But then I laughed, and when she asked me why I did not go on, I said that I had suddenly realised that I had strayed from the subject, and that whereas she had begun to talk of love I had ended by talking of Henry James. "It is all about the same thing," she said, "for we are both grumbling at that mental limpness which makes people think that they need make no effort, but that life will go on around them just the same. And that is why I think one of the most dreadful sights is a man asleep. No one should see another person asleep; it seems to me the most private thing in the world, and if I were a man and a woman had watched me as I lay asleep, I should want to kill her so that she should not go about and tell people how I had looked as I lay stupidly unconscious of everything around me. Only once I have seen a man asleep, and that was the end of a perfect love affair. I had suddenly gone to see him in his chambers, and when his man showed me into his room I found him lying there on the sofa, with his head thrown back on a cushion, sleeping. His man said that he must be very tired as he had been working all night, and that it would be kind of me not to wake him. I waited in the room for an hour, trying not to look at him but to read a book, but his breathing filled the room and I could not take my eyes away from him; and at the end of an hour I felt that my love had gone from me minute by minute as I had looked at him, and that now I might just as well get up and go away, for I did not care any longer if he was asleep or awake. So I went away, but I do not know if he woke up as the door closed behind me."
"And did you ever tell him why you had ceased to love him?" I asked.
"I couldn't do that," she said, "because if he had not understood me I should have hated him, and I do not like hating people whom I have loved. But now I dine with him from time to time, and I can see that he is still wondering how it was that on Monday I loved him and on Tuesday I didn't."
As we walked through the Park towards the Park Lane gates, it seemed to me wonderful that this day, one among many days, should already be passing, irrevocably, and that what we had said and what we had felt as we sat on chairs in the sun would never be repeated, would never come again except perhaps in a different way and with different surprises. And when I asked her if she felt the happiness of the afternoon, she laughed slightly and said that she liked the Park this spring afternoon. "It is perfect now," she said, "but when we come here in a month's or two months' time it will be too warm to sit in the sun and talk about love and Henry James, and in the autumn we will sit down for a moment and shiver a little and pity the brown leaves falling, and in the winter we will walk quickly through because it will be too cold; and then in Park Lane you will put me into a taxi and stand by the door with your hat in your hand, and say good-bye. For the seasons will have gone round, and we shall each have given what the other will take, and when I look at you you will be different, and when you look at me you will not see, as you see now, my eyes looking far away over your shoulder, and you will not wonder what it is that I am looking at. For then, as you stand by the door of the taxi and smile your good-bye at me, the end will have come, and there will be nothing to look at in the distance over your shoulders. And next year you will be an 'old friend,' and I shall ring you up and say that I am very sorry I can't lunch and walk in the Park with you that day because an Oxfordish young man has fallen in love with me, and it will be amusing to see what sort of lunch he will order when he is in love.