r race and station,
not without significance. They would grow old insensibly;
they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason,
marry in due course -- the one a pretty girl, future mother of
healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow,
obviously a soldier; and at last, prosperous in their
dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy,
not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would
sink into the grave.

That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern
of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a
placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and
shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty
sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that
you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it
is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days,
that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great
majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values,
I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a
wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such
easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously.
I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if
I could only have change -- change and the excitement of
the unforeseen.

Chapter VIII

On reading over what I have written of the Stricklands, I am
conscious that they must seem shadowy. I have been able to
invest them with none of those characteristics which make the
persons of a book exist with a real life of their own; and,
wondering if the fault is mine, I rack my brains to remember
idiosyncrasies which might lend them vividness. I feel that
by dwelling on some trick of speech or some queer habit I
should be able to give them a significance peculiar to themselves.
As they stand they are like the figures in an old tapestry;
they do not separate themselves from the background,
and at a distance seem to lose their pattern, so that you have
little but a pleasing piece of colour. My only excuse is that
the impression they made on me was no other. There was just
that shadowiness about them which you find in people whose
lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in
it and by it only. They are like cells in the body, essential,
but, so long as they remain healthy, engulfed in
the momentous whole. The Stricklands were an average family
in