He puffed at his cigar, resuming presently: 

’But it would be untrue if I said that I regretted anything.  Constituted as I am, there was no other way of learning my real needs and capabilities.  Much in the past is hateful to me, but it all had its use.  There are men—­why, take your own case.  You look back on life, no doubt, with calm and satisfaction.’

‘Rather, with resignation.’

Godwin let his cigar fall, and laughed bitterly.

’Your resignation has kept pace with life.  I was always a rebel.  My good qualities—­I mean what I say—­have always wrecked me.  Now that I haven’t to fight with circumstances, they may possibly be made subservient to my happiness.’

‘But what form is your happiness to take?’

’Well, I am leaving England.  On the Continent I shall make no fixed abode, but live in the places where cosmopolitan people are to be met.  I shall make friends; with money at command, one may hope to succeed in that.  Hotels, boarding-houses, and so on, offer the opportunities.  It sounds oddly like the project of a swindler, doesn’t it?  There’s the curse I can’t escape from!  Though my desires are as pure as those of any man living, I am compelled to express myself as if I were about to do something base and underhand.  Simply because I have never had a social place.  I am an individual merely; I belong to no class, town, family, club’——­’Cosmopolitan people,’ mused Earwaker.  ‘Your ideal is transformed.’

’As you know.  Experience only could bring that about.  I seek now only the free, intellectual people—­men who have done with the old conceptions—­women who’——­

His voice grew husky, and he did not complete the sentence.  ’I shall find them in Paris, Rome.—­Earwaker, think of my being able to speak like this!  No day-dreams, but actual sober plans, their execution to begin in a day or two.  Paris, Rome!  And a month ago I was a hopeless slave in a vile manufacturing town.—­I wish it were possible for me to pray for the soul of that poor dead woman.  I don’t speak to you of her; but do you imagine I am brutally forgetful of her to whom I owe all this?’

‘I do you justice,’ returned the other, quietly.

‘I believe you can and do.’

‘How grand it is to go forth as I am now going!’ Godwin resumed, after a long pause.  ’Nothing to hide, no shams, no pretences.  Let who will inquire about me.  I am an independent Englishman, with so and so much a year.  In England I have one friend only—­that is you.  The result, you see, of all these years savage striving to knit myself into the social fabric.’

‘Well, you will invite me some day to your villa at Sorrento,’ said Earwaker, encouragingly.

‘That I shall!’ Godwin’s eyes flashed with imaginative delight.  ’And before very long.  Never to a home in England!’

’By-the-bye, a request.  I have never had your portrait.  Sit before you leave London.’