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Her feet are rooted to the earth, soft bark creeps up her legs and little by little enfolds her groin.
    When she tries to tear her hair her hands are full of leaves.
    What of Orpheus, who pursues his passion through the gates of Hell, only to fail at the last moment and to lose the common presence of his beloved?
    And Actaeon, whose desire for Artemis turns him into a stag and leaves him torn to pieces by his own dogs?
    These things are so, and may be laid out in a solemn frieze to run round the edges of the world.
    Then I stood up and reminded the company of Penelope, who through her love for one man refused the easy compromise of a gilded kingdom and unravelled by night the woven weight of a day's work to leave her hands empty again in the morning.
    And of Sappho, who rather than lose her lover to a man flung herself from the windy cliffs and turned her body into a bird.
    It is well known that those in the grip of heavy enchantments can be wakened only by a lover's touch. Those who seem dead, who are already returning to the earth, can be restored to life, quickened again by one who is warm.
    Then, it being night, and the twin stars of Castor and Pollux just visible in the sky, I spoke of that tragedy, of two brothers whose love we might find unnatural, so stricken in grief when one was killed that the other, begging for his life again, accepted instead that for half the year one might live, and for the rest of the year the other, but never the two together. So it is for us, who while on earth in these suits of lead sense the presence of one we love, not far away but too far to touch.
    The villagers were silent and one by one began to move away, each in their own thoughts. A woman brushed my hair back with her hand. I stayed where I was with my shoulders against the rough sea wall and asked myself what I hadn't asked the others.
    Was I searching for a dancer whose name I did not know or was I searching for the dancing part of myself?
    Night.

    In the dark and in the water I weigh nothing at all. I have no vanity but I would enjoy the consolation of a lover's face. After my only excursion into love I resolved never to make a fool of myself again. I was offered a job in a whore-house but I turned it down on account of my frailty of heart. Surely such to-ing and fro-ing as must go on night and day weakens the heart and inclines it to love? Not directly, you understand, but indirectly, for lust without romantic matter must be wearisome after a time. I asked a girl at the Spitalfields house about it and she told me that she hates her lovers-by-the-hour but still longs for someone to come in a coach and feed her on mince-pies.
    Where do they come from, these insubstantial dreams?
    As for Jordan, he has not my common sense and will no doubt follow his dreams to the end of the world and then fall straight off.
    I cannot school him in love, having no experience, but I can school him in its lack and perhaps persuade him that there are worse things than loneliness.
    A man accosted me on our way to Wimbledon and asked me if I should like to see him.
    'I see you well enough, sir,' I replied.
    'Not all of me,said he, and unbuttoned himself to show a thing much like a pea-pod.
    'Touch it and it will grow,' he assured me. I did so, and indeed it did grow to look more like a cucumber.
    'Wondrous, wondrous, wondrous,' he swooned, though I could see no reason for swooning.
    Put it in your mouth,' he said. 'Yes, as you would a delicious thing to eat.'
    I like to broaden my mind when I can and I did as he suggested, swallowing it up entirely and biting it off with a snap.
    As I did so my eager fellow increased his swooning to the point of fainting away, and I, feeling both astonished by his rapture and disgusted by the leathery thing filling up my mouth, spat out what I had not eaten and gave it to one of my dogs.
    The whore from Spitalfields had told me that men like to be consumed in the mouth, but it still seems to me a reckless act, for the