e
of her quick blood, wrought him to some jealous lover's throbs, which led
him to impress his unchangeableness upon her, to bind her to that
standard.

She declined his visit: not now; 'not yet': and for that he presumed to
chide her, half-sincerely. As far as he knew he stood against 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 ordinar