XXVI
In that uninitiated observation of the great spectacle of English life on which I have touched, it might be supposed that he passed a great many dull days. But the dulness was as grateful as a warm, fragrant bath, and his melancholy, which was settling to a secondary stage, like a healing wound, had in it a certain acrid, palatable sweetness. He had the company of his thoughts and for the present wanted none other. He had no desire to make acquaintances and left untouched a couple of notes of introduction sent him by Tom Tristram. He mused a great deal on Madame de Cintré—sometimes with a dull despair that might have seemed a near neighbour to detachment. He lived over again the happiest hours he had known—that silver chain of numbered days in which his afternoon visits, strained so sensibly to the ideal end, had come to figure for him a flight of firm marble steps where the ascent from one to the other was a momentous and distinct occasion, giving a nearer view of the chamber of confidence at the top, a white tower that flushed more and more as with a light of dawn. He had yet held in his cheated arms, he felt, the full experience, and when he closed them together round the void that was all they now possessed, he might have been some solitary spare athlete practising restlessly in the corridor of the circus. He came back to reality indeed, after such reveries,
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