He got straight up. “Go and see it?”
“Go and see it.”
“Well,” he said, “with you I’ll go anywhere.”
On our return to town we determined to spend three days there together
and then proceed to our errand. We were as conscious one as the other of
that deeper mystic appeal made by London to those superstitious pilgrims
who feel it the mother-city of their race, the distributing heart of
their traditional life. Certain characteristics of the dusky Babylon,
certain aspects, phases, features, “say” more to the American spiritual
ear than anything else in Europe. The influence of these things on
Searle it charmed me to note. His observation I soon saw to be, as
I pronounced it to him, searching and caressing. His almost morbid
appetite for any over-scoring of time, well-nigh extinct from long
inanition, threw the flush of its revival into his face and his talk.