"I know what it will be like," grunted Boreham, and he hesitated. If May Dashwood had been staying on in Oxford it would have been different, but she was going away. So Boreham hesitated.
"Telephone me this evening, will you?" said Bingham.
"Very well," said Boreham. "I'll see what I have got on hand, and if I have time——" and so the two men parted.
Boreham got into his gig with a heavy heart and drove back to Chartcote. How he hated the avenue that cut him off from the world outside. How he hated the clean smell of the country that came into his windows. How he hated to see the moon, when it glinted at him from between the tops of trees. He longed for streets, for the odour of dirt and of petrol and of stale-cooked food.
The noise of London soothed him, the jostling of men and women; he hungered for it. And yet he did not love those human beings. He knew their weaknesses, their superstitions, their follies, their unreason! Boreham remembered a much over-rated Hebrew (possibly only a mythical figure) who once said to His followers that when they prayed they should say: "Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us."
He got out of his gig slowly. "I don't forgive them," he said, and, unconscious of his own sins, he walked up the steps into his lonely house.