Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/35

 for her that when once he should get well into it he would find himself staying indefinitely. Yes, that was inevitably what must happen to him: he offered the bright example of a man of thirty, with means, curiosity, the highest culture, who had, for whatever reasons, never gone at all, but he would show how people with that history infallibly made it up by never coming back when once they did go. Why should he come back? With his tastes, his resources and opportunities, his intensified longing and disciplined youth, he would have an admirable life.

Many things were before him while she talked, but most of all perhaps the almost sinister strangeness of his having been condemned to this ordeal. It was the last predicament he had ever dreamed of, the prescription of further patience least on the cards for him, he would have supposed, and least congruous with other realities. This in fact made her spring of action, the unconfessed influence that had worked in her, constantly less and less doubtful. The difficulty was that though he had everything on his side he actually felt himself in a cleft stick. "Don't you then," he appealed, "just simply and personally care for me the least little bit? What you seem to me to have in your head," he went on after waiting a while in vain for her reply, "is, however you express it, a mere cold little theory, which is rather proud of itself, but which has the peculiarity of being both 21