feelings very vividly and a rather slow way of moving, looked upon him as
strong-minded, deliberate, and cool. They thought him reasonable and
praised his common sense; but he knew that his placid expression was no
more than a mask, assumed unconsciously, which acted like the protective
colouring of butterflies; and himself was astonished at the weakness of
his will. It seemed to him that he was swayed by every light emotion, as
though he were a leaf in the wind, and when passion seized him he was
powerless. He had no self-control. He merely seemed to possess it because
he was indifferent to many of the things which moved other people.

He considered with some irony the philosophy which he had developed for
himself, for it had not been of much use to him in the conjuncture he had
passed through; and he wondered whether thought really helped a man in any
of the critical affairs of life: it seemed to him rather that he was
swayed by some power alien to and yet within himself, which urged him like
that great wind of Hell which drove Paolo and Francesca ceaselessly on. He
thought of what he was going to do and, when the time came to act, he was
powerless in the grasp of instincts, emotions, he knew not what. He acted
as though he were a machine driven by the two forces of his environment
and his personality; his reason was someone looking on, observing the
facts but powerless to interfere: it was like those gods of Epicurus, who
saw the doings of men from their empyrean heights and had no might to
alter one smallest particle of what occurred.

LXXIX

Philip went up to London a couple of days before the session began in
order to find himself rooms. He hunted about the streets that led out of
the Westminster Bridge Road, but their dinginess was distasteful to him;
and at last he found one in Kennington which had a quiet and old-world
air. It reminded one a little of the London which Thackeray knew on that
side of the river, and in the Kennington Road, through which the great
barouche of the Newcomes must have passed as it drove the family to the
West of London, the plane-trees were bursting into leaf. The houses in the
street which Philip fixed upon were two-storied, and in most of the
windows was a notice to state that lodgings were to let. He knocked at one
which announced that the lodgings were unfurnished, and was shown by an
austere, silent woman four very small rooms, in one of which there was a
kitchen range a