"
Sometimes Hayward left Philip to go home by himself. He would never
exactly reply to Philip's eager questioning, but with a merry, rather
stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines of
Rossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in which passion and purple,
pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young lady
called Trude. Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures
with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles and
Pheidias because to describe the object of his attentions he used the word
hetaira instead of one of those, more blunt and apt, provided by the
English language. Philip in the daytime had been led by curiosity to pass
through the little street near the old bridge, with its neat white houses
and green shutters, in which according to Hayward the Fraulein Trude
lived; but the women, with brutal faces and painted cheeks, who came out
of their doors and cried out to him, filled him with fear; and he fled in
horror from the rough hands that sought to detain him. He yearned above
all things for experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his age
he had not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the most
important thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things
as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terribly
from the ideal of his dreams.
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