As for being alive where he could see her – that was nothing short of coquetry. And she piled it on. She smiled at him and shook his hand. They conversed and corresponded. He wrote to her about church architecture and she, throwing prudence to the wind, replied. She accompanied him to the theatre to see Ibsen – Ibsen! And finally she agreed to take a train ride with him to Winchester. It must have felt to him like a betrothal.

No wonder he was disappointed. Men far less susceptible might have pinned their hopes on Winchester. It’s not only for convenience and privacy that Henry James’s most intensely adulterous couple go off to plight their infidelity in Gloucester. There’s something in the air of cathedral cities.

Just as there is something in the movement of a railway carriage, which was where, alas, it was all decided, long before they got to Winchester. No. No. She shook her head. She was sorry. She wasn’t as free a thinker as he thought she was. She hadn’t meant that.

‘Well!’ he might have been excused exclaiming, in the circumstances and given his history. ‘Well! This is a queer elopement!’

But it’s unlikely that he would have enjoyed himself with her in Winchester whatever she’d said. He was, above all things else, the poet of the disappointment of the actual moment. A successful afternoon with Mrs Henniker would have left his creative sensibility in ruins. You can’t throw yourself into writing Life’s Little Ironies or Time’s Laughingstocks, if you’ve got a warm aristocrat snuggled into your shoulder. Those whom the Muses love must go without. Ecce signum! –

And we were left alone

As Love’s own pair;

Yet never the love-light shone

Between us there!

But that which chilled the breath

Of afternoon,

And palsied unto death

The pane-fly’s tune

– he got the thing he wanted after all.