on
preserving in its repose a fine resonant quality... But as such
distinctions touch upon the transcendental I shall spare you the pain of
listening to them. There are limits to my cruelty. No! I didn't
reckon up carefully in my mind all this I have been telling you. How
could I have done so, with Fyne right there in the room? He sat
perfectly still, statuesque in homely fashion, after having delivered
himself of his effective assent: `Yes. The convict,' and I, far from
indulging in a reminiscent excursion into the past, remained
sufficiently in the present to muse in a vague, absent-minded way on the
respectable proportions and on the (upon the whole) comely shape of his
great pedestrian's calves, for he had thrown one leg over his knee,
carelessly, to conceal the trouble of his mind by an air of ease. But
all the same the knowledge was in me, the awakened resonance of which I
spoke just now; I was aware of it on that beautiful day, so fresh, so
warm and friendly, so accomplished--an exquisite courtesy of the much
abused English climate when it makes up its meteorological mind to
behave like a perfect gentleman. Of course the English climate is never
a rough. It suffers from spleen somewhat frequently--but that is
gentlemanly too, and I don't mind going to meet him in that mood. He
has his days of grey, veiled, polite melancholy, in which he is very
fascinating. How seldom he lapses into a blustering manner, after all!
And then it is mostly in a season when, appropriately enough, one may go
out and kill something. But his fine days are the best for stopping at
home, to read, to think, to muse--even to dream; in fact to live fully,
intensely and quietly, in the brightness of comprehension, in that
receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear, luminous and serene
weather."

That day I had intended to live intensely and quietly, basking in the
weather's glory which would have lent enchantment to the most
unpromising of intellectual prospects. For a companion I had found a
book, not bemused with the cleverness of the day--a fine-weather book,
simple and sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend. But looking at
little Fyne seated in the room I understood that nothing would come of
my contemplative aspirations; that in one way or another I should be let
in for some form of severe exercise. Walking, it would be, I feared,
since, for me, that idea was inseparably associated with the visual
impression