If I work up--in'r dozen years or
so I ought to be gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain
sense of it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't
get along very decently--very decently indeed.'
The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it
struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had a sense of all
this globe as that....'
By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated
world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high
roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland
pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great
circles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments and
dues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes such
visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations and
yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively
than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere
moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately swiftness
on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living progress that
altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to that
incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling.
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