My sister Agatha commended my courage and energy, and Lola read my articles with a glowing enthusiasm, which compensated for lack of exact understanding; but I was not proud of my position.  It is one thing to stand at the top of a marble staircase and in a debonair, jesting fashion to fling insincere convictions to a recipient world.  It is another to sell the same worthless commodity for money.  I began, to my curious discomfort, to suspect that life had a meaning after all.

CHAPTER XVIII

One day I had walked from Cadogan Gardens with a gadfly phrase of Lola’s tormenting my ears: 

“You’re not quite alive even yet.”

I had spent most of the day over a weekly article for James’s high-toned periodical, using the same old shibboleths, proclaiming Gilead to be the one place for balm, juggling with the same old sophistries, and proving that Pope must have been out of his mind when he declared that an honest man was the noblest work of God, seeing that nobler than the most honest man was the disingenuous government held up to eulogy; and I had gone tired, dispirited, out of conceit with myself to Lola for tea and consolation.  I had not been the merriest company.  I had spoken gloomily of the cosmos, and when Adolphus the Chow dog had walked down the room in his hind legs, I had railed at the futility of canine effort.  To Lola, who had put forth all her artillery of artless and harmless coquetry in voice and gesture, in order to lure my thoughts into pleasanter ways, I exhibited the querulous grumpiness of a spoiled village octogenarian.  We discussed the weather, which was worth discussing, for the spring, after long tarrying, had come.  It was early May.  Lola laughed.

“The spring has got into my blood.”

“It hasn’t got into mine,” I declared.  “It never will.  I wonder what the deuce is the matter with me.”

Then Lola had said, “My dear Simon, I know.  You’re not quite alive even yet.”

I walked homewards pestered by the phrase.  What did she mean by it?  I stopped at the island round the clock-tower by Victoria Station and bought a couple of newspapers.  There, in the centre of the whirlpool where swam dizzily omnibuses, luggage-laden cabs, whirling motors, feverish, train-seeking humans, dirty newsboys, I stood absently saying to myself, “You’re not quite alive even yet.”

A hand gripped my arm and a cheery voice said “Hallo!” I started and recognised Rex Campion.  I also said “Hallo!” and shook hands with him.  We had not met since the days when, having heard of my Monte Cristo lavishness, he had called at the Albany and had beguiled me into giving a thousand pounds to his beloved “Barbara’s Building,” the prodigious philanthropic institution which he had founded in the slums of South Lambeth.  In spite of my dead and dazed state of being I was pleased to see his saturnine black-bearded face, and to hear his big voice.  He was one of those men who always talked like a megaphone.  The porticoes of Victoria Station re-echoed with his salutations.  I greeted him less vociferously, but with equal cordiality.