Living, as he had always done, in the rather
formal and reticent atmosphere of his class and environment, he would
have thought this fervour of patriotism in an English mouth ridiculous,
or, if persevered in, merely bad form. Yet when Falbe hailed the Rhine
and the spires of Cologne, it was clear that there was no bad form about
it at all. He felt like that; and, indeed, as Michael was beginning to
perceive, he felt with a similar intensity on all subjects about which
he felt at all. There was something of the same vivid quality about Aunt
Barbara, but Aunt Barbara's vividness was chiefly devoted to the hunt
of the absurdities of her friends, and it was always the concretely
ridiculous that she pursued. But this handsome, vital young man, with
his eagerness and his welcome for the world, who had fallen with
so delightful a cordiality into Michael's company, had already an
attraction for him of a sort he had never felt before.
Dimly, as the days went by, he began to conjecture that he who had never
had a friend was being hailed and halloed to, was being ordered, if
not by precept, at any rate by example, to come out of the shell of his
reserve, and let himself feel and let himself express.
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