Miss Merry seemed
much more inclined to sympathise, and Howard used to intercept her
gaze bent upon him in deep concern.
One afternoon, returning from a lonely walk, he met Maud going out
of the Manor gate. She looked happy, he thought. He stopped and
made a few commonplace remarks. She looked at him rather strangely,
he felt, and seemed to be searching his face for some sign of the
old goodwill; but he hardened his heart, though he would have given
worlds to tell her what was in his mind; but he felt that any
reconstruction of friendship must be left till a later date, when
he might again be able to conciliate her sisterly regard. She
seemed to him to have passed through an awakening of some kind, and
to have bloomed both in mind and body, with her feet on the
threshold of vital experience, and the thought that it was Guthrie
who could evoke this upspringing of life within her was very bitter
to him.
He trod the valley of humiliation hour by hour, in these lonely
days, and found it a very dreary place. It was wretched to him to
feel that he had suddenly discovered his limitations. Not only
could he not have his will, could not taste the fruit of love which
had seemed to hang almost within his reach, but the old contented
life seemed to have faded and collapsed about him.
That night his aunt asked him about his book, and he said he was
not getting on well with it. She asked why, and he said that he had
been feeling that it was altogether too intellectual a conception;
that he had approached it from the side of REASON, as if people
argued themselves into faith, and had treated religion as a thesis
which could be successfully defended; whereas the vital part of it
all, he now thought, was an instinct, perhaps refined by inherited
thought, but in its practical manifestations a kind of choice,
determined by a natural liking for what was attractive, and a
dislike of what was morally ugly.
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