onality
expressing it just as her lips framed the consonants and vowels--and he
would love her. His own name, ridiculous and hateful though it was, would
sing in reply. They would be in harmony together in the literal sense, as
necessary to one another as two notes in the same chord....

So he also possessed the mystical vision of the poet. What he
lacked--such temperaments always do--was the sense of proportion and the
careful balance that adjusts cause and effect. And this it is, no doubt,
that makes his adventures such "hard sayings." It becomes difficult to
disentangle what actually did happen from what conceivably might have
happened; what he thinks he saw from what positively _was_.

His early life--to the disgust of his Father, a poor country
squire--was a distressing failure. He missed all examinations, muddled
all chances, and finally, with L50 a year of his own, and no one to
care much what happened to him, settled in London and took any odd job
of a secretarial nature that offered itself. He kept to nothing for
long, being easily dissatisfied, and ever on the look out for the "job"
that might conceal the kind of adventure he wanted. Once the work of
the moment proved barren of this possibility, he wearied of it and
sought another. And the search seemed prolonged and hopeless, for the
adventure he sought was not a common kind, but something that should
provide him with a means of escape from a vulgar and noisy world that
bored him very much indeed. He sought an adventure that should announce
to him a new heaven and a new earth; something that should confirm, if
not actually replace, that inner region of wonder and delight he
reveled in as a boy, but which education and conflict with a prosaic
age had swept away from his nearer consciousness. He sought, that is,
an authoritative adventure of the soul.

To look at, one could have believed that until the age of twenty-five he
had been nameless, and that a committee had then sat upon the subject and
selected the sound best suited to describe him: Spinrobin--Robert. For,
had he never seen himself, but run into that inner prairie of his and
called aloud "Robert Spinrobin," an individual exactly resembling him
would surely have pattered up to claim the name.

He was slight, graceful, quick on his feet and generally alert; took
little steps that were almost hopping, and when he was in a hurry gave
him the appearance of "spinning" down the pavement or up the stairs;