My emotions sank comfortably to a less inflated level. I murmured something politely as we passed into the so-called “sitting-room” together, and for a moment the atmosphere of my own practical world came in strongly with me. The sense of the incongruous inevitably was touched. The immense fabric of my friend’s beliefs seemed in that instant to tremble a little. That the woman he--_we_--had been waiting for through centuries, this “old soul” taught of the ancient wisdom and aware of august, forgotten worship, should be “making a bed upstairs” woke in me a sense of healthy amusement. Julius took up the water! She was engaged in menial acts! A girl brought butter from a distant farm! And I could have laughed--but for one other thing that lay behind and within the comedy. For that other thing was--pathos. There was a kind of yearning pain at the heart of it: a pain whose origins were too remote to be discoverable by the normal part of me. It touched the poetry in me, too. For after the first disturbing effect--that it was not adequate--I felt slowly another thing: that this commonplace meeting was far more likely to be _true_ than the dramatic sort I had anticipated. It was natural, it was simple; all big adventures of the soul begin in a quiet way. Obviously, as yet, the two selves in me were not yet comfortably readjusted. I became aware, too, that Julius was what I can only call somewhere less human than before--more impersonal. He talked, he acted, he even looked as a figure might outside our world. I had no longer insight into his being as before. His life lay elsewhere, expresses it best perhaps. I can hardly present him as a man of flesh and blood. Emotion broke through so rarely.