crowd, the people who had done things being pointed out by people
who recognised them to people who didn't--it would all go on with
unflagging animation and sparkle and enjoyment, and for him it
would have stopped utterly. He would be in some unheard-of sun-
blistered wilderness, where natives and pariah dogs and raucous-
throated crows fringed round mockingly on one's loneliness, where
one rode for sweltering miles for the chance of meeting a collector
or police officer, with whom most likely on closer acquaintance one
had hardly two ideas in common, where female society was
represented at long intervals by some climate-withered woman
missionary or official's wife, where food and sickness and
veterinary lore became at last the three outstanding subjects on
which the mind settled or rather sank. That was the life he
foresaw and dreaded, and that was the life he was going to. For a
boy who went out to it from the dulness of some country rectory,
from a neighbourhood where a flower show and a cricket match formed
the social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be
very crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and
adventure. But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of
things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than
stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as
an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted
mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully about the
world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages. He was being put
aside, as a wine is put aside, but to deteriorate instead of
gaining in the process, to lose the best time of his youth and
health and good looks in a world where youth and health and good
looks count for much and where time never returns lost possessions.
And thus, as the curtain swept down on the close of each act, Comus
felt a sense of depression and deprivation sweep down on himself;