His feeling was like a brimming stream between reedy banks, where a wooden moss-covered dam prevents any spring-flood, but where the water, making its way round the edge of the obstacle, bends the long, submerged grasses before it, as it sweeps forward.

Two images troubled him just a little⁠—Gerda’s white, tense face as it had looked when she left him on the street, and, with this, a vague uncomfortable memory of the figure on the Waterloo steps. But, in his intensely heightened consciousness of this “suspended” moment, he deliberately steered the skiff of his thought away from both those reefs.