He had also been young; though he had denied his youth.

The boy’s white face quivered with a little wave of heat and pain.  He clasped his forehead with his hands.

“Let me think.”

His fingers tightened their hold, as if to grasp thought by holding the dizzy aching head that contained it.  He could think of nothing but Poppy.  He had seen his father’s point quite steadily and clearly a minute ago; but when he thought of Poppy his brain began to turn round and round again.  He gripped his forehead harder still, to stop it.

His thinking drifted into a kind of moody metaphysics instead of concentrating itself on the matter in hand.  “It takes a poet,” he said to himself, “to create a world, and this world would disgrace a Junior Journalist.”  Was it, he wondered, the last effort of a cycle of transcendental decadence, melancholy, sophisticated?  Or was it a cruel young jest flung off in the barbarous spring-time of creative energy?  Either way it chiefly impressed him with its imbecility.  He saw through it.  He saw through most things, Himself included.  He knew perfectly well that he had developed this sudden turn for speculative thought because he was baulked of an appointment with a little variety actress.  That he should see through the little variety actress was not to be expected.  Poppy was in her nature impenetrable, woman being the ultimate fact, the inexorable necessity of thought.  Supposing the universe to be nothing more than a dance of fortuitous atoms, then Poppy, herself a fortuitous atom, led the dance; she was the whirligig centre towards which all things whirled.  No wonder that it made him giddy to think of her.

Suddenly out of its giddiness his brain conceived and instantly matured a plan.  A practical plan.  He would catch that eleven-thirty express all right.  He would go down into Devonshire, and stay in Devonshire till Saturday.  If necessary, he would sit up with those abominable books all Thursday night and Friday night.  And on Saturday he would return.  At the worst he would only have to go down again on Monday.  He would have missed the Junior Journalists’ dinner, he would be lucky if he saw the ghost of an idea on this side Whit Sunday, but he would have torn the heart out of his holiday.

He rose abruptly.  “All right.  It’s a most awful nuisance, as it happens, but I’ll go.”

“I’m glad you’re willing to oblige me.  You’ll not regret it.”

Isaac was really meditating something very handsome in the way of a commission.  As he looked benignly into his son’s face and saw its deep misery and repugnance, he answered his own question.

“It is a woman.”

BOOK II

LUCIA’S WAY

CHAPTER XIV

He wondered how much longer they were going to keep him waiting.  His head still ached, and every nerve was irritable.  He began to suspect the servant of having failed to report his arrival; he thought of ringing for him and announcing himself a second time.  Then he remembered that he was only the man who had come about the books; he was there on the Hardens’ business, and their time was his time.  And there were worse places to wait in than the library of Court House.