The acquirement of wealth demanded his entire strength, and all
lighter considerations he had consistently refused to recognise, until
he thought them dead. This sudden flaming mood rushed up and showed
him otherwise. He reflected on it, but clumsily, as with a mind too
long trained in the rigid values of stocks and shares, buying and
selling, hard figures that knew not elasticity. This softer subject
led him to no conclusion, leaving him stranded among misty woods and
fields of flowers that had no outlet. He realised, however, clearly
that this side of him was not atrophied as he thought. Its unused
powers had merely been accumulating--underground.
He got no further than that just now. He poked the fire and lit
another cigarette. Then, glancing idly at the paper, his eye fell upon
the list of births, and by merest chance picked out the name of
Crayfield. Some nonentity had been 'safely delivered of a son' at
Crayfield, the village where he had passed his youth and childhood. He
saw the Manor House where he was born, the bars across the night-
nursery windows, the cedars on the lawn, the haystacks just beyond the
stables, and the fields where the rabbits sometimes fell asleep as
they sat after enormous meals too stuffed to move. He saw the old
gravel-pit that led, the gardener told him, to the centre of the
earth.
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