Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/46

 you'll never come back I meant that you'll never wish to. Of course you can come back without wishing as much as you like. But that," she blandly remarked, "won't do for me."

"How well you know what I wish," he exhaled, "and how much every way you know about everything!"

"Well," she patiently replied before he had time finally to leave her, "it's not wholly my fault if an expression you once used to me has much worked in me. I remembered it as soon as I saw you to-day, and it would have made a folly of my talking to you of my conditions if I had done that with any other practical view than to call your attention to our impossibilities. You used it on one occasion when I was last at home in a way that has made me never forget it."

Ralph wondered. "I've used doubtless plenty of expressions and in plenty of absurd ways. But what in the world was this one?"

She brought it responsibly out. "'The sense of the past'."

He wondered still more. "Is that all?"

"You said it was the thing in life you desired most to arrive at, and that wherever you had found it—even where it was supposed to be most vivid and inspired—it had struck you as deplorably lacking intensity. At the intensity required, as you said, by any proper respect for itself, you proposed if possible yourself to arrive—art, 32