‘ “But you would recognize her if you saw her?” the man asked.

‘Again I had to say no; and then I had the presence of mind to add “But she would recognize me!”

‘He nodded sagely, as if this was a situation that might easily arise and one which, as a man of the world, and a man of heart, he understood. Excusing himself, he turned away and called to someone inside the flat. A woman came out—his wife, I suppose; she was thin-faced and dark and wore long ear-rings. While he was explaining my quest to her I was again overwhelmed by a conviction of its hopelessness; yet she did not seem to share it; she kept looking at me with quick, measuring eyes as if she was trying to guess, from my appearance, the sort of person I should be interested in.

‘ “There are a score of signorinas living in the palace,” she said to me; “would yours be young or old?”

‘I stared; it had never occurred to me that a signorina could be old; but of course she could, the word only implied unmarried, and I was old; it was a natural question.

‘ “No, young, young,” I cried, “I am sure she is young.”

‘The woman smiled and hesitated.

‘ “Proviamo!” she said. “Let us try!”

‘Fascinated, I watched her ring the bell of the flat next to hers; the door opened, there were explanations, then a girl came out with her, a pretty girl of eighteen or so, who shyly looked me up and down, and then shook her head. Four or five times, at neighbouring doors, the process was repeated; once the couple drew a blank; once they came out with three signorinas all of whom politely looked as if they would have liked to recognize me if they could. Between each identity parade my hopes soared, only to be dashed again.

‘All at once I realized it was over; no more signorinas were forthcoming; my well-wishers had exhausted their stock of suspects; now it was for me to prosecute my search, and they sincerely hoped I should be successful. I stood a moment encircled by their smiles, and then with Latin realism and acceptance of failure, the smiles were turned off and I found myself alone.

‘Twilight was falling. It was thickest where I stood; I might have been in the middle of a tunnel, with a glimmer of violet light at either, end. My excitement had evaporated and the shadow of defeat, which is also the shadow of reality, began to mingle with the other shadows. Again, which way? At which end of the tunnel should I begin? Then I remembered, and was amazed at myself for having been so dense: it was the end that overlooked my flat that I must explore: the inspecting signorinas had come from the middle of the palace, which had no view of mine.

‘With this realization my hopes revived. Looking through the four-arched window I could see my own: for once Giuseppina had not closed the shutters and I had the fancy that I could see myself, looking out, looking at something I didn’t know was there, something I had created without knowing it, as the burning-glass knows nothing of the fire it starts.

‘A puff of heat enveloped me, and all at once the sala, enormous as it was, seemed airless. How often, in Venice, the sirocco dies away at sunset just when it is most needed, making the nights seem hotter than the days. I did not remember this, but the sweat burst out on my forehead, and I felt my shirt sticking to my back. But it wasn’t only my body trying to throw off something that oppressed it, it was my mind, trying to shake off the riding, driving impulse which possessed it, and which had begun to create, in the near distance of my mental landscape, a tract that wavered and trembled and did not, as painters say, explain itself—an agitation of moving shapes of light and dark, a tangle of branches in a high wind, with sometimes a flash of white among them, like a peeled stick tossed to and fro. You know Velasquez’ picture of the Spinners?—well, it was as if the tapestry in the background of that picture had come to life and all its intricate design was wavering tremulously upwards. I was conscious of reality, like a pillar on each side of me, framing my view, but my thoughts were joined to that unstable centre where the vegetable flames were leaping, where nothing was clearly made out save the fact of flux.

Resist it as I would, I felt myself being sucked into this disturbance and soon my feet were moving in time with it rather than in answer to my own control—so that it was without really knowing what I was doing or even where I was that I rang first at one door and then at another, asking questions that I scarcely understood, though their urgency and intensity seemed to shake me, and receiving answers whose purport I gathered from the tone and gestures which accompanied them, not from the words themselves. Without knowing how, I found myself on other floors which might have been in another building, so different were they from the sala I had left: where the ceilings were low, the windows square or squat, where the whole plan of the palace had been be-devilled by party walls, divisions ply-wood thin, ingenious devices to wrest from the once noble simplicity of the great structure its last inch of living room.

‘Up and down I went, by staircases broad and narrow, and I must have crossed the sala again, though I don’t remember doing that, when I found another entry, another staircase and yet another range of doors.

‘By this time I had lost all shyness or self-consciousness: I rang, I waited, I put my question with the impersonal authority of someone asking for help; only vaguely did I register the fact that these doors were better kept and that a different type of person answered them.

‘The last door bell was answered by a maid: she stood in the doorway unsmiling and suspicious. She had a pinched face, hard eyes, and hair drawn tightly back.

‘ “C’è una signorina,” I began. “There is a young lady——”

‘ “Si,” she said, “yes”—and it was like the crack of a whip. “Ma la signorina non riceve nessuno”—“The young lady receives no one.”

‘ “Receives no one?” I gasped, and something told me that I had come to the end of my quest. “She receives no one!” I repeated. “Are you sure?”

‘"No one,” the maid answered stubbornly, “proprio nessuno”—“no one at all.”

‘She was shutting the door on me when I cried:

‘ “But I have an appointment with her!”

‘ “How can you have an appointment with her?” the maid said scornfully. “I tell you she sees no one, only her family, and, and . . .” She stopped.

‘ “And who?” I demanded.

‘But she had already changed her mind about telling me, and shook her head saying, “Non importa—it doesn’t matter—it’s not you.”

‘At that the pillars of reality seemed to dissolve, and framed in the doorway was not the maid keeping me out, or the wall of the passage behind her, but the green trees undulating upwards in golden light, a jungle in which forms had no time to harden into matter; and before the vision could be taken from me I pushed on into it, past the maid, through the door, down the passage whose terminal window faced my own, to where, on the left, another door stood open and the scent of flowers met me as I went through—met me and strengthened, and then I saw the flowers and the waving stems: they were banked up inside the open window, almost hiding it, keeping out the view, the view of me, keeping out what remained of the light, or I should have seen, much sooner than I did see, for the shadows of the leaves were playing on it and there was no other movement—the bed and the face on the pillow.’

My friend stopped and passed his hand across his face, whether to keep his mind’s eye clear for its inner vision or to brush the vision aside I could not tell: and then, perhaps with the same intention, whichever it was, he closed and unclosed his eyes.

‘Is that all?’ I asked at length.

‘No, it isn’t all,’ he said. ‘How kind of you to have listened to me for so long, Arthur! It isn’t all, but it’s all that I feel I can tell—not because the rest’s too private, though it is private, but because I can’t—oh well—externalize it. What happened before, belonged to me; what happened afterwards, belonged to us: it was shared, that was the point of it. You can’t say much about sharing, can you? Not to convey its meaning?’