considerable number indeed, for any information about him that might
matter, but which left you wholly to judge whether they seemed justified
by their fruits. This manner about them, as one may call it in general,
often contributes to your impression that they make for a certain strain
of related modesty which may on occasion be one of their happiest
effects; it at any rate, in days when my acquaintance with them was
slighter, used to leave me gaping at the treasure of operation, the far
recessional perspectives, it took for granted and any offered
demonstration of the extent or the mysteries of which seemed unthinkable
just in proportion as the human resultant testified in some one or other
of his odd ways to their influence. He might not always be, at any rate
on first acquaintance, a resultant explosively human, but there was in
any case one reflection he could always cause you to make: "What a
wondrous system it indeed must be which insists on flourishing to all
appearance under such an absence of advertised or even of confessed
relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump!"
The formulation, the approximate expression of what the system at large
might or mightn't do for those in contact with it, became thus one's own
fitful care, with one's attention for a considerable period doubtless
dormant enough, but with the questions always liable to revive before
the individual case.

Rupert Brooke made them revive as soon as one began to know him, or in
other words made one want to read back into him each of his promoting
causes without exception, to trace to some source in the ambient air
almost any one, at a venture, of his aspects; so precious a loose and
careless bundle of happy references did that inveterate trick of giving
the go-by to over-emphasis which he shared with his general kind fail to
prevent your feeling sure of his having about him. I think the liveliest
interest of these was that while not one of them was signally romantic,