“Every one’s in their company who feels a big impulse and has the courage of it.  The trouble with most of us is that we can do the feeling all right; but when it comes to the execution—­well, we like to keep on the safe side, among the sane.”

“So that,” Davenant began, stammeringly, “if a fellow got something into his head—­something that couldn’t be wrong, you know—­something that would be right—­awfully right in its way, but in a way that most people would consider all wrong—­or wild, as I said before—­you’d advise him—?”

“I shouldn’t advise him at all.  Some things must be spontaneous, or they’re of little use.  If a good seed in good ground won’t germinate of its own accord, words of counsel can’t help it.  But here we are at home.  You won’t come in just yet?  Very well; you’ve got your latch-key.”

“Good-night, sir.  I hope you’re not going to think me—­well, altogether an idiot.”

“Very likely I shall; but it’ll be nothing if I do.  If you can’t stand a little thing like that you’d better not have come back with the ideas that have brought you.”

III

Davenant turned away into the moonlit mist.  Through it the electric lamps of Boston, curving in crescent lines by the water’s edge, or sprinkled at random over the hill which the city climbs, shone for him with the steadiness and quiet comfort inherent in the familiar and the sure after his long roaming.  Lighting a cigarette, he strode along the cement pavement beside the iron railing below which the river ran swiftly and soundlessly.  At this late hour of the evening he had the embankment to himself, save for an occasional pair of lovers or a group of sauntering students.  Lights from the dignified old houses—­among which was Rodney Temple’s—­overlooking the embankment and the Charles threw out a pleasant glow of friendliness.  Beyond the river a giant shadow looming through the mist reminded him of the Roman Colisseum seen in a like aspect, the resemblance being accentuated in his imagination by the Stadium’s vast silence, by its rows upon rows of ghostly gray sedilia looking down on a haunted, empty ring.  His thoughts strayed to Rome, to Cairo, to Calcutta, to Singapore, to the stages of those two patient journeys round the world, made from a sense of duty, in search of a widening of that sheerly human knowledge which life had hitherto denied him.  Having started from London and got back to London again, he saw how imperfectly he had profited by his opportunities, how much he had missed.  It was characteristic of him to begin all over again, and more thoroughly, conscientiously revisiting the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal, endeavoring to capture some of that true spirit of appreciation of which he read in books.