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of forty. I don't know. But certainly the keen brightness that
makes effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just
at a time with all these new political developments--when I ought to
be working. Odd, isn't it? But I do begin to find life toilsome,
its rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago
to want the garden quite badly. Yes--and I've seen it three times."
"
"
The garden?"
No--the door! And I haven't gone in!"
He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his
voice as he spoke. "Thrice I have had my chance--thrice! If ever
that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in out of
this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these
toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will
stay . . . . . I swore it and when the time came--I didn't go.
"
Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to
enter. Three times in the last year.
"
The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the
Tenants' Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a
majority of three. You remember? No one on our side--perhaps very
few on the opposite side--expected the end that night. Then the
debate collapsed like eggshells. I and Hotchkiss were dining with
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