n the passing of centuries. It cared nothing for the passion
of a single storm.

And then came reaction, doubt. After all, humanity was a puny production
of the Ages. Men and women were like the struggling animalculae that her
father had so often shewn the boys, in a drop of magnified ditch-water;
yet not quite like those microscopic insects, for the stupendous
processes of life had at last created a widening consciousness, a mind
which could perceive the bewildering vastness of Nature and its own
smallness, which could, in some measure, get outside its own particular
ditch, and the strife and struggle of it, groping upwards for larger
realities--

"Over us stars and under us graves."

To go down next morning to breakfast; to meet the usual homely events,
was bewildering after such a night. Which was dream: this or that? So
solid and convincing seemed, at times, the interests and objects of
every day, that Hadria would veer round to a sudden conviction that
these things, or what they symbolized, were indeed the solid facts of
human life, and that all other impressions arose from the disorderly
working of overcharged brain-cells. It was a little ailment of youth
and would pass off. Had it been possible to describe to her father the
impressions made upon her by the world and Nature, as they had presented
themselves to her imagination from her childhood, he would have
prescribed change of air and gymnastics. Perhaps that was the really
rational view of the matter. But what if these hygienic measures cured
her of the haunting consciousness of mystery and vastness; what if she
became convinced of the essential importance of the Gordon pedigree, or
of the amount of social consideration due to the family who had taken
Clarenoc? Would that alter the bewildering truths of which she would
have ceased to think?

No; it would only mean that the animalcule had returned to the
occupations of its ditch, while the worlds and the peoples went spinning
to their destiny.

"Do the duty that lies nearest thee," counselled everybody: people of
all kinds, books of all kinds. "Cheap, well-sounding advice," thought
Hadria, "sure of popularity! Continue to wriggle industriously, O
animalcule, in that particular ditch wherein it has pleased heaven to
place thee; seek not the flowing stream and the salt ocean; and if, some
clear night, a star finds room to mirror itself in thy little stagnant
world, shining through the fat weeds an