Project Gutenberg's The Inside of the Cup, Volume 5, by Winston Churchill

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Title: The Inside of the Cup, Volume 5

Author: Winston Churchill

Release Date: October 17, 2004 [EBook #5360]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INSIDE OF THE CUP, VOLUME 5 ***

Produced by David Widger

THE INSIDE OF THE CUP

By Winston Churchill

Volume 5.

XVII. RECONSTRUCTION
XVIII. THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
XIX. MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN

CHAPTER XVII

RECONSTRUCTION

I

Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical. He, John Hodder, a
clergyman, rector of St. John's by virtue of not having resigned, had
entered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for an
abandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!
The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there. He
had fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all in
him save the carnal had been blotted out.

More paradoxes! If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him
there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded in
any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman, Kate
Marcy. Her future, to be sure, was problematical. Here was no simple,
sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting innocence
betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness.
And she had, in spite of all, known the love which effaces self! Could
the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?

Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazement
because, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, he
was not despondent. For a month he had not permitted his mind to dwell
on the riddle; yet this morning he felt stirring within him a new energy
for which he could not account, a hope unconnected with any mental
process! He felt in touch, once more, faintly but perceptibly, with
something stable in the chaos. In bygone years he had not seen the
chaos, but the illusion of an orderly world, a continual succession of
sunrises, 'couleur de rose', from the heights above Bre