there was no inevitable any more, and escaped his former despair.

He could, for example, "clear out."

It became a wonderful and alluring phrase to him: "clear out!"

Why had he never thought of clearing out before?

He was amazed and a little shocked at the unimaginative and

superfluous criminality in him that had turned old cramped and

stagnant Fishbourne into a blaze and new beginnings. (I wish from the

bottom of my heart I could add that he was properly sorry.) But

something constricting and restrained seemed to have been destroyed by

that flare. Fishbourne wasn't the world. That was the new, the

essential fact of which he had lived so lamentably in ignorance.

Fishbourne as he had known it and hated it, so that he wanted to kill

himself to get out of it, wasn't the world.

The insurance money he was to receive made everything humane and

kindly and practicable. He would "clear out," with justice and

humanity. He would take exactly twenty-one pounds, and all the rest he

would leave to Miriam. That seemed to him absolutely fair. Without

him, she could do all sorts of things--all the sorts of things she was

constantly urging him to do.

And he would go off along the white road that led to Garchester, and

254

The History of Mr Polly