"It's all right. They'll all come back later. They'll be wanting things."
They were gone—all of them. He was alone in his room. He drew back the curtains and looked down over the grey misty stream of Duke Street scattered with the marigolds of the evening lights.
He threw open a window, and the roar of London came up to him like the rattle-rattle-rattle of a weaver's shuttle.
He laughed. He was happier than he had ever been before. The whole world seemed to be at his feet, and he no longer wished to judge it, to improve it, to dictate to it, to dogmatise it, to expect great things of it, to be disappointed in it....
He would never do any of those things again.
He addressed it:
"I did passionately wish you to be improved," he said, "but I didn't love you. Now I know you will never be improved, but I love you dearly—all of you, not a bit of you. Life simply isn't long enough for all I'm going to see!"
[XII]
BOMBASTES FURIOSO
That year, Nineteen-Nineteen, threw up to the surface, because of the storm and disorder of its successive tidal waves, many strange fish; and of all that I encountered, the strangest, most attractive, and, I venture to think, the most typical of our times and their uncertainties, was my friend Bombastes Furioso—otherwise Benedick Jones.