Page:Anthony Hope - The Kings Mirror.djvu/198

 what had seemed my hard-won victory, but I did not feel as though I could justify it to him. He would laugh, be a little puzzled, and dismiss the matter as inexplicable. His own creed was not swathed in clouds, nor dim, nor hard clearly to see and picture; it was all very straightforward. Properly it was no creed; it was a course of action based on a mode of feeling which neither demanded nor was patient of defence or explanation. The circumstances of my life were such that never before had I been brought into contact with a similar temperament or a similar practice. When they were thus suddenly presented to me they seemed endowed with a most attractive simplicity, with a naturalness, with what I must call a wholesomeness; the objections I felt to be overstrained, unreal, morbid. Varvilliers' feet were on firm ground; on what shaking uncertain bog of mingled impulses, emotions, fancies, and delusions might not those who blamed him be found themselves to stand?

I am confident that he spoke without premeditation, with no desire to win a proselyte, merely as man to man, in unaffected intimacy. I think that he was rather sorry for me, having detected a gloominess in my view of life and a tendency to moody and fretful introspection. Once or twice he referred, in passing jest, to the difference of national characteristics, the German tendency to make love by crying (so he put it) as contrasted with the laughing philosophy of his own country. At the end he apologized for talking so much, and pointed out to me a photograph of Coralie that stood on the mantelpiece more than half-hidden by letters and papers, saying, "I suppose she set me off; somehow she seems to me a sort of embodiment of the thing."