Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/82

 an obliging expert, his eyes would probably open. But experts and tests were, as it happened, and as I have already signified, quite what he was as yet least moved to cultivate; his instinct, with so much more on his consciousness, from the first concussion, than he could fairly handle, having been all to postpone the social complication, the presentation of letters, the looking up of friends. It had struck him that, marked out by his odd fate for an hospitality so rare and so special, he might temporarily neglect any minor appeal. There was already before him, goodness knew, matter enough for response.

This evening at any rate, while the day darkened and the weather shrouded his vigil, he invoked convenient illusions with a tremour he had not yet felt; he arrived, between his fondness and his fear, at the easiest compromise with concentration. Unmistakeably, as the afternoon waned, he held off as much as he hovered. It was a natural effect of his restlessness that he didn't for the present see himself settled. It was positively as if, with the cup so held to his lips, the taste of 1710 might prove too stiff a dose. He would judge, as it were, when he came back—back, as who should say also, from everywhere else. He would go of course everywhere else; intellectually now he could so well afford to. This would make all the general initiation that, as a preliminary, was indispensable—the series of 68