Isabel waited for him to continue. He sat, bent forward, his hands about one knee.
“And you returned to England with plans?” she asked at length, finding him persevere in silence.
“No, only with experience. I came back because I had news of my mothers illness. She was dead and buried before I got home.”
“It strikes me as curious,” he resumed rapidly, “that my childhood, boyhood in fact, has utterly gone from my memory. I suppose that is why I have such slight sympathy with children. I have often tried desperately to recover the consciousness of my young days: it has gone. My father, my mother, I cannot, recall their relations to me, nor mine to them. Nay, facts even have left my memory. I know scarcely anything before the beginning of my student years, and even those are vanishing, I find. I live only in the present.”
“But the future?”
“No, from looking forward I shrink as much as from looking back.”
There was another silence.
“But since you returned to England?” Isabel inquired, “have you never thought of another profession?”
Kingcote laughed.
“I had crazy projects for studying art. Gabriel put that into my head. But my zeal did not last. It is the same in everything; I lack persistence.”