bumping up and down my stairs. That was really what I saw of him in the
light of his behaviour. He had fallen in love as he might have broken
his leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanently
lame. It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of him
left in the same position as before. The tremendous cleverness, the
literary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all
seemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. I
hadn't had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great man
at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had
addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself
how effectively this privilege had supposed itself to prepare him for the
career on which my friend appeared now to have embarked. I remember too
making up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose
in impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of
mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a
revealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and his
chill, and the only thing he touched with judgment was this convenience
of my friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but the matter
comes back in a kind of sense of my being rather the mouthpiece, of my
having had to put it together for him. He took it from me in this form
without a groan, and I gave it him quite as it came; he took it again and
again, spending his odd half-hours with me as if for the very purpose of
learning how idiotically he was in love. He told me I made him see
things: to begin with, hadn't I first made him see Flora Saunt? I wanted
him to give her up and lucidly informed him why; on which he never
protested nor contradicted, never was even so alembicated as to declare
just for the sake of the point that he wouldn't. He simply and
pointlessly didn't, and when at the end of three months I asked him what
was the use of talking with such a fellow his nearest approach to a
justification was to say that what made him want to help her was just the