had a vague idea that night
that he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, that
some secret association of wise men should take care of his work and
hand it on from generation to generation until the world was riper for
its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the thousands of
people he passed had really awakened to the fact of change, they trusted
the world for what it was, not to alter too rapidly, to respect their
trusts, their assurances, their habits, their little accustomed traffics
and hard-won positions.

He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging, brightly-lit
masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down on a seat and
became aware of the talk of the two people next to him. It was the
talk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The man was
congratulating himself on having regular employment at last; 'they like
me,' he said, 'and I like the job. If I work up--in'r dozen years or
so I ought to be gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain
sense of it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't
get along very decently--very decently indeed.'

The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it
struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had a sense of all
this globe as that....'

By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated
world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high
roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland
pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great
circles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments and
dues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes such
visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations and
yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively
than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere
moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately swiftness
on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living progress that
altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to that
incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed
to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the
human routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable
changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night,
seed-