“And to think that to-night we shall sleep in true German beds,” he said.  “I allow that the duvet is not so convenient as blankets, and that there is a watershed always up the middle of your bed, so that during the night your person descends to one side while the duvet rolls down the other; but it is German, which makes up for any trifling inconvenience.  Baireuth, too; perhaps it will strike you as a dull and stinking little town, and so I dare say it is.  But after lunch we shall go up the hillside to where the theatre stands, at the edge of the pine-woods, and from the porch the trumpets will give out the motif of the Grail, and we shall pass out of the heat into the cool darkness of the theatre.  Aren’t you thrilled, Comber?  Doesn’t a holy awe pervade you!  Are you worthy, do you think?”

All this youthful, unrestrained enthusiasm was a revelation to Michael.  Intentionally absurd as Falbe’s rhapsody on the Fatherland had been, Michael knew that it sprang from a solid sincerity which was not ashamed of expressing itself.  Living, as he had always done, in the rather formal and reticent atmosphere of his class and environment, he would have thought this fervour of patriotism in an English mouth ridiculous, or, if persevered in, merely bad form.  Yet when Falbe hailed the Rhine and the spires of Cologne, it was clear that there was no bad form about it at all.  He felt like that; and, indeed, as Michael was beginning to perceive, he felt with a similar intensity on all subjects about which he felt at all.  There was something of the same vivid quality about Aunt Barbara, but Aunt Barbara’s vividness was chiefly devoted to the hunt of the absurdities of her friends, and it was always the concretely ridiculous that she pursued.  But this handsome, vital young man, with his eagerness and his welcome for the world, who had fallen with so delightful a cordiality into Michael’s company, had already an attraction for him of a sort he had never felt before.

Dimly, as the days went by, he began to conjecture that he who had never had a friend was being hailed and halloed to, was being ordered, if not by precept, at any rate by example, to come out of the shell of his reserve, and let himself feel and let himself express.  He could see how utterly different was Falbe’s general conception and practice of life from his own; to Michael it had always been a congregation of strangers—­Francis excepted—­who moved about, busy with each other and with affairs that had no allure for him, and were, though not uncivil, wholly alien to him.  He was willing to grant that this alienation, this absence of comradeship which he had missed all his life, was of his own making, in so far as his shyness and sensitiveness were the cause of it; but in effect he had never yet had a friend, because he had never yet taken his shutters down, so to speak, or thrown his front door open.  He had peeped out through chinks, and felt how lonely he was, but he had not given anyone a chance to get in.