“Lonsdale Mews!”
“Yes, yes, of course. I had forgotten. Eight Lonsdale Mews, Lonsdale Road, Chelsea. But my mind is very confused and I do not know what I should say to her even if she came.”
Bobby wrote down the address forthwith.
“And this Christina Alberta is all you have?” he asked.
“All I have.
“Twenty. Quite a child really. I ought never to have left her. But there came a sort of wonder upon me—As though the world was opening. It made everything else seem very trivial.”
§ 10
“There came a sort of wonder upon me as though the world was opening.”
Bobby wrote that down also. And he sat very late before the fire in the ground-floor room thinking that over and thinking over the message he would have to send to Christina Alberta in the morning. To-morrow he would have to explain himself and his extraordinary intervention in Preemby affairs. It was by no means plain to himself as yet, and to-morrow he would have to make plain to a probably very indignant young lady why her father had so caught his sympathies and fascinated his imagination as to tempt him to this escapade. He found himself thrown back on self-analysis. He found himself scrutinizing his own motives and his own scheme of existence.
He knew and understood that feeling, “as though the world was opening” so well. Still better did he know that feeling of dead emptiness in life out of which it arose. In his own case he had thought this habitual discontent with the daily round, this urgency towards something strange and grandiose, was due to the dislocation of all his expectations of life by the great war; that it was a subjective aspect of nervous instability; but in the case of this little laundryman it could not have been the war that had sent him out, a sort of emigrant from himself, to find a fantastic universal kingdom. It must be something more fundamental than the war accident. It must be a normal disposition in men towards detachment from safety and comfort.