nd if he could possibly hold out!

For there still came times when he believed that to turn his back for
ever, on place and people, would make him the happiest of mortals. For
a time this idea had left him in peace. Now it haunted him again.
Perhaps, because he had at last grasped the unpalatable truth that it
would never be his luck to save: if saving were the only key to
freedom, he would still be there, still chained fast, and though he
lived to be a hundred. Certain it was, he did not become a better
colonist as the years went on. He had learnt to hate the famous
climate--the dust and drought and brazen skies; the drenching rains and
bottomless mud--to rebel against the interminable hours he was doomed
to spend in his buggy. By nature he was a recluse--not an outdoor-man
at all. He was tired, too, of the general rampage, the promiscuous
connexions and slap-dash familiarity of colonial life; sick to death of
the all-absorbing struggle to grow richer than his neighbours. He
didn't give a straw for money in itself--only for what it brought him.
And what was the good of that, if he had no leisure to enjoy it? Or was
it the truth that he feared being dragged into the vortex? ... of
learning to care, he, too, whether or no his name topped
subscription-lists; whether his entertainments were the most sumptuous,
his wife the best-dressed woman in her set? Perish the thought!

He did not disquiet Mary by speaking of these things. Still less did he
try to explain to her another, more elusive side of the matter. It was
this. Did he dig into himself, he saw that his uncongenial surroundings
were not alone to blame for his restless state of mind. There was in
him a gnawing desire for change as change; a distinct fear of being
pinned for too long to the same spot; or, to put it another way, a
conviction that to live on without change meant decay. For him, at
least. Of course, it was absurd to yield to feelings of this kind; at
his age, in his position, with a wife dependent on him. And so he
fought them--even while he indulged them. For this was the year in
which, casting the question of expense to the winds, he pulled down and
rebuilt his house. It came over him one morning on waking that he could
not go on in the old one for another day, so cramped was he, so
tortured by its lath-and-plaster thinness. He had difficulty in winning
Mary over; she was against the outlay, the trouble and confusion
involved; and was only reconciled