everybody
save his old friend and Renee; and she certainly would have refreshed
his heart for a day. In writing, however, he had an ominous vision of
the morrow to the day; and, both for her sake and his own, he was not
unrejoiced to hear that she was engaged day and night in nursing her
husband. Pursuing his vision of the morrow of an unreproachful day with
Renee, the madness of taking her to himself, should she surrender at
last to a third persuasion, struck him sharply, now that he and his
uncle were foot to foot in downright conflict, and money was the
question. He had not much remaining of his inheritance--about fifteen
hundred pounds. He would have to vacate Holdesbury and his uncle's
town-house in a month. Let his passion be never so desperate, for a
beggared man to think of running away with a wife, or of marrying one,
the folly is as big as the worldly offence: no justification is to be
imagined. Nay, and there is no justification for the breach of a moral
law. Beauchamp owned it, and felt that Renee's resistance to him in
Normandy placed her above him. He remembered a saying of his moralist:
'We who interpret things heavenly by things earthly must not hope to
juggle with them for our pleasures, and can look to no absolution of
evil acts.' The school was a hard one. It denied him holidays; it cut
him off from dreams. It ran him in heavy harness on a rough highroad,
allowing no turnings to right or left, no wayside croppings; with the
simple permission to him that he should daily get thoroughly tired. And
what was it Jenny Denham had said on the election day? 'Does incessant
battling keep the intellect clear?'

His mind was clear enough to put the case, that either he beheld a
tremendous magnification of things, or else that other men did not
attach common importance to them; and he decided that the latter was the
fact.

An incessant struggle of one man with the world, which position usually
ranks his relatives against him, does not conduce to soundness of
judgement. He may nevertheless be right in considering that he is right
in the main. The world in motion is not so wise that it can pretend to
silence the outcry of an ordinarily generous heart even--the very infant
of antagonism to its methods and establishments. It is not so difficult
to be right against the world when the heart is really active; but the
world is our book of humanity, and before insisting that his handwriting
shall occupy the next blank pa