know its meaning,
showed him how decisively the barrier line across the memory of his
boyhood was drawn, or, it might be, his early manhood. He could not
remember, properly speaking, the whole of his life in the States, but
he could remember telling a man--one Larpent, a man with a club-foot,
at Ontario--that he had been there over fifteen years. This man
has nothing to do with this story, but he happens to serve as an
illustration of the disjointed way in which small details would tell
out clear against a background of confusion. Why, Fenwick could
remember his face plainly--how close-shaven he was, and black over the
razor-land; how his dentist had inserted an artificial tooth that
didn't match, and shone out white. But as to the fifteen years he had
spent in the States, that he had told Mr. Larpent of, they grew dimmer
and dimmer as he tried to carry his recollection further back. Beyond
them--or rather, longer ago than they, properly speaking--came that
endless, intolerable labyrinth of trees, and then, earlier still, that
railway-carriage. It was getting clearer; but the worst of it was that
the clearer it got, the clearer grew the Rosey that came out of it.
As long as that went on, there was nothing of it all he could place
faith in. He had been told that no man could be convinced, by his own
reason, of his own hallucination. He would supply a case to the
contrary. It would amuse him one day, if ever he came to know that
girl of the railway-carriage was dead, to tell Rosalind all his
experiences, and how bravely he fought against what he knew to be
delusion.

But he must make an effort against this sort of thing. Here was he,
who had just made up his mind--so he phrased it--to remain himself,
and refuse to be Harrisson, no sooner was he left alone for a few
minutes than he must needs be raking up the past. And that, too,
because of a line of Horace!--sound in itself, but quite cut asunder
from its origin, the book he read it in, or the voice he heard read
it. What did that line matter? Leave it for Mr. Harrisson in that
state of pre-existence. As well make a point of recalling the
_provenance_ of any little thing that had happened in this his present
life. Well, for instance, Mary and the fat boy in "Pickwick." Rosalind
had read him that aloud, he knew, but he couldn't say when. Was he
going to worry himself to recall that which could do him no harm to
know? Surely not. And if so, why strive to bring back things