“In truth, I could not believe it a dream, for all the sobering reality of things about me.  I bathed and dressed as it were by habit, and as I shaved I argued why I of all men should leave the woman I loved to go back to fantastic politics in the hard and strenuous north.  Even if Gresham did force the world back to war, what was that to me?  I was a man, with the heart of a man, and why should I feel the responsibility of a deity for the way the world might go?

“You know that is not quite the way I think about affairs, about my real affairs.  I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of view.

“The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike a dream, that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details; even the ornament of a bookcover that lay on my wife’s sewing-machine in the breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line that ran about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the messenger from my deserted party.  Have you ever heard of a dream that had a quality like that?”

“Like—?”

“So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten.”

I thought.  I had never noticed the point before, but he was right.

“Never,” I said.  “That is what you never seem to do with dreams.”

“No,” he answered.  “But that is just what I did.  I am a solicitor, you must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help wondering what the clients and business people I found myself talking to in my office would think if I told them suddenly I was in love with a girl who would be born a couple of hundred years or so hence, and worried about the politics of my great-great-great-grandchildren.  I was chiefly busy that day negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease.  It was a private builder in a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way.  I had an interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that sent me to bed still irritated.  That night I had no dream.  Nor did I dream the next night, at least, to remember.

“Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished.  I began to feel sure it was a dream.  And then it came again.

“When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very different.  I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in the dream.  Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them was back again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled.  I began, I know, with moody musings.  Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days, to toil and stress, insults, and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could not do other than despise, from the stress and anguish of war and infinite misrule?  And, after all, I might fail. They all sought their own narrow ends, and why should not I—­why should not I also live as a man?  And out of such thoughts her voice summoned me, and I lifted my eyes.