He made Dan help get the rest of his things into his bag, and with one little artifice and another prevented him from stagnating in despair.  He dissented from the idea of waiting over another day to see if Alice would not relent when she got her letters back, and send for Dan to come and see her.

“Relent a good deal more when she finds you’ve gone out of town, if she sends for you,” he argued; and he got Dan into the cab and off to the station, carefully making him an active partner in the whole undertaking, even to checking his own bag.

Before he bought his own ticket he appealed once more to Dan.

“Look here!  I feel like a fool going off with you on this expedition.  Be honest for once, now, Mavering, and tell me you’ve thought better of it, and don’t want me to go!”

“Yes—­yes, I do.  Oh yes, you’ve got to go.  I I do want you.  I—­you make me see things in just the right light, don’t you know.  That idea of yours about little steps—­it’s braced me all up.  Yes—­”

“You’re such an infernal humbug,” said Boardman, “I can’t tell whether you want me or not.  But I’m in for it now, and I’ll go.”  Then he bought his ticket.

XLV.

Boardman put himself in charge of Mavering, and took him into the smoking car.  It was impossible to indulge a poetic gloom there without becoming unpleasantly conspicuous in the smoking and euchre and profanity.  Some of the men were silent and dull, but no one was apparently very unhappy, and perhaps if Dan had dealt in absolute sincerity with himself, even he would not have found himself wholly so.  He did not feel as he had felt when Alice rejected him.  Then he was wounded to the quick through his vanity, and now; in spite of all, in spite of the involuntary tender swaying of his heart toward her through the mere force of habit, in spite of some remote compunctions for his want of candour with her, he was supported by a sense of her injustice, her hardness.  Related with this was an obscure sense of escape, of liberation, which, however he might silence and disown it, was still there.  He could not help being aware that he had long relinquished tastes customs, purposes, ideals, to gain a peace that seemed more and more fleeting and uncertain, and that he had submitted to others which, now that the moment of giving pleasure by his submission was past, he recognised as disagreeable.  He felt a sort of guilt in his enlargement; he knew, by all that he had, ever heard or read of people in his position, that he ought to be altogether miserable; and yet this consciousness of relief persisted.  He told himself that a very tragical thing had befallen him; that this broken engagement was the ruin of his life and the end of his youth, and that he must live on an old and joyless man, wise with the knowledge that comes to decrepitude and despair; he imagined a certain look for himself, a gait, a name, that would express this; but all the same he was aware of having got out of something.  Was it a bondage, a scrape, as Boardman called it?  He thought he must be a very light, shallow, and frivolous nature not to be utterly broken up by his disaster.