V
It was all immensely reassuring, and Sabre gathered up his bundle of papers and went into his room, feeling on the whole rather pleasurably excited than otherwise. But as he read, column after column and paper after paper, measures that had been taken by the Government, orders to Army and Naval reservists, the impending call for men, the scenes in the streets of London, and with these the deeply grave tone of the leading articles, the tremendous statistics and the huge foreshadowing of certain of the military correspondents, the breathless news already from the seats of war,—as his mind thus received there returned to it its earlier sense of enormous oppression and tremendous conjecture. War.... England.... The first sentence of his history, now greatly advanced, came tremendously into his mind: "This England you live in is yours...." And now at war—challenged—threatened—
It surged enormously within him. He got up. He must go out into the streets and see what was happening.
The day wore on. He felt extraordinarily shy and self-conscious about the performance of a matter that had entered his mind with that surging uplift of his feelings. It was four o'clock in the afternoon before he took himself to it and then, leaving its place, he unexpectedly encountered Mabel. She was just going into the station. She had come in, as she had proposed, and she told him what she had said to Jones and what Jones had said to her. "Abominably rude man."
Then she asked him, "Was that Doctor Anderson's gate you came out of just now?"
"Yes."
"Whatever had you been to see him about?"
He flushed. He never could invent an excuse when he wanted one. "I'd been asking him to have a look at me."
"Whatever for?"
"Oh, nothing particular."