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tell of, Redmond--I am haunted. I am haunted by something--that
rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings
.
. . . ."
He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often
overcomes us when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful
things. "You were at Saint Athelstan's all through," he said, and
for a moment that seemed to me quite irrelevant. "Well"--and he
paused. Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily,
he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the
haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart
with insatiable longings that made all the interests and spectacle
of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.
Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written
visibly in his face. I have a photograph in which that look of
detachment has been caught and intensified. It reminds me of what
a woman once said of him--a woman who had loved him greatly.
"Suddenly," she said, "the interest goes out of him. He forgets
you. He doesn't care a rap for you--under his very nose . . . . ."
Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was
holding his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an
extremely successful man. His career, indeed, is set with
successes. He left me behind him long ago; he soared up over my
head, and cut a figure in the world that I couldn't cut--anyhow.
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