her glad that Moses had
gone to bed dissatisfied, and rather glad that he did not know what she
might have told him--quite resolved that he should not know at present.
Was he to know that she liked nobody so much as him? Not he, unless he
loved her more than all the world, and said so first. Mara was resolved
upon that. He might go where he liked--flirt with whom he liked--come
back as late as he pleased; never would she, by word or look, give him
reason to think she cared.

CHAPTER XXIV

DESIRES AND DREAMS

Moses passed rather a restless and uneasy night on his return to the
home-roof which had sheltered his childhood. All his life past, and all
his life expected, seemed to boil and seethe and ferment in his
thoughts, and to go round and round in never-ceasing circles before him.

Moses was _par excellence_ proud, ambitious, and willful. These words,
generally supposed to describe positive vices of the mind, in fact are
only the overaction of certain very valuable portions of our nature,
since one can conceive all three to raise a man immensely in the scale
of moral being, simply by being applied to right objects. He who is too
proud even to admit a mean thought--who is ambitious only of ideal
excellence--who has an inflexible will only in the pursuit of truth and
righteousness--may be a saint and a hero.

But Moses was neither a saint nor a hero, but an undeveloped chaotic
young man, whose pride made him sensitive and restless; whose ambition
was fixed on wealth and worldly success; whose willfulness was for the
most part a blind determination to compass his own points, with the
leave of Providence or without. There was no God in his estimate of
life--and a sort of secret unsuspected determination at the bottom of
his heart that there should be none. He feared religion, from a
suspicion which he entertained that it might hamper some of his future
schemes. He did not wish to put himself under its rules, lest he might
find them in some future time inconveniently strict.

With such determinations and feelings, the Bible--necessarily an
excessively uninteresting book to him--he never read, and satisfied
himself with determining in a general way that it was not worth reading,
and, as was the custom with many young men in America at that period,
announced himself as a skeptic, and seemed to value himself not a little
on the distinction. Pride in skepticism is a peculiar distinction of
young men. It takes year