felt estranged, not only from friends and family, but from herself. She could not work, for all power of concentration had left her. Her husband kept his accustomed round between his chambers, his club, and his chair by the fireside, tranquilly unaware that anything was wrong; her daughter Florence was away at school in Berne; and the chatter of friends, in which Julia had once joined so enthusiastically, now seemed like die gibbering of dead souls in limbo. Yet to all outward appearances she had merely done what so many women yoked to indifferent husbands had done before her. She numbered amongst her own acquaintance women who moved cheerfully and lightly from one lover to the next, and knew of cases in which the children of such unions were accepted by the said indifferent husbands without apparent protest. The code seemed to be that so long as appearances were more or less maintained, women as well as men could do as they pleased. Whereas to Julia the taking of a lover had seemed an altogether momentous step. She had yearned for an intimacy to which she could bring her whole heart, which would release something trapped within her, free a door in her imagination which seemed to have swollen and stuck fast; but until the day she met Frederick Liddell she had come to believe she would die without ever having found it.
Marriage to Ernest Lockhart had been the great disappointment of Julia's life. Yet she had nothing to say against him, beyond an entire absence of passion, and even there, he had not deceived her; she had deceived herself. At twenty, she had allowed herself to be overborne by the romance of marrying a man sixteen years her senior, so assured and cultivated beside, say, young Harry Fletcher who had blushed and stammered every time he spoke to her but who, as she realised far too late, had plainly adored her. Her parents had not forced her; on the contrary, she could still recall her father asking her very earnestly if she was quite sure, and hear herself saying blithely yes, airily convinced that Ernest Lockhart's reserve concealed an answering force of passion. And then to discover her husband so… well, so inept and lifeless, yet so wedded to the shows and forms of marriage, and so incapable of comprehending her unhappiness. Had it not been for her daughter, born within a year of the wedding, she would have left him; as it was, she had worked at her writing and entertained her friends, unable in the end to hate her husband for being what he was, and feeling, as her thirtieth birthday receded, only a dull subterranean anger at the inexorable waste of life.
And then, on a warm spring afternoon at the house of a distinguished man of letters, she had been introduced to Frederick Liddell, whose latest volume of poems she had read only the week before, and very soon found herself deep in conversation with him in a quiet comer of the distinguished mans garden, where they sat upon a bench in the shade of an oak and talked until she had lost all consciousness of time. He was not much over thirty, and looked even younger, for his complexion was as fair and soft as a woman's, and his dark eyes capable, as it seemed to Julia, of a quite feminine subtlety. Even his wavy brown hair seemed expressive in its unruly abundance, brushed across a broad, high forehead, the face narrowing markedly to a strong, rounded chin. His enthusiasms chased one another across his features; in repose, his most characteristic expression was one of gentle melancholy, a mild sadness which Julia found quite irresistible, all the more so because Frederick seemed utterly devoid of guile. She was used to fending off the attentions of practised seducers such as her unhappy friend Irene's husband Hector, with whom, it was said, no woman could safely be left alone for five minutes, but whose oily countenance invariably reminded Julia of Mr Chadband. But she was quite unused to being listened to with such responsive absorption. By the time she discovered that he had read and admired the one tale of hers that had so far been published, Julia felt certain she had made a friend for life.
They spoke a great deal that afternoon of religion, or rather of the impossibility of either believing in any of its prescribed forms, or living without some aspiration beyond the material, without coming to any definite conclusion save that their feelings seemed to be in entire agreement. In poetry they were divided by Julia's preference for Keats against his for Shelley, but this only opened the happy prospect of their reading their favourite passages to one another on some future occasion. From there they progressed naturally to dreams, and Julia found herself telling Frederick of a dream she had had on perhaps half a dozen occasions. It usually began in soft summer twilight, in an open field, a gentle slope covered in long green grass. She would begin to run down the slope, taking longer and longer strides until she could feel her feet just brushing the tips of the grass and remember, with a great rush of joy, that she had been born with the gift of flight. Then she would extend her arms and soar above the fields, feeling utterly at home in the air until the awareness that she was dreaming began to press itself upon her. Always she would struggle to hold onto the dream; for one magical, exhilarating moment she would believe that she had woken and yet continued to fly, until the world dissolved beneath her and she was left alone and bereft in darkness, like the knight-at-arms waking upon the cold hill's side. This was something she had never disclosed to anyone, for fear that if she did not keep it secret, the dream would never come back to her. Yet she spoke of it quite spontaneously to Frederick, and when she had done so, saw that he was greatly moved.
SOME YEARS AGO, HE SAID, HE HAD FALLEN IN LOVE WITH a dancer named Lydia Lopez-not her real name, for she had been born and bred in London, but the only one he had ever known her by, just as he had been left only one memento of her, though he did not say what it was. He had gone every night to the theatre where she performed, and sometimes taken her to supper afterwards. Frederick did not describe Lydia very distinctly, other than to say that she was very small and slightly formed, so much so that she could easily have been taken for a child of twelve or thirteen.
One particularly elaborate scene-a favourite with the audience-called for her to be equipped with wings and to soar, suspended from a wire, high above the stage. Frederick had been in the front row on the night when the wire gave way and Lydia fell from the painted heavens; he could still, he said, shuddering at the memory, hear the dreadful thud of her body striking the boards. The curtain was instantly drawn; yet to everyone's amazement and relief, she came out half an hour later, looking a little dazed but apparently uninjured, and took a bow, drawing rapturous applause from the house. But the relief was premature; a few hours later she lapsed into unconsciousness, and she died two days later of a haemorrhage to the brain.
Before Lydia, Frederick confessed, he had fancied himself in love with a different woman every week, but he had never since been able to care for anyone as he had cared for her. 'I did not know how much she meant to me until she was gone/ he said, gazing into Julia's eyes with such open, unaffected feeling that her sympathy went out to him entirely; so much so that she found she had taken his hand in both of hers. She felt, if anything, strangely reassured by this disclosure; and he accepted her invitation to tea at her house in Hyde Park Gardens with such eagerness, and told her with such warmth how delighted he was to have met her, that she went home happier than she could remember being since she had first held her infant daughter in her arms.
Julia knew herself in love with Frederick from that first afternoon, but it was many weeks before she dared hope that her feeling might be returned, for when she saw him next in company she wondered if he were not exactly the same ardent, attentive listener with everyone of his acquaintance. Yet he accepted all of her suggestions for meeting, despite the demands upon his time-he had a small private income, supplemented by a great deal of reviewing-with such eagerness that her imagination would insist upon running far ahead of her. She dared not invite him too often to her house, for she could not bear the thought of their relations becoming the object of common gossip, and so they met in galleries and parks, and sometimes in the Reading Room, always maintaining the pretext that such-and-such would be an interesting thing to do as soon as they found the opportunity. There always seemed to be more to say than they had time for, and as the days lengthened he spoke less often of Lydia; but it was not until spring had passed into summer that she arrived, with a rapidly beating heart, at the entrance to a mansion block towering above a narrow Bloomsbury street, in response to his first invitation to tea.
HE HAD WARNED HER ABOUT THE STAIRS, APOLOGISING for his preference for living as high above the street as possible, but she was still surprised by how many flights there were, and though the day was cool and cloudy, she was quite dazzled by the light when he ushered her into his sitting room. There were tall casements on
