PART TWO
CHAPTER I
Sometimes I wonder yet whether Mills wished me to oversleep myself
or not: that is, whether he really took sufficient interest to
care. His uniform kindliness of manner made it impossible for me
to tell. And I can hardly remember my own feelings. Did I care?
The whole recollection of that time of my life has such a peculiar
quality that the beginning and the end of it are merged in one
sensation of profound emotion, continuous and overpowering,
containing the extremes of exultation, full of careless joy and of
an invincible sadness--like a day-dream. The sense of all this
having been gone through as if in one great rush of imagination is
all the stronger in the distance of time, because it had something
of that quality even then: of fate unprovoked, of events that
didn't cast any shadow before.
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