Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/187

Rh the evening's tragi-comedy, was so unusual as to rouse in him a psychologic interest strong enough to come near to destroying its object. But the flame of pleasure lighted by the impulse fought successfully against the cold wind of cynical analysis, and he stood up.

"Upon my word," said he, "the copy-books are right—'Be virtuous and you will be happy.' At least if you aren't, you won't. And if you are. . . . One could but try!"

He packed a bag. He went out and sent telegrams to his people at King's Lynn, and to all the folk in town with whom he ought in these next weeks to have danced and dined, and he wrote a telegram to her. But that went no further than the floor of the Fleet Street Post Office, where it lay in trampled, scattered rhomboids.

Then he dined in Hall—he could not spare from his great renunciation even such a thread of a thought as should have decided his choice of a restaurant; and he went back to the gloomy little rooms and wrote a letter to Tom.

It seemed, until his scientific curiosity was aroused by the seeming, that he wrote with his