Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/34

26 and bend over his task. If he should go abroad his mother might think he had some weak-minded view of joining Julia Dallow and trying, with however little hope, to win her back—an illusion it would be singularly pernicious to encourage. His desire for Julia's society had succumbed, for the present at any rate, to an irresistible interruption—he had become more and more conscious that they spoke a different language. Nick felt like a young man who has gone to the Rhineland to "get up" his German for an examination—committed to talk, to read, to dream only in the new idiom. Now that he had taken his jump everything was simplified, at the same time that everything was pitched in a higher, more excited key; and he wondered how in the absence of a common dialect he had conversed on the whole so happily with Julia. Then he had after-tastes of understandings tolerably independent of words. He was excited because every fresh responsibility is exciting, and there was no manner of doubt that he had accepted one. No one knew what it was but himself (Gabriel Nash scarcely counted—his whole attitude on the question of responsibility was so wanton), and he would have to ask his dearest friends to take him on trust. Rather, he would ask nothing of any one, but would cultivate independence, mulishness and gaiety and fix his thoughts on a bright if distant morrow. It was disagreeable to have to remember that his task would not be sweetened by a sense of heroism; for if it might be heroic to give up the muses for the strife of great affairs, no romantic glamour worth speaking of would ever gather round an Englishman who in the prime of his strength had given up great or even small affairs for the