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. Really, if this continues, Mr. Linford, I shall be obliged--" "A case of it--of this blankness of mine. Instead of continuing my early prejudice, which I now recall was preposterously in your favour, I survey you coldly for the first time. You know I'm afraid to look at print for fear I've forgotten how to read." "Nonsense!" "No--I tell you I feel exactly like one of those chaps from another planet, who are always reaching here in the H.G. Wells's stories--a gentleman of fine attainments in his own planet, mind you--bland, agreeable, scholarly--with marked distinction of bearing, and a personal beauty rare even on a planet where the flaunting of one's secretest bones is held to betoken the only beauty--you understand _that?_--Well, I come here, and everything is different--ideals of beauty, people absurdly holding for flesh on their bones, for example--numbers, language, institutions, everything. Of course, it puzzles me a little, but see the value I ought to be to the world, having a mature mind, yet one as clean of preconceptions and prejudice as a new-born babe's." "Oh, so that is why you could see that I'm not--" "Also, why I could see that you _are_--that's it, smile! Nance, you _are_ a dear, when you smile--you make a man feel so strong and protecting. But if you knew all the queer things I've thought in the last week about time and people and the world. This morning I woke up mad because I'd been cheated out of the past. Where _is_ all the past, Nance? There's just as much past somewhere as there is future--if one's soul has no end, it had no beginning. Why not worry about the past as we do about the future? First thing I'm going to do--start a Worry-About-the-Past Club, with dues and a president, and by-laws and things!" "Don't you think I'd better send Clytie, now?" "No; please wait a minute." He clutched her hand with a new strength, and raised on his elbow to face her, then, speaking lower: "Nance, you know I've had a feeling it wasn't the right thing to ask the old gentleman this--he might think I hadn't been studying at college--but _you_ tell me--what is this about the atoning blood of Jesus Christ? It was a phrase he used the other day, and it stuck in my mind." "Bernal--you surely know!" "Truly I don't--it seems a bad dream I've had some time--that's all--some awful dream about my father." "It was the part of the Saviour to purchase our redemption by his death on Calvary." "O
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