her life on his
bore the far-off memory of fear, yet it now seemed as vital and natural
as the first. She had shown him something long ago which he was fully
understanding now.

He passed on, and again there lifted its head the thing which, in his
clean, boyish horror, he had taken to hold a terror which he now saw it
did not of necessity. He had learnt to mistrust it because it had led
him into what had at the time been such a mistaken marriage with poor
little Phoebe; but that, too, seemed to matter very little now. He saw
again how in that one hectic year he had tried to tell himself that
physical passion was at least the chief drug of life, that the wonder
and the intoxication of it made all else pale, that it made even
sordidness and strain worth while; and he saw again his revulsion from
it, his effort to break away.

He drifted into the blackness he supposed was night, and came up out of
it at the hour of his life when for the first time he had found
something which, however it had modified or changed, had yet never
entirely been swamped by anything else, which in some ways had
strengthened--the wonder of fatherhood that he had felt, the ecstasy of
creation, which had dawned for him on that night when Phoebe had
whispered to him.... What now of that hour, that hour which had seemed
so utterly broken by what Archelaus had told him all these years after?
He still could not see quite clearly, though now it was with no sense of
being hopelessly baffled that he fell back awhile from before that
curtain. He went on passing again through his life, and he saw the
harder years that came crowding along, those definite, clear-cut years
of young manhood when he had somehow drifted a little away from Boase,
when he had first begun to be a man in the country, when all his schemes
and working out of them had filled the hours--still with Nicky as the
chief personal interest.

In his childhood he had lived by what would happen in a far golden
future, in his youth by what might happen any dawning day; but in his
years of manhood, and from then till he began to feel the first oncoming
of age, he had lived by what he did. Then he came again to Georgie, and
saw how insensibly he had been won to softer ways, though never to the
glamour-ridden ways of first youth. They had been sweet, those years,
and the sweeter for the outside things--the friendship with Killigrew
that had vivified his life, the pleasant intermittent times with J