shion of a novice: he raised it (or reduced it) to
abstinence. He was like an unclean man who, having washed himself clean,
remains in the water for the love of it. He wished to be religiously,
superstitiously pure. This was easy, as we have said, so long as his
goddess smiled, even though it were as a goddess indeed,--as a creature
unattainable. But when she frowned, and the heavens grew dark, Richard's
sole dependence was in his own will,--as flimsy a trust for an upward
scramble, one would have premised, as a tuft of grass on the face of a
perpendicular cliff. Flimsy as it looked, however, it served him. It
started and crumbled, but it held, if only by a single fibre. When
Richard had cantered fifty yards away from Gertrude's gate in a fit of
stupid rage, he suddenly pulled up his horse and gulped down his
passion, and swore an oath, that, suffer what torments of feeling he
might, he would not at least break the continuity of his gross physical
soberness. It was enough to be drunk in mind; he would not be drunk in
body. A singular, almost ridiculous feeling of antagonism to Gertrude
lent force to this resolution. "No, madam," he cried within himself, "I
shall _not_ fall back. Do your best! I shall keep straight." We often
outweather great offences and afflictions through a certain healthy
instinct of egotism. Richard went to bed that night as grim and sober as
a Trappist monk; and his foremost impulse the next day was to plunge
headlong into some physical labor which should not allow him a moment's
interval of idleness. He found no labor to his taste; but he spent the
day so actively, in the mechanical annihilation of the successive hours,
that Gertrude's image found no chance squarely to face him. He was
engaged in the work of self-preservation,--the most serious and
absorbing work possible to man. Compared to the results here at stake,
his passion for Gertrude seemed but a fiction. It is perhaps difficult
to give a more lively impression of the vigor of this passion, of its
maturity and its strength, than by simply stating that it discreetly
held itself in abeyance until Richard had set at rest his doubts of that
which lies nearer than all else to the heart of man,--his doubts of the
strength of his will. He answered these doubts by subjecting his
resolution to a course of such cruel temptations as were likely either
to shiver it to a myriad of pieces, or to season it perfectly to all the
possible requirements of lif