rawn
outside himself and the affairs of Cloom, that sudden curious twist of
vision which means glamour might occur for Ishmael as he looked at
Phoebe. If there were no rich enough materials at hand to make a
fuller life for the boy, then, thought the Parson, with logic, it must
be brought to him. The difficulty was Ishmael himself.

He had a curious quality derived of some inherited instinct of fear--a
quality that made him distrust change. It had been that which had held
him back on the day at St. Renny when he had dallied with the notion of
running away to sea; it had been that which had made him loth to leave
school at the end in spite of his excitement over returning to a Cloom
legally his; and it was that now which enabled him to be hypnotised by
his own furrows drawing out in front of him. He clung to what happiness
he knew in a way rare in one so young, and he was quite aware how much
of it he found even in uncongenial company. What might lie beyond it he
distrusted.

Not for nothing had Annie lived through the stress she had before his
birth, and from her circumstances, though not her nature, he drew that
queer mingling of content and dread. But from the old Squire, little as
he resembled him in all else, came that impersonality in what are
usually personal relationships, against which even the Parson beat in
vain. Through all his passionate sinning James Ruan had held himself
aloof from the sharer in his sins. What for him had been the thing by
which he lived no one ever knew; his sardonic laughter barred all
ingress to his mind.

With Ishmael, as the Parson was beginning to see, places had so far
stood for more than people. St. Renny, the manner and atmosphere of it,
had meant more than Killigrew, the Vicarage than the Parson, Cloom than
his brothers and sister and the friends he made there. It was towards
this very detachment that the Parson's upbringing of Ishmael had tended,
and yet he now felt the need of more. For some appetite for more life
was bound to stir and break into being one day, and Boase was
passionately desirous that it should make for happiness and good. Thus
Boase thought of it all, but, after the fashion of the race of which
Ishmael also was one, he showed no sign of his meditations.

With the approach of the boy's twenty-first birthday the Parson saw
light. Though Ishmael had come of age, as far as the property went,
three years earlier, still the occasion was not without import, and