It was, however, when staying in his grandmother’s house at Weymouth, that the word had come to him which he now always used in his own mind to describe these obsessions. It was the word “mythology”; and he used it entirely in a private sense of his own. He could remember very well where he first came upon the word. It was in a curious room, called “the anteroom,” which was connected by folding-doors with his grandmother’s drawing-room, and which was filled with the sort of ornamental debris that middle-class people were in the habit of acquiring in the early years of Queen Victoria. The window of his grandmother’s room opened upon the sea; and Wolf, carrying the word “mythology” into this bow-window, allowed it to become his own secret name for his own secret habit.

This “sinking into his soul”⁠—this sensation which he called “mythology”⁠—consisted of a certain summoning-up, to the surface of his mind, of a subconscious magnetic power which from those very early Weymouth days, as he watched the glitter of sun and moon upon the waters from that bow-window, had seemed prepared to answer such a summons.