ther--well,--weak?"

"Yes," said Father Payne, "it's weak, no doubt! That is to say, if I were
differently made, more hard-hearted, more sure of myself, I should go, and
I should enjoy myself, and moon about, and bore you to death with old
stories about the chimes at midnight--everybody would be a dear old boy or
a good old soul, and I should hand out tips, and get perfectly maudlin in
the evenings over a glass of claret. That's the normal thing, no
doubt--that's what a noble-minded man in a novel of Thackeray's would do!"

"Well," said Barthrop, "you know best--but I expect that if you did take
the plunge and go there, you would find yourself quite at ease."

"I might," said Father Payne; "but then I also might not--and I prefer not
to risk it. You see, it would be merely wallowing in sentiment--and I don't
approve of sentiment. I want my emotions to live with, not to bathe in!"

"But you don't mind going back to London," said Barthrop.

"No," said Father Payne, "but that bucks me up. I was infernally unhappy in
London, and it puts me in a thoroughly sensible and cheerful mood to go and
look at the outside of my old lodgings, and the place where I used to
teach, and to say to myself, 'Thank God, that's all over!' Then I go on my
way rejoicing, and make no end of plans. But if I went to Oxford, I should
just remember how happy and young I was; and I might even commit the folly
of regretting the lapse of time, and of wishing I could have it back again.
I don't think it is wholesome to do anything which makes one discontented,
or anything which forces one to dwell on what one has lost. That doesn't
matter. Nothing really is ever lost, and it only takes the starch out of
one to think about it from that angle. I don't believe in the past. It
seems unalterable, and I suppose in a sense it is so. But if you begin to
dwell on unalterable things, you become a fatalist, and I'm always trying
to get away from that. The point is that no one is unalterable, and, thank
God, we are always altering. To potter about in the past is like grubbing
in an ash-heap, and shedding tears over broken bits of china. The plate, or
whatever it is, was pretty enough, and it had its place and its use; and
when the stuff of which it is made is wanted again, it will be used again.
It is simply fatuous to waste time over the broken pieces of old dreams and
visions; and I mean to use my emotions and my imagination to see new dreams
and finer visions. P