ned
it, they would think me mad. And yet I often fancied that thought moved
me in the direction of a sanity more perfect, more desirable than my
sanity of self-indulgence. Sometimes even I said to myself that I would
reorganise my life, that I would be different from what I had been. And
then, again, I laughed at my folly of the imagination, and cursed that
clairvoyant of Bond Street, who made a living by trading upon the latent
imbecility of human nature. Yet, the desire of change, of
soul-transformation, came and lingered, and the vision of the monk's
worn young face was often with me. And whenever, in my waking dreams, I
looked upon it, I felt that a time might come when I could pray and weep
for the wild catalogue of my many sins.

* * * * *

"Bernard, at last the day came when I left England. I had long wished to
travel. I had grown tired of the hum of literary cliques, and the jargon
of that deadly parasite called 'modernity.' Praise fainted, and lay like
a corpse before my mind. I was sick of gaiety. It seemed to me that
London was stifling my powers, narrowing my outlook, barring out real
life from me with its moods and its fashions, and its idols of the hour,
and its heroes of a day, who are the traitors of the day's night.

"So I went away.

"And now I come to the part of my story that you may find it hard to
believe. Yet it is true.

"One day, in my wanderings, I came to a monastery. I remember the day
well. It was an afternoon of early winter, and I was _en route_ to a
warm climate. But to gain my climate, and snatch a vivid contrast such
as I love, I toiled over a gaunt and dreary pass, presided over by
heavy, beetling-browed mountains. I rode upon a mule, attended only by
my manservant and by a taciturn guide who led a baggage-mule. Slowly we
wound, by thin paths, among the desolate crags, which sprang to sight in
crowds at each turn of the way, pressing upon us, like dead faces of
Nature, the corpses of things we call inanimate, but which had surely
once lived. For the earth is alive, and gives life. But these mountains
were now utterly dead. These grey, petrified countenances of the hills
subdued my soul. The pattering shuffle of the mules woke an occasional
echo, and even an echo I hated. For the environing silence was immense,
and I wished to steep myself in it. As we still ascended, in the waste
winter afternoon, towards the hour of twilight, snow--the first snow of