For the most part these letters were brief, for Lewisham, South
Kensington fashion, prided himself upon not being "literary," and some
of the more despatch-like wounded a heart perhaps too hungry for
tender words.
He did not meet Miss Heydinger's renewed advances with invariable
kindness. Yet something of the old relations were presently
restored. He would talk well to her for a time, and then snap like a
dry twig. But the loaning of books was resumed, the subtle process of
his aesthetic education that Miss Heydinger had devised. "Here is a
book I promised you," she said one day, and he tried to remember the
promise.
The book was a collection of Browning's Poems, and it contained
"Sludge"; it also happened that it contained "The Statue and the
Bust"--that stimulating lecture on half-hearted constraints. "Sludge"
did not interest Lewisham, it was not at all his idea of a medium, but
he read and re-read "The Statue and the Bust." It had the profoundest
effect upon him. He went to sleep--he used to read his literature in
bed because it was warmer there, and over literature nowadays it did
not matter as it did with science if one dozed a little--with these
lines stimulating his emotion:--
"So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam
The glory dropped from their youth and love,
And both perceived they had dreamed a dream.
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