It had
consciously gathered to a head, but the reservoir had filled sooner
than he knew, and his companion's touch was to make the waters spread.
There were some things that had to come in time if they were to come at
all. If they didn't come in time they were lost for ever. It was the
general sense of them that had overwhelmed him with its long slow rush.

"It's not too late for YOU, on any side, and you don't strike me as in
danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in general
pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking
as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.
All the same don't forget that you're young--blessedly young; be glad
of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it's a
mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular,
so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what HAVE you
had? This place and these impressions--mild as you may find them to
wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I've seen at
HIS place--well, have had their abundant message for me, have just
dropped THAT into my mind. I see it now. I haven't done so enough
before--and now I'm old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I DO
see, at least; and more than you'd believe or I can express. It's too
late. And it's as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me
without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its
faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses
one loses; make no mistake about that. The affair--I mean the affair
of life--couldn't, no doubt, have been different for me; for it's at
the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental
excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a
helpless jelly, one's consciousness is poured--so that one 'takes' the
form as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it:
one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom;
therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I
was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have
it; I don't quite know which. Of course at present I'm a case of
reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no
doubt, always be taken with an allowance. But that doesn't affect the
point that the right time is now yours. The right time is ANY time
that one is still so lucky