that she, an invalid, a poor, afflicted cripple, should be able to love, should desire to be loved; that this child, this half-woman, this immature, impotent creature, should have the temerity (I cannot express it otherwise) to love, to desire, with the conscious and sensual love of a real woman. I had envisaged every possibility but this: that a being whom Fate had so maimed, who had not the strength to drag herself along, could dream of a lover, a beloved, that she should so horribly misunderstand me, who, after all, visited and went on visiting her simply out of pity. But the next moment I realized with a fresh shock that it was my own burning pity that, more than anything else, was to blame if this lonely girl, cut off as she was from the outside world, should fancy that she perceived in me, the foolish slave of my pity, the only man who was sympathetic enough to visit her day after day in her prison, signs of tender emotion. Whereas I, fool, hopeless simpleton that I was, had only seen in her a sufferer, a cripple, a child and not a woman. Not