“My dear master, how, after all, are you going to do it? It’s infinitely noble, but what time it will take, what patience and independence, what assured, what perfect conditions! Oh for a lone isle in a tepid sea!”
“Isn’t this practically a lone isle, and aren’t you, as an encircling medium, tepid enough?” he asked, alluding with a laugh to the wonder of my young admiration and the narrow limits of his little provincial home. “Time isn’t what I’ve lacked hitherto: the question hasn’t been to find it, but to use it. Of course my illness made, while it lasted, a great hole—but I dare say there would have been a hole at any rate. The earth we tread has more pockets than a billiard-table. The great thing is now to keep on my feet.”
Neil Paraday looked at me with eyes—such pleasant eyes as he had—in which, as I now recall their expression, I seem to have seen a dim imagination of his fate. He was fifty years old, and his illness had been cruel, his convalescence slow. “It isn’t as if I weren’t all right.”
“Oh if you weren’t all right I wouldn’t look at you!” I tenderly said.
We had both got up, quickened as by this clearer air, and he had lighted a cigarette. I had taken a fresh one, which with an intenser smile, by way of answer to my exclamation, he applied to the flame of his match. “If I weren’t better I shouldn’t have thought of _that_!” He flourished his script in his hand.
“I don’t want to be discouraging, but that’s not true,” I returned. “I’m sure that during the months you lay here in pain you had visitations sublime. You thought of a thousand things. You think of more and more all the while. That’s what makes you, if you’ll pardon my familiarity, so respectable. At a time when so many people are spent you come into your second wind. But, thank God, all the same, you’re better! Thank God, too, you’re not, as you were telling me yesterday, ‘successful.’ If _you_ weren’t a failure what would be the use of trying? That’s my one reserve on the subject of your recovery—that it makes you ‘score,’ as the newspapers say. It looks well in the newspapers, and almost anything that does that’s horrible. ‘We are happy to announce that Mr. Paraday, the celebrated author, is again in the enjoyment of excellent health.’ Somehow I shouldn’t like to see it.”