VI

I RETURNED to England with an expectant hunger born of this love of
beauty that was now ingrained in me. I came home with the belief that
my yearning would be satisfied in a deeper measure; and more--that,
somehow, it would be justified and explained. I may put it plainly,
if only to show how difficult this confession would have been to any
one but yourself; it sounds so visionary from a mere soldier and man
of action such as I am. For my belief included a singular dream that,
in the familiar scenes I now revisited, some link, already half
established, would be strengthened, and might probably be realized,
even proved.

In Africa, as you know, I had been set upon the clue at home in
England. Among the places and conditions where this link had been
first established in the flesh, must surely come a fuller revelation.
Beauty, the channel of my inspiration, but this time the old sweet
English beauty, so intimate, so woven through with the fresh wonder
of earliest childhood days, would reveal the cause of my first
failure to respond, and so, perhaps, the intention of those final
pathetic sentences that still haunted me with their freight of
undelivered meaning. In England, T believed, my "thrill" must bring
authentic revelation.

I came back, that precarious entity, a successful man. I was to be
that thing we used to laugh about together in your Cambridge days, a
distinguished personality; I should belong to the breed of little
lions. Yet, during the long, tedious voyage, I realized that this
held no meaning for me; I did not feel myself a little lion, the idea
only proved that the boy in me was not yet dead. My one desire,