about the happy head-spring itself, and the apparently
copious tributaries, of the golden stream.

From all which marked anomalies, at any rate, what was the moral to
draw? He dropped into a Park chair again with that question, he lost
himself in the wonder of why he had come away with his homage so very
much unpaid. Yet it didn't seem at all, actually, as if he could say
or conclude, as if he could do anything but keep on worrying--just in
conformity with his being a person who, whether or no familiar with the
need to make his conduct square with his conscience and his taste, was
never wholly exempt from that of making his taste and his conscience
square with his conduct. To this latter occupation he further abandoned
himself, and it didn't release him from his second brooding session
till the sweet spring sunset had begun to gather and he had more or less
cleared up, in the deepening dusk, the effective relation between the
various parts of his ridiculously agitating experience. There were vital
facts he seemed thus to catch, to seize, with a nervous hand, and the
twilight helping, by their vaguely whisked tails; unquiet truths that
swarmed out after the fashion of creatures bold only at eventide,
creatures that hovered and circled, that verily brushed his nose, in
spite of their shyness. Yes, he had practically just sat on with his
"mistress"--heaven save the mark!--as if not to come to the point; as
if it had absolutely come up that there would be something rather vulgar
and awful in doing so. The whole stretch of his stay after Cornelia's
withdrawal had been consumed by his almost ostentatiously treating
himself to the opportunity of which he was to make nothing. It was as
if he had sat and watched himself--that came back to him: Shall I now or
sha'n't I? Will I now or won't I? "Say within the next three minutes,
say by a quarter past six, or by twenty minutes past, at the
furthest--always if nothing more comes up to prevent."

What had already come up to prevent was, in the strangest and drollest,
or at least in the most preposterous, way in the world, that not
Cornelia's presence, but her very absence, with its distraction of his
thoughts, the thoughts that lumbered after her, had made the difference;
and without his being the least able to tell why and how. He put it
to himself after a fashion by the image that, this distraction once
created, his working round to his hostess again, his reverting to the
matter