Of late indeed his letters had
not been many, and a rumour had reached her that he was not doing
quite satisfactorily at Cambridge, but she explained it away to the
full contentment of her own heart, and went on building such castles
as her poor aerolithic skill could command, with Leopold ever and
always as the sharer of her self-expansion.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CURATE AT HOME.
If we could arrive at the feelings of a fish of the northern ocean
around which the waters suddenly rose to tropical temperature, and
swarmed with strange forms of life, uncouth and threatening, we
should have a fair symbol of the mental condition in which Thomas
Wingfold now found himself. The spiritual fluid in which his being
floated had become all at once more potent, and he was in
consequence uncomfortable. A certain intermittent stinging, as if
from the flashes of some moral electricity, had begun to pass in
various directions through the crude and chaotic mass he called
himself, and he felt strangely restless. It never occurred to
him--as how should it?--that he might have commenced undergoing the
most marvellous of all changes,--one so marvellous, indeed, that for
a man to foreknow its result or understand what he was passing
through, would be more strange than that a caterpillar should
recognise in the rainbow-winged butterfly hovering over the flower
at whose leaf he was gnawing, the perfected idea of his own
potential self--I mean the change of being born again.
Pages:
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78