But deep down in him his ineradicable honesty kept nagging at him, telling that this new sea-lure was all make-believe, that not that way for him did happiness lie.  Yet he kept on, always with a tingle of excitement mingling with an undercurrent of disbelief in the reality of it all, and made his way to the quayside determined to talk to the sailors and introduce the subject of a new hand....  Half an hour later he came away, after a desultory though interesting enough conversation in which his project had never got past his tongue.  Through no cowardice or dread, he had simply not been able to broach it.  He stared back at the ship when he paused on the crest of the hill, trying to puzzle out what was struggling for recognition in him.  Dimly it began to dawn on him that there are only two ways for a man to live fully.  The first is by being rooted to a spot that is everything to him, by which he makes his bread, by which and on which he lives, so that its well-being is as that of himself; and the second is by calling no place home, wandering the world over and remaining always free.  The way which lies betwixt these two—­that of hiring this house or that, putting belongings about it and being attached to it by purely artificial ties of expediency and rent, a house that was born of the thought of some unknown, the fabric of whose ground is nothing to him who hires it—­this way, which is the way of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, is false and unsatisfying.  It would be splendid to have two lives and give one to each of the primary ways, to live once by the soil and once by the sea; but that is a thing that can happen to no man.  He may wander till he is ageing and then “settle down,” but that is a different affair.  Ishmael was born of the soil; Cloom, not only by inheritance, but by his peculiar training, meant his life.  With a sensation of something clogging, but infinitely satisfying too, he admitted it.  Cloom had been too strong for him.

It was the only time another path ever even suggested itself to him, and then the suggestion had not been sincere, merely the promptings of that literary sense which is in all imaginative youth.  It prompted, too, not so worthily, in an aspect of his new knowledge that did not escape him—­a certain romance about it, a feeling that it made him rather interesting, something of a figure....  He would not have been human had he quite escaped that at his age.  And yet it was that feeling no one but Killigrew, who frankly mooted it, had a suspicion of as possible, so Ishmael realised with shame.  Also his commonsense told him that the sordid and quite unromantic incidents were likely to pile up more thickly than any of charm or pleasure.  His was an admirable position for any one who loved self-pity; he would be able to see himself as a romantic centre, to feed on misunderstanding and enjoy a self-conscious isolation.

That was the real danger, one that the Parson, who was in some matters of a beautiful simplicity, had never realised.  He had only foreseen the straightforward shames and difficulties, and by these Ishmael was at an age to be untouched, while he was just ripe for the former snare.