of Mrs. Wallace gained flesh and blood, seeming so real
that he almost stretched out his arms to seize her.... His footfall on
the brown needles was noiseless, and the tread was soft and easy; the
odours filled him like an Eastern drug with drowsy intoxication.

But all that now was gone. When, unbidden, the well-known laugh rang
again in his ears, or he felt on his hands the touch of the slender
fingers, James turned away with a gesture of distaste. Now Mrs. Wallace
brought him only bitterness, and he tortured himself insanely trying to
forget her.... With tenfold force the sensation returned which had so
terribly oppressed him before his illness; he felt that Nature had
become intolerably monotonous; the circumscribed, prim country was
horrible. On every inch of it the hand of man was apparent. It was a
prison, and his hands and feet were chained with heavy iron.... The
dark, immovable clouds were piled upon one another in giant masses--so
distinct and sharply cut, so rounded, that one almost saw the impressure
of the fingers of some Titanic sculptor; and they hung low down,
overwhelming, so that James could scarcely breathe. The sombre elms were
too well-ordered, the meadows too carefully tended. All round, the hills
were dark and drear; and that very fertility, that fat Kentish
luxuriance, added to the oppression. It was a task impossible to escape
from that iron circle. All power of flight abandoned him. Oh! he loathed
it!

The past centuries of people, living in a certain way, with certain
standards, influenced by certain emotions, were too strong for him.
James was like a foolish bird--a bird born in a cage, without power to
attain its freedom. His lust for a free life was futile; he acknowledged
with cruel self-contempt that he was weaker than a woman--ineffectual.
He could not lead the life of his little circle, purposeless and untrue;
and yet he had not power to lead a life of his own. Uncertain,
vacillating, torn between the old and the new, his reason led him; his
conscience drew him back. But the ties of his birth and ancestry were
too strong; he had not the energy even of the poor tramp, who carries
with him his whole fortune, and leaves in the lap of the gods the
uncertain future. James envied with all his heart the beggar boy,
wandering homeless and penniless, but free. He, at least, had not these
inhuman fetters which it was death to suffer and death to cast off; he,
indeed, could make the world his s