me,
had elapsed since then, yet (to vary my metaphor) the burden he was to
carry for the rest of his days was firmly lashed to his back. I don't
mean by this that Flora had been persuaded to contract her scope; I mean
that he had been treated to the unconditional snub which, as the event
was to show, couldn't have been bettered as a means of securing him. She
hadn't calculated, but she had said "Never!" and that word had made a
bed big enough for his long-legged patience. He became from this moment
to my mind the interesting figure in the piece.

Now that he had acted without my aid I was free to show him this, and
having on his own side something to show me he repeatedly knocked at my
door. What he brought with him on these occasions was a simplicity so
huge that, as I turn my ear to the past, I seem even now to hear it
bumping up and down my stairs. That was really what I saw of him in the
light of his behaviour. He had fallen in love as he might have broken
his leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanently
lame. It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of him
left in the same position as before. The tremendous cleverness, the
literary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all
seemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. I
hadn't had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great
man at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had
addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself
if such privileges had been an indispensable preparation to the career
on which my friend appeared now to have embarked. I remember too making
up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose in
impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of
mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a
revealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and
his chill, and the only thing he showed any subtlety about was this
convenience of my friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but
the matter comes back to me in a kind of sense of _my_ being rather the
mouthpiece, of my having had to thresh it out for him. He took it from
me without a groan, and I gave it to him, as we used to say, pretty hot;
he took it again and again, spending his odd half-hours with me as if
for the very purpose of learning how idiotically he was in love. He told
me I made h