Love Lies Dreaming Read Online Free PDF Page B

of depression, and my occasional fits of exhilaration.
    A small child came and asked me the time—the
right
time, as all urchins do. She stood a little distance away from me and grinned at me engagingly, so engagingly that I forgot the grubbiness of her nose and the hideous gray underclothes dangling below her frock. That started me off.
    As she stood there smiling at me with her eyes wrinkled in the sunlight, a picture flashed before me of the same child naked, standing unashamed and still smiling, with the green grass round her and the trees in the background, and the sun flashing from the tiny waves in the kale. Almost mechanically I glanced at my watch and told her what she wanted to know, andshe scampered away, while my eyes followed her across the park I pictured small pink limbs twinkling over the lawn, the slight, graceful lines of hip and shoulder and the airy freedom of all her movements.
    The vision extended itself with mesmeric rapidity. Now all the park was alive with little naked children. The piercing pipe of their voices, which had maddened me five minutes before, now made fairy music, faint and far away. The endless running to and fro, whose aimlessness had called forth from me a growl of disgust, was now the weavings of a dainty little ballet, wherein the artless gestures and grace of attitude set off the innocent nakedness of the dancers. Squalor had vanished with the rags that suggested it. And the sun shone more brightly than ever, lighting up the lake until it glittered like a sea of diamonds, and the trees swayed ever so little in the wind, their murmur making a drowsy accompaniment to the piping treble of the children’s cries. It was all sheer piercing beauty.
    Along the paths came others—envied adults. My enchanted eyes stripped them, too, of the clothes that shielded them from a censorious world. This smug, self-satisfied individual, strutting perkily along, withswaying, swag belly, breathing stertorously on his way to an over-ample lunch—what the devil was there about him to be envied? And the woman with the yapping Pomeranian. She too, seemed to find difficulty in breathing—which was hardly surprising to me now, for I could see that the tortured over-abundant flesh was bound and corseted almost from neck to knee. I suppose the corsets satisfied her; they were obviously designed for the purpose, seeing that they and their attendant brassiere pushed the fat away from the front, where she could see it (and where, at any rate, there was some excuse for its existence) to the back where she could not. She puffed by me, and I could see the garters sunk in the flabby thighs, and the crippled toes hobbling painfully on the high-heeled shoes, and a trickle of sweat between the shoulder-blades beneath the silk vest.
    The lean woman who followed immediately after her would be too painful to describe even to this limited extent. Then I thought of Constance and laughed joyously—and aloud. The lean woman turned involuntarily and looked at me, and then hurried on with averted glance from this imbecile bad characterwho sat laughing at respectable women in the park; and I laughed again.
    The rest of that day passed in laughter, happy, joyful laughter, which carried me through the drudgery of the office and through the crowds on the way back, and along the streets and up the stairs home. In my eagerness I could hardly put the key into the keyhole, and as Constance met me in the hall I caught her to me in flooding happiness. Everything was right with the world.

Chapter IV
    The last word I wrote yesterday was “happiness.” I suppose it is inevitable that during this period of doubt and unhappiness I should turn back to the days when there was no doubt and also no unhappiness.
    Yet it is not Constance that I doubt. I am certain of that, far more certain than I am of anything else in this world. This is just a little spurt of contrariness which I suppose is inevitable. Now that it