"So there I was, a young washing machine manufacturer, and I hadn't any woman, and since that affair at his house I didn't see my former friend with whom I used to try to talk of the vague, but nevertheless more colourful dreams of my idle hours. After a few months father sent me out on the road to see if I couldn't sell washing machines to merchants in small towns and sometimes I was successful and did sell some and sometimes I didn't.

"At night in the towns I used to walk about in the streets and sometimes I did get with a woman, with a waitress from the hotel, or a girl I had picked up on the streets.

"We walked about under the trees along the residence streets of the town and when I was lucky I sometimes induced one of them to go with me to a little cheap hotel or into the darkness of the fields at the edge of the towns.

"At such times we talked of love and sometimes I was a good deal moved, but after all not really moved.

"The whole thing started me thinking of the slender naked girl I had seen on the bed and of the look in her eyes at the moment when she came up out of sleep and her eyes met mine.

"I knew her name and address and so one day I grew bold and wrote her a long letter. You must understand that by this time I felt I had become quite a sensible fellow and so I tried to write in a sensible way.

"I remember I was sitting in the writing-room of a small hotel in an Indiana town when I did it. The desk where I sat was by a window near the town's Main Street and, as it was evening, people were going along the street to their houses, I suppose going home to the evening meal.

"I don't deny I grew pretty romantic. As I sat there, feeling lonely and I suppose filled with self-pity I looked up and saw a little drama acted out in a hallway across the street. There was a rather old tumble-down building with a stairway at the side running to an upper story, where it was evident someone lived, as there were white curtains at the window.

"I sat looking across at the place, and I suppose I was dreaming of the long slender body of the girl on the bed up stairs in another house. It was evening and growing dusk, you understand, and just such a light as had fallen over us at the moment we looked into each other's eyes, at the moment when there was no one but just our two selves, before we had time to think and remember the others in that house, when I was coming out of a day-dream and she was coming out of the dreams of sleep, at the moment when we accepted each other and the complete and momentary loveliness of each other well, you see, just such a light as I had stood in and she had lain in as one might lie on the soft waters of some southern sea, just such another light was now lying over the little bare writing-room of the foul little hotel in that town and across the street a woman came down the stairway and stood in just such another light.