"You call this resting!" he said, dryly; then, looking at her drowned
hair, added: "I see you have already entrusted your trouble to the
waters of Lethe."
But without answer Barbara vanished into the dim hall and up the stairs.
CHAPTER IV
While Barbara was swimming to meet the dawn, Miltoun was bathing in
those waters of mansuetude and truth which roll from wall to wall in the
British House of Commons.
In that long debate on the Land question, for which he had waited to
make his first speech, he had already risen nine times without catching
the Speaker's eye, and slowly a sense of unreality was creeping over
him. Surely this great Chamber, where without end rose the small sound
of a single human voice, and queer mechanical bursts of approbation and
resentment, did not exist at all but as a gigantic fancy of his own! And
all these figures were figments of his brain! And when he at last spoke,
it would be himself alone that he addressed! The torpid air tainted with
human breath, the unwinking stare of the countless lights, the long rows
of seats, the queer distant rounds of pale listening flesh perched up so
high, they were all emanations of himself! Even the coming and going in
the gangway was but the coming and going of little wilful parts of him!
And rustling deep down in this Titanic creature of his fancy was 'the
murmuration' of his own unspoken speech, sweeping away the puff balls of
words flung up by that far-away, small, varying voice.
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