If you're a man of imagination--" "Oh," Vanderbank broke in, "I know how much more in that case you're one! It only makes me regret," he continued, "that I've not attended more since yesterday to what you've been about." "I've been about nothing but what among you people I'm always about.
I've been seeing, feeling, thinking.

That makes no show, of course I'm aware, for any one but myself, and it's wholly my own affair.

Except indeed," he added, "so far as I've taken into my head to make, on it all, this special appeal.

There are things that have come home to me." "Oh I see, I see," Vanderbank showed the friendliest alertness.

"I'm to take it from you then, with all the avidity of my vanity, that I strike you as the person best able to understand what they are." Mr.Longdon appeared to wonder an instant if his intelligence now had not almost too much of a glitter: he kept the same position, his back against the table, and while Vanderbank, on the settee, pressed upright against the wall, they recognised in silence that they were trying each other.