er
brother had been so startling that I believe I must have been stirred by
it to some kind of awakening even had I not fallen in love with Anne. I
had been given so perfect an opportunity to enter into their feelings and
views by my strange and intimate association with their antagonism to all
that was typified by the rule of the Hall. By reason of my sympathy with
the Banks I had been able to realise the virtue of struggle and the evils
of the almost unlimited and quite indiscriminating power wielded by such
landowners as old Jervaise. And in condemning him and his family, I must
condemn myself also. We were all of us so smug and self-satisfied. We had
blindly believed that it was our birthright to reap where we had not sown.

Nevertheless, though the truth was so plain to me in that moment, I
accepted it grudgingly. The voice of my artificial self clamoured for a
hearing. But these things were so, had always been so, it protested; what
could I do to change them? And probably, if it had not been for the force
of the thrilling passion of reverence and admiration for Anne that had
suddenly illuminated my whole being, the cultivated inertia of a life-time
would finally have conquered me. I should have thrust the problem away
from me and returned with a sensual satisfaction to the familiar way of
life I understood. I should have consoled myself with the reflection that
mine was not the temperament to face the ardours and disappointments of
struggle.

As it was, I longed so furiously to justify myself before Anne; to win, by
some heroic measure, her good opinion, that the incentive of my passion
bore me triumphantly over the first re-actions of inertia and protest. I
could never return to my old complacency, although the mechanical,
accustomed habit of my thought had for me, as yet, no suggestion other
than some change in the ideal and manner of my writing. I thought vaguely
of attempting some didactic drama to illustrate the tragic contrast
between gentle and simple that had been so glaringly illuminated for me by
recent experience. Yet, even as I played with that idea, I recognised it
as a device of my old self to allay my discontent. I caught myself
speculating on the promise of the play's success, on the hope of winning
new laurels as an earnest student of sociology. I thrust that temptation
from me with a sneer at my own inherent hypocrisy.

"But what else can you do?" argued my old self and my only reply was to
blu