We have all of us a crude desire to “place” our fellows in this or that category or class: we like to know more or less what they are, so that, maybe, we may know more or less what we shall be to them. But, even with the knowledge that she was Gerald’s sister, that she was twenty-nine years old, that she was the niece of Lord Portairley, you could not, anyhow I couldn’t, “place” Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather despairing one, that she didn’t fit in anywhere, to any class, nay, to any nationality. She wasn’t that ghastly thing called “Bohemian,” she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society,” “county,” upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own.{31} But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not. In her eyes you saw the landscape of England, spacious and brave; but you felt unreasonably certain that she was as devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart. She gave you a sense of the conventions; but she gave you—unaware always, impersonal always, and those cool, sensible eyes!—a much deeper sense that she was somehow outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge as to what is and what is not conventional. That was why, I am trying to show, I felt so profoundly incapable with her. It was not as though one was non-existent; it was as though, with her, one existed only in the most limited sense. And, I suppose, she affected me particularly in that way simply because I am a man of my time. For that is a limitation a man can’t get beyond—to be of his time, completely. He may be successful, a man like that—indeed, should he not blow his brains out if he is not?—but he who is of his time may never rise above himself: he is the galley-slave working incessantly at the oars of his life, which reflects the lives of the multitude of his fellows. Yes, I am of my time. And so I had with this woman that profound sense of incapability, of defeat, which any limited man must feel with a woman whose limitations he cannot know. She was—in that phrase of Mr. Conrad’s which can mean so little or so much—she was of all time. She was, when{32} the first woman crawled out of the mud of the primeval world. She would be, when the last woman walks towards the unmentionable end.
{31}
{32}
“Good-bye,” I said, and then, as I looked from the disordered room and my disenchanted life at her, the eyes in the shadow of the green
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