Of course the cultivated reader has heard of Aubrey Vair. He has published on three several occasions volumes of delicate verses,—some, indeed, border on indelicacy,  
—and his column “Of Things Literary” in the “Climax” is well known. His Byronic visage and an interview have appeared in the “Perfect Lady.” It was Aubrey Vair, 
 
I believe, who demonstrated that the humour of Dickens was worse than his sentiment, and who detected “a subtle bourgeois flavour” in Shakespeare. However, it is not 
 
generally known that Aubrey Vair has had erotic experiences as well as erotic inspirations. He adopted Goethe some little time since as his literary prototype, and 
 
that may have had something to do with his temporary lapse from sexual integrity.
For it is one of the commonest things that undermine literary men, giving us landslips and picturesque effects along the otherwise even cliff of their respectable 
 
life, ranking next to avarice, and certainly above drink, this instability called 460genius, or, more fully, the consciousness of genius, such as Aubrey Vair 
 
possessed. Since Shelley set the fashion, your man of gifts has been assured that his duty to himself and his duty to his wife are incompatible, and his renunciation 
 
of the Philistine has been marked by such infidelity as his means and courage warranted. Most virtue is lack of imagination. At any rate, a minor genius without his 
 
affections twisted into an inextricable muddle, and who did not occasionally shed sonnets over his troubles, I have never met.
Even Aubrey Vair did this, weeping the sonnets overnight into his blotting-book, and pretending to write literary causerie when his wife came down in her bath slippers 
 
to see what kept him up. She did not understand him, of course. He did this even before the other woman appeared, so ingrained is conjugal treachery in the talented 
 
mind. Indeed, he wrote more sonnets before the other woman came than after that event, because thereafter he spent much of his leisure in cutting down the old 
 
productions, retrimming them, and generally altering this ready-made clothing of his passion to suit her particular height and complexion.
Aubrey Vair lived in a little red villa with a lawn at the back and a view of the Downs behind Reigate. He lived upon discreet investment eked out by literary work. 
 
His wife was handsome, sweet, and gentle, and—such is the tender humility 461of good married women—she found her life’s happiness in seeing that little Aubrey Vair 
 
had well-cooked variety for dinner, and that their house was the neatest and brightest of all the houses they entered. Aubrey Vair enjoyed the dinners, and was proud 
 
of the house, yet nevertheless he mourned because his genius dwindled. Moreover, he grew plump, and corpulence threatened him.
We learn in suffering what we teach in song, and Aubrey Vair knew certainly that his soul could give no creditable crops unless his affections were harrowed. And how 
 
to harrow them was the trouble, for Reigate is a moral neighbourhood.
So Aubrey Vair’s romantic longings blew loose for a time, much as a seedling creeper might, planted in the midst of a flower-bed. But at last, in the fulness of time, 
 
the other woman came to the embrace of Aubrey Vair’s yearning heart-tendrils, and his romantic episode proceeded as is here faithfully written down.
The other woman was really a girl, and Aubrey Vair met her first at a tennis party at Redhill. Aubrey Vair did not play tennis after the accident to Miss Morton’s 
 
eye, and because latterly it made him pant and get warmer and moister than even a poet should be; and this young lady had only recently arrived in England, and could 
 
not play. So they gravitated into the two vacant 462basket chairs beside Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, in front of the hollyhocks, and were presently talking at their ease 
 
together.
The other woman’s name was unpropitious,—Miss Smith,—but you would never have suspected it from her face and costume. Her parentage was promising, she was an 
 
orphan, her mother was a Hindoo, and her father an Indian civil servant; and Aubrey Vair—himself a happy mixture of Kelt and Teuton, as, indeed, all literary men have 
 
to be nowadays—naturally believed in the literary consequences of a mixture of races. She was dressed in white. She had finely moulded, pale features, great depth of 
 
expression, and a cloud of delicately frisé black hair over her dark eyes, and she looked at Aubrey Vair with a look half curious and half shy, that contrasted 
 
admirably with the stereotyped frankness of your common Reigate girl.
“This is a splendid lawn—the best in Redhill,” said Aubrey Vair, in the course of the conversation; “and I like it all the better because the daisies are spared.” 
 
He indicated the daisies with a graceful sweep of his rather elegant hand.
“They are sweet little flowers,” said the lady in white, “and I have always associated them with England, chiefly, perhaps, through a picture I saw ‘over there’ 
 
when I was very little, of children making daisy chains. I promised myself 463that pleasure when I came home. But, alas! I feel now rather too large for such delights.
 
”
“I do not see why we should not be able to enjoy these simple pleasures as we grow older—why our growth should have in it so much forgetting. For my own part—”
“Has your wife got Jane’s recipe for stuffing trout?” asked Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, abruptly.
“I really don’t know,” said Aubrey Vair.
“That’s all right,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt. “It ought to please even you.”
“Anything will please me,” said Aubrey Vair; “I care very little—”
“Oh, it’s a lovely dish,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, and relapsed into contemplation.
“I was saying,” said Aubrey Vair, “that I think I still find my keenest pleasures in childish pastimes. I have a little nephew that I see a great deal of, and when 
 
we fly kites together, I am sure it would be hard to tell which of us is the happier. By-the-by, you should get at your daisy chains in that way. Beguile some little 
 
girl.”
“But I did. I took that Morton mite for a walk in the meadows, and timidly broached the subject. And she reproached me for suggesting ‘frivolous pursuits.’ It was a 
 
horrible disappointment.”
“The governess here,” said Aubrey Vair, “is robbing that child of its youth in a terrible way. 464What will a life be that has no childhood at the beginning?
“Some human beings are never young,” he continued, “and they never grow up. They lead absolutely colourless lives. They are—they are etiolated. They never love, 
 
and never feel the loss of it. They are—for the moment I can think of no better image—they are human flowerpots, in which no soul has been planted. But a human soul 
 
properly growing must begin in a fresh childishness.”
“Yes,” said the dark lady, thoughtfully, “a careless childhood, running wild almost. That should be the beginning.”
“Then we pass through the wonder and diffidence of youth.”
“To strength and action,” said the dark lady. Her dreamy eyes were fixed on the Downs, and her fingers tightened on her knees as she spoke. “Ah, it is a grand thing 
 
to live—as a man does—self-reliant and free.”
“And so at last,” said Aubrey Vair, “come to the culmination and crown of life.” He paused and glanced hastily at her. Then he dropped his voice almost to a 
 
whisper—“And the culmination of life is love.”
Their eyes met for a moment, but she looked away at once. Aubrey Vair felt a peculiar thrill and a catching in his breath, but his emotions were too complex for 
 
analysis. He had a certain 465sense of surprise, also, at the way his conversation had developed.
Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt suddenly dug him in the chest with her ear-trumpet, and some one at tennis bawled, “Love all!”
“Did I tell you Jane’s girls have had scarlet fever?” asked Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt.
“No,” said Aubrey Vair.
“Yes; and they are peeling now,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, shutting her lips tightly, and nodding in a slow, significant manner at both of them.
There was a pause. All three seemed lost in thought, too deep for words.
“Love,” began Aubrey Vair, presently, in a severely philosophical tone, leaning back in his chair, holding his hands like a praying saint’s in front of him, and 
 
staring at the toe of his shoe,—“love is, I believe, the one true and real thing in life. It rises above reason, interest, or explanation. Yet I never read of an age 
 
when it was so much forgotten as it is now. Never was love expected to run so much in appointed channels, never was it so despised, checked, ordered, and obstructed. 
 
Policemen say, ‘This way, Eros!’ As a result, we relieve our emotional possibilities in the hunt for gold and notoriety. And after all, with the best fortune in 
 
these, we only hold up the gilded images of our success, and are weary slaves, with unsatisfied hearts, in the pageant of life.”
466Aubrey Vair sighed, and there was a pause. The girl looked at him out of the mysterious darkness of her eyes. She had read many books, but Aubrey Vair was her first 
 
literary man, and she took this kind of thing for genius—as girls have done before.
“We are,” continued Aubrey Vair, conscious of a favourable impression,—“we are like fireworks, mere dead, inert things until the appointed spark comes; and then—
 
if it is not damp—the dormant soul blazes forth in all its warmth and beauty. That is living. I sometimes think, do you know, that we should be happier if we could 
 
die soon after that golden time, like the Ephemerides. There is a decay sets in.”
“Eigh?” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, startlingly. “I didn’t hear you.”
“I was on the point of remarking,” shouted Aubrey Vair, wheeling the array of his thoughts,—“I was on the point of remarking that few people in Redhill could match 
 
Mrs. Morton’s fine broad green.”
“Others have noticed it,” Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt shouted back. “It is since she has had in her new false teeth.”
This interruption dislocated the conversation a little. However—
“I must thank you, Mr. Vair,” said the dark girl, when they parted that afternoon, “for having given me very much to think about.”
467And from her manner, Aubrey Vair perceived clearly he had not wasted his time.
............