“He’s done fine things, great things.  I shall look him up, and we’ll drink a bottle of wine together.”

He kept stroking Miriam’s hand, a white hand with blue veins—­a strong hand, though so delicately fashioned.  The touch of the wedding-ring again gave a new direction to his discursive thoughts.

“After this, shall you go back to that horrible hole in Lancashire?”

“I hope to go back home, certainly.”

“Home, home!” he muttered, impatiently.  “It has made you ill, poor girl.  Stay in Italy a long time, now you are once here.  For you to he here at all seems a miracle; it gives me hopes.”

Miriam did not resent this, in word at all events.  She was submitting again to physical oppression; her head drooped, and her abstracted gaze was veiled with despondent lassitude.  Reuben talked idly, in loose sentences.

“Do you think of me as old or young, Miriam?” he asked, when both had kept silence for a while.

“I no longer think of you as older than myself.”

“That is natural.  I imagined that.  In one way I am old enough, but in another I am only just beginning my life, and have all my energies fresh.  I shall do something yet; can you believe it?”

“Do what?” she asked, wearily.

“Oh, I have plans; all sorts of plans.”

He joined his hands together behind his head, and began to stir with a revival of mental energy.

“But plans of what sort?”

“There is only one direction open to me.  My law has of course gone to—­to limbo; it was always an absurdity.  Most of my money has gone the same way, and I’m not sorry for it.  If I had never had anything, I should have set desperately to work long ago.  Now I am bound to work, and you will see the results.  Of course, in our days, there’s only one road for a man like me.  I shall go in for literature.”

Miriam listened, but made no comment.

“My life hitherto has not been wasted,” Elgar pursued, leaning forward with a new light on his countenance.  “I have been gaining experience.  Do you understand?  Few men at my age have seen more of life—­the kind of life that is useful as literary material.  It’s only quite of late that I have begun to appreciate this, to see all the possibilities that are in myself.  It has taken all this time to outgrow the miserable misdirection of my boyhood, and to become a man of my time.  Thank the fates, I no longer live in the Pentateuch, but at the latter end of the nineteenth century.  Many a lad has to work this deliverance for himself nowadays.  I don’t wish to speak unkindly any more, Miriam, but I must tell you plain facts.  Some fellows free themselves by dint of hard study.  In my case that was made impossible by all sorts of reasons—­temperament mainly, as you know.  I was always a rebel against my fetters; I had not to learn that liberty was desirable, but how to obtain it, and what use to make of it.  All the disorder through which I have gone was a struggle towards self-knowledge and understanding of my time.  You and others are wildly in error in calling it dissipation, profligacy, recklessness, and so on.  You at least, Miriam, ought to have judged me more truly; you, at all events, should not have classed me with common men.”