lf in a most peculiar situation. He had hated the
severe discipline of his youth, and had finally rebelled against it and
renounced its results as far as they went materially. This he had
thought to mean his emancipation. But when the hour to assert his
freedom had come, he found that the long years of rigid training had
bound his volition with iron bands. He was wrapped in a mantle of habit
which he was ashamed to display and yet could not shake off. The
pendulum never stops its swing in the middle of the arc. So he would
have gone to the other extreme and revelled in the pleasures whose very
breath had been forbidden to his youth; but he found his sensibilities
revolting from everything that did not accord with the old Puritan code
by which they had been trained. He knew himself to be full of
capabilities for evil, but it seemed as if some power greater than his
held him back. It was Frederick Brent who looked on sin abstractly, but
its presence in the concrete was seen through the eyes of Mrs. Hester
Hodges. It could hardly be called the decree of conscience, because so
instantaneous was the rejection of evil that there was really no time
for reference to the internal monitor. The very restriction which he had
complained of he was now putting upon himself. The very yoke whose
burden he hated he was placing about his own neck. He had run away from
the sound of "right" and "duty," but had not escaped their power. He
felt galled, humiliated, and angry with himself, because he had long
seen the futility of blind indignation against the unseen force which
impelled him forward in a hated path.

One thing that distressed him was a haunting fear of the sights which
Perkins would show him on the morrow's night. He had seen enough for
himself to conjecture of what nature they would be. He did not want to
see more, and yet how could he avoid it? He might plead illness, but
that would be a lie; and then there would be other nights to follow, so
it would only be a postponement of what must ultimately take place or
be boldly rejected. Once he decided to explain his feelings on the
subject, but in his mind's eye he saw the half-pitying sneer on the face
of the worldly young cityite, and he quailed before it.

Why not go? Could what he saw hurt him? Was he so great a coward that he
dared not come into the way of temptation? We do not know the strength
of a shield until it has been tried in battle. Metal does not ring true
or false