Sacred and Profane Love | Page 5

a
frank, joyous pride. From that moment I ceased to be ashamed of anything that I honestly
liked. But I dared not keep the book. The knowledge of its contents would have killed my
aunt. I read it again; I read the last pages several times, and then I burnt it and breathed
freely.
Such was I, as I forced my will on my aunt in the affair of the concert. And I say that she
who had never suspected the existence of the real me, suspected it then, when we glanced
at each other across the breakfast-room. Upon these apparent trifles life swings, as upon a

pivot, into new directions.
I sat with my aunt while Lucy went with the note. She returned soon with the reply, and
the reply was:
'So sorry I can't accept your kind invitation. I should have liked to go awfully. But Fred
has got the toothache, and I must not leave him.'
The toothache! And my very life, so it seemed to me, hung in the balance.
I did not hesitate one second.
'Hurrah!' I cried. 'She can go. I am to call for her in the cab.'
And I crushed the note cruelly, and threw it in the fire.
'Tell him to call at Ryleys',' I said to Rebecca as she was putting me and my dress into the
cab.
And she told the cabman with that sharp voice of hers, always arrogant towards inferiors,
to call at Ryleys.'
I put my head out of the cab window as soon as we were in Oldcastle Street.
'Drive straight to Hanbridge,' I ordered.
The thing was done.

II
He was like his photograph, but the photograph had given me only the most inadequate
idea of him. The photograph could not render his extraordinary fairness, nor the rich gold
of his hair, nor the blue of his dazzling eyes. The first impression was that he was too
beautiful for a man, that he had a woman's beauty, that he had the waxen beauty of a doll;
but the firm, decisive lines of the mouth and chin, the overhanging brows, and the
luxuriance of his amber moustache, spoke more sternly. Gradually one perceived that
beneath the girlish mask, beneath the contours and the complexion incomparably delicate,
there was an individuality intensely and provocatively male. His body was rather less
than tall, and it was muscular and springy. He walked on to the platform as an unspoilt
man should walk, and he bowed to the applause as if bowing chivalrously to a woman
whom he respected but did not love. Diaz was twenty-six that year; he had recently
returned from a tour round the world; he was filled full of triumph, renown, and adoration.
As I have said, he was already legendary. He had become so great and so marvellous that
those who had never seen him were in danger of forgetting that he was a living human
being, obliged to eat and drink, and practise scales, and visit his tailor's. Thus it had
happened to me. During the first moments I found myself thinking, 'This cannot be Diaz.
It is not true that at last I see him. There must be some mistake.' Then he sat down

leisurely to the piano; his gaze ranged across the hall, and I fancied that, for a second, it
met mine. My two seats were in the first row of the stalls, and I could see every slightest
change of his face. So that at length I felt that Diaz was real, and that he was really there
close in front of me, a seraph and yet very human. He was all alone on the great platform,
and the ebonized piano seemed enormous and formidable before him. And all around was
the careless public--ignorant, unsympathetic, exigent, impatient, even inimical--two
thousand persons who would get value for their money or know the reason why. The
electric light and the inclement gaze of society rained down cruelly upon that defenceless
head. I wanted to protect it. The tears rose to my eyes, and I stretched out towards Diaz
the hands of my soul. My passionate sympathy must have reached him like a beneficent
influence, of which, despite the perfect self-possession and self-confidence of his
demeanour, it seemed to me that he had need.
I had risked much that night. I had committed an enormity. No one but a grown woman
who still vividly remembers her girlhood can appreciate my feelings as I drove from
Bursley to Hanbridge in the cab, and as I got out of the cab in the crowd, and gave up my
ticket, and entered the glittering auditorium of the Jubilee Hall. I was alone, at night, in
the public places, under the eye of the world. And I