was: Time! Time! Time
would have set everything right. In time some of these speculations of
his were certain to have succeeded. He repeated this defence, this
excuse, this confession of faith, with wearisome iteration. Everything
he had done or left undone had been to gain time. He had hypnotized
himself with the word. Sometimes, I am told, his appearance was
ecstatic, his motionless pale eyes seemed to be gazing down the vista of
future ages. Time--and of course, more money. "Ah! If only you had
left me alone for a couple of years more," he cried once in accents of
passionate belief. "The money was coming in all right." The deposits
you understand--the savings of Thrift. Oh yes they had been coming in to
the very last moment. And he regretted them. He had arrived to regard
them as his own by a sort of mystical persuasion. And yet it was a
perfectly true cry, when he turned once more on the counsel who was
beginning a question with the words "You have had all these immense sums
. . . " with the indignant retort "_What_ have I had out of them?"

"It was perfectly true. He had had nothing out of them--nothing of the
prestigious or the desirable things of the earth, craved for by predatory
natures. He had gratified no tastes, had known no luxury; he had built
no gorgeous palaces, had formed no splendid galleries out of these
"immense sums." He had not even a home. He had gone into these rooms in
an hotel and had stuck there for years, giving no doubt perfect
satisfaction to the management. They had twice raised his rent to show I
suppose their high sense of his distinguished patronage. He had bought
for himself out of all the wealth streaming through his fingers neither
adulation nor love, neither splendour nor comfort. There was something
perfect in his consistent mediocrity. His very vanity seemed to miss the
gratification of even the mere show of power. In the days when he was
most fully in the public eye the invincible obscurity of his origins
clung to him like a shadowy garment. He had handled millions without
ever enjoying anything of what is counted as precious in the community of
men, because he had neither the brutality of temperament nor the fineness
of mind to make him desire them with the will power of a masterful
adventurer . . . "

"You seem to have studied the man," I observed.

"Studied," repeated Marlow thoughtfully. "No! Not studied. I had no
opportunities. You know that I