mply mooned about. I hadn't a club, and I used to read at the
Museum--read just to keep my senses. Then, I suppose I got used to it. Of
course, if I had had any adventurousness in me, I should have gone off and
become a day-labourer or anything--but I am not that sort of person.

"That went on till I was about thirty-three--and then quite suddenly, and
without any warning, I had my experience. I suppose that something was
going on inside me all the time, something being burnt out of me in those
fires. It was a mixture of selfishness and stupidity and perverseness that
was the matter with me. I didn't see that I could do anything. I was simply
furious with the world for being such a hole, and with God for sticking me
in the middle of it. The occasion of the change was simply too ridiculous.
It was nothing else but coming back to my rooms and finding a big bowl of
daffodils there. They had been left, my landlady told me, by a young
gentleman. It sounds foolish enough--but it suddenly occurred to me to
think that someone was interested in me, pitied me, cared for me. A sort of
mist cleared away from my eyes, and I saw in a flash, what was the
mischief--that I had walled myself in by my misery and bad temper, and by
my expectation that something must be done for me. The next day I had to
take a lot of pupils, one after another, for composition. One of them had a
daffodil in his hand, which he put down carelessly on the table. I stared
at it and at him, and he blushed. He wasn't an interesting young man to
look at or to talk to--but it was just a bit of simple humanity. It all
came out. I had been good to him--I looked as if I were having a bad time.
It was just a little human, signal, and a beautiful one. It was there,
then, all the time, I saw--human affection--if I cared to put out my hand
for it. I can't describe to you how it all developed, but my heart had
melted somehow--thawed like a lump of ice. I saw that there was no specific
ill-will to me in the world. I saw that everything was there, if I only
chose to take it. That was my second awakening--a glimmer of light through
a chink--and suddenly, it was day! I had been growling over bones and straw
in a filthy kennel, and I was not really tied up at all. Life was running
past me, a crystal river. I was dying of thirst: and all because it was not
given me in a clean glass on a silver tray, I would not drink it--and God
smiling at me all the time."

Father Payne walked o