Ishmael endeavoured to live up to the Parson’s advice and keep fluid, and his naturally mobile nature helped him in this.  Where and when he did fall short, as the inevitable prejudices of age in favour of the ways it knows arose in him, he at least could see it and smile at himself.  But, following on the intense period of personal feeling he had lived through while Nicky was at the war, had come the inevitable reaction, and from that reaction, as far as the capacity for any outstanding emotion went, he was too old to recover.

He had learned the lesson of life too well, saw the whole pattern with too great clarity.  This alone would have relegated him to the background, for it is the frame of mind which, when it is temperamental from the outset, makes the looker-on at life; while when it is attained it creates the person to whom other people come for sympathy and help in matters that seem to them enormously important, even while they appeal to the wider view for better proportion.

He was in the background; but he was not yet content to be there.  He was content to be thought a person who could have feelings that started and ended in others—­even as a young man he had worked for that; but he had not filled in his background with anything that satisfied the portion of himself, which, even if a man live for others ever so completely, still clamours for satisfaction.  Every part of him that was in relation to others had adjusted, but that one spot which always answers to the self alone was merely going on from day to day as best it could.  He was content to have no burning emotions, no strong longings, to be considered less important than themselves by all the younger people amongst whom he lived, but within him the voice that says “I am I ...  I still want something for myself alone, some solution of the riddle, something to make up for loss of youth and beauty and strength,” still stirred and muttered.  Not prosperity, not children, not a wife who took step by step with him, could give this, or even help him to find out what it was.  Not his memory of what the Parson had lived and died by could fill him wholly; he had not yet come to that perfect satisfaction, life was too insistent in him.  Not in the next world, or in any personal contact, however intimate, in this, could the stuff of life be found.  He had imagined while Nicky was away that after all he too had attained the personal fusion that most people seemed to cling to as the chief support in life, but now he knew that that way was not for him any more than for any other at the loneliest pass.

A few days after Nicky’s triumphant election, when thought was once more possible at Cloom, Ishmael felt more depressed than he had for long; he had been living not so much in the valleys as upon the straight plains of late.  To-day his eyes were hurting him and he could not read; there was no work crying to be done, and the heavy warm air was misted with damp that seemed to melt into the bones.  He went