Do you understand the feeling – the sort of feeling that you must get certain matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly negligible complications before you can go to a place that has, during all your life, been a sort of dream city? I didn’t attach much importance to my superior years. I was forty-five, and she, poor thing, was only just rising twenty-two. But she was older than her years and quieter. She seemed to have an odd quality of sainthood, as she must inevitably end in a convent with a white coif framing her face. But she had frequently told me that she had no vocation; it just simply wasn’t there – the desire to become a nun. Well, I guess that I was a sort of convent myself; it seemed fairly proper that she should make her vows to me.

No, I didn’t see any impediment on the score of age. I dare say no man does and I was pretty confident that with a little preparation, I could make a young girl happy. I could spoil her as few young girls have ever been spoiled; and I couldn’t regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him. But, as soon as I came out of my catalepsy, I seemed to perceive my problem – that what I had to do to prepare myself for getting into contact with her, was just to get back into contact with life, some wrestling with men of business, some travelling amongst larger cities, something harsh, something masculine. I didn’t want to present myself to Nancy Rufford as a sort of old maid. That was why, just a fortnight after Florence’s suicide, I set off to the United States.