Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/48

 that's so wonderful for a man uninitiated; by which I venture to mean, you see, a man untravelled. It's àpropos of what you call the 'backward vision.' and I could immediately find the page. 'There are particular places where things have happened, places enclosed and ordered and subject to the continuity of life mostly, that seem to put us into communication, and the spell is sometimes made to work by the imposition of hands, if it be patient enough, on an old object or an old surface.' It's very wonderful, you know, your having arrived at that, your having guessed it, in this place, which denies the old at every turn and contains so few such objects or surfaces." So she continued to comment. "I hope your old house will contain plenty of them."

Her quotation of this twaddle, as it struck him, from his small uninformed Essay, for which he now blushed, completed his disarray. Half a dozen things rose to his lips and stopped, but the bitterest got uttered. "What's most extraordinary is that illusion I was under about your own type. I had taken it," he explained, "as so beautifully suggestive."

"Suggestive of what?" his hostess asked.

He looked at her without meeting this and as for the last time. "And again it's all there. You would help me more than anyone. I feel it," he continued with his eyes on her face, "really not as a mistake. Essentially—well, you're one of them." 34