ted
with the power to see clearly, not as himself younger, less developed.
In the same way he regarded his early manhood, when he looked back upon
the ardent boy who had loved Blanche and staked all of intensity that
apparently he was capable of on that one personality. Phoebe too....

With memory of her he felt more alien still, unless he were looking at
Nicky; then he would have a queer sensation that he was seeing some
embodiment of what she had stood for to the passionate Ishmael who had
married her. Sometimes he wondered what it would have been like if she
had not died.... She would have lost her charm perhaps, become
coarser--or would that peculiar dewy softness of hers have survived the
encroachments of the years? Further apart they would inevitably have
grown; less and less of sympathy between them would have been
inevitable. So much his honesty had to admit. Passion, which he
flattered himself he had so mastered, almost as though it had been
shocked out of him on that terrible night of waiting for its fruit to
come and rend the mother's life away from her--would passion have lived?
He knew that as anything individual between her and him it could not
have, so that he would always have been meaning to deny its claims, and
would always have been falling into what would have become a mere custom
of the flesh impossible to break, only yielding, after years of it, to
boredom.

From that he had been saved, and he gave thanks without pretence, for
with the freedom of his body was enwrapped the freedom of his soul. Yet
he was still a young man when Nicky was nearing "double figures"--only
in the early thirties. To him the years that had passed since Nicky's
birth were so different in quality from all that had gone before that it
was small wonder they seemed to him another life and he himself another
person. Nicky had been the dominating human factor; the public life of
the times, as it affected his own corner in particular, the chief
interest which had kept him hard at work, too busy for the dreams of his
unsatisfied youth. He had altered, hardened, sharpened, become more of a
man of the world, thought himself contented, and in action and practical
affairs drowned mental speculation and emotion.

This was the Ishmael of the late 'seventies, a being altered indeed, but
not more so than the England of that period was from the England of the
'fifties and 'sixties. That she had grown, improved, set her house in
better or