a
young man who has gone to the Rhineland to "get up" his German for an
examination--committed to talk, to read, to dream only in the new idiom.
Now that he had taken his jump everything was simplified, at the same
time that everything was pitched in a higher and intenser key; and he
wondered how in the absence of a common dialect he had conversed on the
whole so happily with Mrs. Dallow. Then he had aftertastes of
understandings tolerably independent of words. He was excited because
every fresh responsibility is exciting, and there was no manner of doubt
he had accepted one. No one knew what it was but himself--Gabriel Nash
scarcely counted, his whole attitude on the question of responsibility
being so fantastic--and he would have to ask his dearest friends to take
him on trust. Rather indeed he would ask nothing of any one, but would
cultivate independence, mulishness, and gaiety, and fix his thoughts on
a bright if distant morrow. It was disagreeable to have to remember that
his task would not be sweetened by a sense of heroism; for if it might
be heroic to give up the muses for the strife of great affairs, no
romantic glamour worth speaking of would ever gather round an Englishman
who in the prime of his strength had given up great or even small
affairs for the muses. Such an original might himself privately and
perversely regard certain phases of this inferior commerce as a great
affair; but who would give him the benefit of that sort of
confidence--except indeed a faithful, clever, exalted little sister
Biddy, if he should have the good luck to have one? Biddy was in fact
all ready for heroic flights and eager to think she might fight the
battle of the beautiful by her brother's side; so that he had really to
moderate her and remind her how little his actual job was a crusade with
bugles and banners and how much a grey, sedentary grind, the charm of
which was all at the core. You might have an emotion about it, and an
emotion that would be a help, but this was not the sort of thing you
could show--the end in view would seem so disproportionately small. Nick
put it to her that one really couldn't talk to people about the
"responsibility" of what she would see him pottering at in his studio.

He therefore didn't "run," as he would have said, to winged words any
more than he was forced to, having, moreover, a sense that apologetic
work (if apology it should be called to carry the war straight into the
enemy's countr