After morning service, he sate down
to his Christmas fare alone, and then, when the simple meal was over,
would sit and think in his accustomed chair, falling perhaps into
one of those quiet dozes from which, because they seemed to be so
natural a result, so seemly a consummation, of his thoughts, he
did not regularly abstain. Later, he sallied forth, with a sense
of refreshment, for a brisk walk among the fens, the sedges, the
hedgerows, the reed-fringed pools, the pollard willows that would in
due course be putting forth their tender shoots of palest green. And
then, once more in his rooms, with the curtains drawn and the candles
lit, he would turn to his book-shelves and choose from among them some
old book that he knew and loved, or maybe some quite new book by that
writer whose works were most dear to him because in them he seemed
always to know so precisely what the author would say next, and
because he found in their fine-spun repetitions a singular repose,
a sense of security, an earnest of calm and continuity, as though he
were reading over again one of those wise copy-books that he had so
loved in boyhood, or were listening to the sounds made on a piano by
some modest, very conscientious young girl with a pale red pig-tail,
practising her scales, very gently, hour after hour, next door.
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