f
it were a first-fruit of the Change, I found myself in the presence
of a human being towards whom I perceived myself inferior and
subordinate, before whom I stood without servility or any insincerity
whatever, in an attitude of respect and attention. My inflamed, my
rancid egotism--or was it after all only the chances of life?--had
never once permitted that before the Change.

He emerged from his thoughts, still with a faint perplexity in
his manner. "That speech I made last night," he said, "was damned
mischievous nonsense, you know. Nothing can alter that. Nothing. . . .
No! . . . Little fat gnomes in evening dress--gobbling oysters.
Gulp!"

It was a most natural part of the wonder of that morning that he
should adopt this incredible note of frankness, and that it should
abate nothing from my respect for him.

"Yes," he said, "you are right. It's all indisputable fact, and I
can't believe it was anything but a dream."

Section 5

That memory stands out against the dark past of the world with
extraordinary clearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was full
of the calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a curious
persuasion too that there was a distant happy clamor of pealing
bells, but that I am half convinced is a mistake. Nevertheless, there
was something in the fresh bite of things, in the dewy newness of
sensation that set bells rejoicing in one's brain. And that big,
fair, pensive man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his
clumsy pose, as though indeed some Great Master of strength and
humor had made him.

And--it is so hard now to convey these things--he spoke to me,
a stranger, without reservations, carelessly, as men now speak to
men. Before those days, not only did we think badly, but what we
thought, a thousand short-sighted considerations, dignity, objective
discipline, discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of
soul, made us muffle before we told it to our fellow-men.

"It's all returning now," he said, and told me half soliloquizingly
what was in his mind.

I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out image
after image to my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragments
of speech. If I had a precise full memory of that morning I should
give it you, verbatim, minutely. But here, save for the little
sharp things that stand out, I find only blurred general impressions.
Throughout I have to make up again his half-forgotten sentences
and speec