It amused me at the time—­the idea of little Neave making eyes at any of Daunt’s belongings.  He might as well have coquetted with the Kohinoor.  And the same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned away from the big house in Belgravia he glanced up at it and said, with a bitterness I’d never heard in him:  “Good Lord!  To think of that lumpy fool having those things to handle!  Did you notice his stupid stumps of fingers?  I suppose he blunted them gouging nuggets out of the gold fields.  And in exchange for the nuggets he gets all that in a year—­only has to hold out his callous palm to have that great ripe sphere of beauty drop into it!  That’s my idea of heaven—­to have a great collection drop into one’s hand, as success, or love, or any of the big shining things, drop suddenly on some men.  And I’ve had to worry along for nearly fifty years, saving and paring, and haggling and intriguing, to get here a bit and there a bit—­and not one perfection in the lot!  It’s enough to poison a man’s life.”

The outbreak was so unlike Neave that I remember every word of it:  remember, too, saying in answer:  “But, look here, Neave, you wouldn’t take Daunt’s hands for yours, I imagine?”

He stared a moment and smiled.  “Have all that, and grope my way through it like a blind cave fish?  What a question!  But the sense that it’s always the blind fish that live in that kind of aquarium is what makes anarchists, sir!” He looked back from the corner of the square, where we had paused while he delivered himself of this remarkable metaphor.  “God, I’d like to throw a bomb at that place, and be in at the looting!”

And with that, on the way home, he unpacked his grievance—­pulled the bandage off the wound, and showed me the ugly mark it had made on his little white soul.

It wasn’t the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him—­it was the inadequacy of the result.  It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man’s wants and his power to gratify them.  Neave’s taste was too exquisite for his means—­was like some strange, delicate, capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered and couldn’t satisfy.

“Don’t you know those little glittering lizards that die if they’re not fed on some wonderful tropical fly?  Well, my taste’s like that, with one important difference—­if it doesn’t get its fly, it simply turns and feeds on me.  Oh, it doesn’t die, my taste—­worse luck!  It gets larger and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger bite of me—­that’s all.”

That was all.  Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations—­as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses—­only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable—­that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give.  He had trained himself in short, to