Yet the heart sickened at running once more full tilt into the past, onto its very school-close faces, bloated now like those of the drowned, or gangling overgrown bodies, into everything all over again one had been at such pains to escape from before, but in grossly inflated form. And indeed had it not been so, one must still have been aware of cliques, snobberies, genius thrown into the river, justice declined a recommendation by the appointments board, earnestness debagged—giant oafs in pepper-and-salt, mincing like old women, their only meaning in another war.
