For his knee was practically cured, and he knew well that
it was Barbara, and Barbara alone, who kept him staying there.
The atmosphere of that big house with its army of servants, the
impossibility of doing anything for himself, and the feeling of hopeless
insulation from the vivid and necessitous sides of life, galled him
greatly. He felt a very genuine pity for these people who seemed to lead
an existence as it were smothered under their own social importance. It
was not their fault. He recognized that they did their best. They were
good specimens of their kind; neither soft nor luxurious, as things
went in a degenerate and extravagant age; they evidently tried to
be simple--and this seemed to him to heighten the pathos of their
situation. Fate had been too much for them. What human spirit could
emerge untrammelled and unshrunken from that great encompassing host
of material advantage? To a Bedouin like Courtier, it was as though a
subtle, but very terrible tragedy was all the time being played before
his eyes; and in, the very centre of this tragedy was the girl who so
greatly attracted him. Every night when he retired to that lofty room,
which smelt so good, and where, without ostentation, everything was so
perfectly ordered for his comfort, he thought:
"My God, to-morrow I'll be off!"
But every morning when he met her at breakfast his thought was precisely
the same, and there were moments when he caught himself wondering: "Am
I falling under the spell of this existence--am I getting soft?" He
recognized as never before that the peculiar artificial 'hardness' of
the patrician was a brine or pickle, in which, with the instinct of
self-preservation they deliberately soaked themselves, to prevent the
decay of their overprotected fibre.
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