.. and now he's in love
with a ghost. That's why real life maddens him."
"Semyonov!" Lawrence whispered the name.
We had come to the end of the quay. My dear church with its round grey
wall stood glistening in the moonlight, the shadows from the snow
rippling up its sides, as though it lay under water. We stood and looked
across the river.
"I've always hated that fellow," Lawrence said. "I've only seen him
about twice, but I believe I hated him before I saw him.... All right,
Durward, that's what I wanted to know. Thank you. Good-night."
And before I could speak he had gripped my hand, had turned back, and
was walking swiftly away, across the golden-lighted quay.
XIX
From the moment that Lawrence left me, vanishing into the heart of the
snow and ice, I was obsessed by a conviction of approaching danger and
peril. It has been one of the most disastrous weaknesses of my life that
I have always shrunk from precipitate action. Before the war it had
seemed to many of us that life could be jockeyed into decisions by words
and theories and speculations. The swift, and, as it were, revengeful
precipitancy of the last three years had driven me into a self-distrust
and cowardice which had grown and grown until life had seemed veiled and
distant and mysteriously obscure.
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