ething of this convivial nature they did every evening for a week.
Then they stopped. Inexplicably, it was becoming boring. On the first
night it had cheered them; on the second and third they had shut their
eyes to the fact that they were bored; the other nights had been,
growingly, of the nature of a fight against something--they could not
have said what. It was something which seemed to grow, slowly, vaguely,
yet with an irresistible sureness.

It is not during constant intercourse and association that influence
gives birth to new comprehension. These fill the foreground; they loom
too large in present interest to allow of a penetrating vision. The
vision, the perception, the discernment, growing from vague abstractions
to poignancy, come later, growing very slowly from seeds sown
unnoticed. From the carelessly received seeds the plant pushes its
gradual, painful way upwards, breaking the earth to make a place for
itself, growing, perhaps, to be a tree, striking and spreading roots all
through the upheaved soil.

So it began to be with the Crevequers. Absence and time began now their
inevitable work. Atmosphere, doubtless at the time absorbed, but
unconsciously, now sent its message from system to brain. Retrospect
meant the slow beginnings of perception; therefore they fought against
retrospect. What at the time had passed them serenely by, came back to
memory in strange new lights. What at the time had been bewildering, put
on, day by day, robes of increasingly translucent clearness. What at the
time they had known, unheeding and uncaring, assumed a vividness quite
new. With the accidentals of intercourse no longer overlaying, wrapping
up and entangling the issues, these pushed a slow way out, and emerged
at last, standing forth unconfused and unadorned, bald in their lucid
simplicity.

Through the slow days and long nights retrospect gave birth thus to a
glimmering perception; perception, its gropings not to be checked, to
comprehension.

In the Crevequers' eyes the melancholy pondering grew more noticeable
than before. Their brows sometimes drew together suddenly, as if, in the
straying of their thoughts, they had lit upon something they did not
like.

Of the Venables they spoke to each other less day by day. Each did not
know how it fared with the other; each hardly knew how it fared with
himself. It was well, perhaps, that during much of the day they had
plenty to do. But there were the evenings. It was c