At first it seemed to him he was floating very peacefully on a clear sea, untroubled in mind or body, though seeing he was drifting, because he was also aware that whither he was drifting was the inevitable direction of a kindly current.  Then after a little or long while, he could not have told which, he seemed himself to become stationary, while past him flowed the pattern of his life as he remembered it—­scenes grey and many-coloured, blurred at the edges, but sharp with an aching clarity at the core.  They had all gone, these happenings, but it was not that which gave the poignancy; it was that the Ishmael who had taken part in them was gone too, and each had borne something of himself away with it.

Those first childish years after he had known Cloom was to be his, that he had to regenerate it; then those years at St. Renny ...  Killigrew floated past him, joyous and pagan.  There was Hilaria, joyous also ... he had forgotten her for years now.  At St. Renny life was always just ahead, and he only had the sense of preparing for it, of being ready to leap into it as into some golden cool stream of running waters....  In those days it had been Cloom, the place made for him in life, that had held so much of glamour in its grey walls and hard acres.  Yet even then there had been something else, some recognition of the fact that even this was not an end to itself alone....  Then youth—­the first years at Cloom and that wonderful incursion into the London that was as past as he was, that London that had been half-wonder, half-nightmare, and that had held his love for Blanche.  There had been a brief spell when he had told himself that this was the chief thing, that in that passionate fusing of two spirits, that absorption in some one other loved being, lay the end in life, but the mirage had dissolved then even as the image of it wavered and faded now.  While he was lost and groping in the wastes it had left him in, there swam up the memory of Hilaria again, but no horror went with it.  And though this second impinging of her life on his bore the far-off memory of fear, yet it now seemed as vital and natural as the first.  She had shown him something long ago which he was fully understanding now.

He passed on, and again there lifted its head the thing which, in his clean, boyish horror, he had taken to hold a terror which he now saw it did not of necessity.  He had learnt to mistrust it because it had led him into what had at the time been such a mistaken marriage with poor little Phoebe; but that, too, seemed to matter very little now.  He saw again how in that one hectic year he had tried to tell himself that physical passion was at least the chief drug of life, that the wonder and the intoxication of it made all else pale, that it made even sordidness and strain worth while; and he saw again his revulsion from it, his effort to break away.