It
was only later that I was to arrive at some faint conception of
Lawrence's marvellous acceptance of anything that might happen to turn
up. Vice, cruelty, unsuspected beauty, terror, remorse, hatred, and
ignorance--he accepted them all once they were there in front of him. He
sometimes, as I shall on a later occasion, show, allowed himself a free
expression of his views in the company of those whom he could trust, but
they were never the views of a suspicious or a disappointed man. It was
not that he had great faith in human nature. He had, I think, very
little. Nor was he without curiosity--far from it. But once a thing was
really there he wasted no time over exclamations as to the horror or
beauty or abomination of its actual presence. There was as he once
explained to me, "precious little time to waste." Those who thought him
a dull, silent fellow--and they were many--made of course an almost
ludicrous mistake, but most people in life are, I take it, too deeply
occupied with their own personal history to do more than estimate at its
surface value the appearance of others... but after all such a
dispensation makes, in all probability for the general happiness.
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