ore strangely affected than
by anything that had happened merely to himself in his whole life. The
approach of death for Vassie, the perpetual chance of it for Nicky, gave
him the fulness of life, in so far as life means the power to feel. He
had thought the loss of power to feel for himself an inevitable part of
age, as it had been of the thickening and greater materialism of middle
life; but now he knew that never had he been ravaged as now, because
never before had he encountered fear for someone he loved.

Bitter loss, the loss of disappointment which at the time the soul tells
one is worse than loss by death, he had known over Blanche; pain,
anger, hardness, with his family he could not have missed; horror and
remorse had both assailed him over Phoebe; natural sorrow that held no
sense of outrage he had felt for the loss of Killigrew and Boase. But
this was something different--this aching sense of helplessness, of a
passion of protectiveness that could avail neither Vassie under his roof
nor Nicky on the far veldt. He had not been of those who are insensitive
to the pain of the world--rather had it held too much of his sympathies;
but now, in the sublime selfishness of great personal grief, he felt he
would give everything--the war, the whole rest of the world--to have
Nicky back in safety. That was only at first, or when the fear was
strongest; at other times his sense of proportion and knowledge of how
Nicky himself would feel towards such a sentiment, brought him to a
truer poise.

The war dragged on. The nation began to see that it was not to be the
"walk-over" so confidently expected; disasters occurred, long sieges
wore the folk at home even as those in the beleaguered towns, growls
against the Government were raised, people talked of "muddling through,"
and every barrel-organ in the land ground out "Soldiers of the Queen"
and "The Absent-minded Beggar." Then the world went mad and mafficked,
felt a little ashamed of itself, and became, for the first time for
years, rather usefully introspective and self-critical. And "Nicky ...
Nicky ... Nicky ..." beat out every swing of the pendulum of Time at
Cloom.

Between the beats of intensest feeling Ishmael would fall into the arid
spaces which all deep emotion holds as a strongly-running sea holds
hollows--spaces where it did not seem to matter so much after all, when
in a dry far-off way he could tell himself that nothing really made any
difference in life. Fr