Page:Solo (1924).pdf/49

 ing his facts, had lived down his first gloating excitement. He found it more profitable to discuss the world within the restrictions which Paul's instincts made obligatory than with the licence made possible by John Ashmill's coarseness. For coarseness implied a limitation of ideas, the calling of spades spades, the ruling out of all the interesting gradations between black and white.

Although Paul saw with relief that his theme of life could hold its own under the intricacies of the new variation, he found that the upheaval of mind resultant upon the discovery of sex had made it necessary to take a new cognizance of other phenomena which he had never thought to challenge. It was as though van-loads of furniture had arrived at the door of his mind, installation of which could be effected only after a wholesale pulling down of partitions and the discarding of outworn objects. The upheaval had awakened his critical faculty, and he found himself watching the world with a growing scepticism and unprecedented shyness. He, who had been the hero of all the school-concert tableaux, now actually quaked when he walked on the platform.

It was at this period that Miss Todd offered him the post of organist in the church, a post made vacant by the marriage and departure of Miss Ranston. The rush of surprise and elation, a new sense of importance in the community, served for a time to restore his old trustful complacency of outlook. He had also increased his practising to four hours a day, and music absorbed most of his surplus energy, physical and mental.

But under the surface, speculation and mutiny were quietly smouldering, and the fond ladies of the village who pointed to him as a model of the Christian virtues and pagan graces were far from guessing the presence in his nature of anything that would make for a conflagration. Paul himself was just sufficiently aware of his own combustibility to keep raking sods over the smoul-