And—supposing that it had already happened, implicit in that single revealing look—he had still to sleep that night.
I forget in what words he began to plead his cause. His idea was this:
He conceived himself to be now stationary, or, if moving at all, to be doing so hardly perceptibly. Ignorant of the connection between Julia's attack and his putting-off of the years, he knew as little that similar results might follow what had happened in the garden of Ker Annic that evening. He would "hang on" by gentle and equable living, and to that extent, and if all went well, time might presently become to him something more nearly approaching what it was to anybody else. He even hazarded a suggestion wild enough to make the hair stand up on your head.
"And if I got as far as that," he mused, his eyes straight before him in the night, "I might even—it's no madder than anything else—I might even start living forward again; but I suppose that's too much to expect," he sighed.
On this I simply refused to make any comment at all.
I had told him that Jennie was the daughter of my host. He was for making plain sailing of it. His outbreak about my cowardice, by the way, had been disregarded by both of us.
"But don't you see, Derry, you're so unimaginably different from anybody and everybody else," I repeated for the tenth time.
"Not if I can stop decently still," was his dogged reply.
"But you don't know yet that you can."
"You don't know that I can't, sir."