Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/136

124 how I might be misrepresented, challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is used up. At last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding, desperately fighting, pin-point of self.... One goes back to one’s home unable to recover. Fighting it over again. All night sometimes.... I get up and walk about the room and curse.... Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame of mind to Westminster?”

“When Westminster is as dead as Avebury,” said the doctor, unhelpfully. He added after some seconds, “Milton knew of these troubles. ‘Not without dust and heat’ he wrote—a great phrase.”

“But the dust chokes me,” said Sir Richmond.

He took up a copy of The Green Roads of England that lay beside him on the table. But he did not open it. He held it in his hand and said the thing he had had in mind to say all that evening. “I do not think that I shall stir up my motives any more for a time. Better to go on into the west country cooling my poor old brain in these wide shadows of the past.”

“I can prescribe nothing better,” said Dr. Martineau. “Incidentally, we may be able to throw a little more light on one or two of your minor entanglements.”

“I don’t want to think of them,” said Sir Richmond. “Let me get right away from everything. Until my skin has grown again.”