He could only decide it
satisfactorily by ignoring Valentine's impertinence to himself, and
endeavouring to resume his former relations of intimacy with these old
friends who were strangers. He began by asking them both to dinner.
Rather to his surprise they accepted and came. The mastiffs were shut
close in their den below, lest they should repeat their performance of
the summer. The dinner passed off with some apparent cheerfulness, but
it served to show the doctor the gulf that was now fixed between him and
his former dear associates. He was on one shore, they on another. Their
faces were altered as if by the desolate influence of distance. Even
their voices sounded strange and far away. Great spaces had widened
between their minds and his. He endeavoured at first to cover those
spaces, to bridge that gulf; but he soon came to learn the vanity of
such an attempt. He could not go to them, nor would they return to him.
He could only pretend to bridge the gulf by the exercise of a suave
diplomacy, and by carefully banishing from his manner every trace of that
dispraising elderliness which seems to the young the essence of prudery
arising, like an appalling Phoenix, from the ashes of past imprudence.
In this way he drew a little nearer to Julian, who obviously feared at
first to suffer condemnation at his hands, but, finding only geniality,
lost his uneasiness and suffered himself to become more natural.
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