FORE:He had begun to know that moment which few men of fifty, and those the luckiest of all, are unaware of. He wanted a companion, somebody who satisfied his human, not his corporal needs. While we are young, the youthful vital force feeds itself by its own excursions, satisfies itself with the fact of its travel and explorations. It is enough to go on, to lead the gipsy life and make the supper hot under the hedge-side, and sleep sound in the knowledge that next day there will be more travel and fresh horizons, and a dawn that shines on new valleys and hillsides. But when the plateau of life is reached, those are the fortunate ones who have their home already made. For thirty years he had had his own fireside and his wife, and his growing children. But never had he found his home: some spirit of the secret garden had inspired him, and now he felt mateless and all his money was dust and ashes in his mouth. Two things he wanted, one to be{121} different in breed from that which he was, the other to find a companion. The shadow of a companion lurked in his room, where were the piles of his books. Somewhere in that direction lay the lodestone.

FORE:"Ah," broke in Mrs. Masters, "there's only one woman for you, and you have yet to find her."The thrillingness was slightly shorn of its vibrations by the return of her mother, who had a great deal to say about the felicitous manner in which she had opened the bazaar. She had brought back with her a small plush monkey climbing a string, and a realistic representation of a spider��s web, with a woolly spider sitting in the middle of it. The rim of the web was fitted with hooks, so that you could hang it up anywhere. She selected the base of the pink clock as the most suitable site.

FORE:��No. He insisted on coming up to his work.��

FORE:

FORE:This absolute numbness came with him into his library, where he went when his wife and daughter, on the warning of the pink clock, proceeded upstairs, after the usual kisses. He did not want to wake his sensibilities up, simply because he did not want anything. Even here, in his secret garden, all he saw round him was meaningless: his library was a big pleasant room and he wondered why he had kept it so sacredly remote from his wife and Alice. There were some books in it, of course. Hugh had got a mercantile idea from one, Alice had been a little shy of an illustration in another, and for some reason he had felt that these attitudes were not tuned to the spirit he found here. But to-night there was no spirit of any kind here, and Alice might be shocked if she chose, Hugh might pick up hints for the printing of advertisements, his wife might put the Leonardo volume in her chair if she did not find it high enough, and if that did not give her the desirable position in which to doze most comfortably, there was the catalogue ready to make her a footstool. Books, books?... They were all strange and silly. In some there were pictures over which he had pored, in others there were verses that had haunted{320} his memory as with magic, and all had a certain perfection about them, whether in print or page or binding or picture, that had once satisfied and intoxicated a certain desire for beauty that he had once felt. There they were on their shelves, there was the catalogue that described them, and the shelves were full of corpses, and the catalogue was like a column of deaths in the daily paper, of some remote individuals that concerned him no more than the victims of a plague in Ethiopia.I do not know how long after that we lay silent, but it seemed an endless time before he exclaimed at last "My God! Dick, you should have told me."

FORE:Mrs Keeling��s powers of intuition could make nothing of this. Starting with the firm conviction that Mr Silverdale had proposed to her daughter, there seemed no place where it would fit in.��My dear Thomas, you quite misunderstand me. I asked for nothing, except that I might take Mamma some day for a drive through their park. I hope I know how to behave better than that. Another thing, too: Miss Propert has been there twice, once to tea and once to lunch. I hope she will not have her head turned, for it seems that she did not take her meals in the housekeeper��s room, but upstairs. But that is none of my business: I am sure Lady Inverbroom may give her lunch on the top of the church-steeple if she wishes, and I said very distinctly that I had always found her a very well-behaved young woman, and mentioned nothing about her bouncing in in the middle of my dinner-party, nor when she spent Sunday morning in your library. Bygones are bygones. That��s what I always say, and act on, too.��