, even to the drowsy-eyed, that he was
moving in the direction whither lagging progress was bound. In the last
eighteen months he had devoured the books of the political economists,
and he had sucked in theories of social philosophy as a child sucks in
milk. That the business of the politician is not to reshape theories,
but to readjust conditions he was ready to admit, yet impelled by a
strong religious conviction, by a belief in the determining power of a
practical Christianity, he was sharing the slowly expanding dream of
his century--the dream of a poverty enriched by knowledge, of a
social regeneration that would follow an enlightened and instructed
proletariat. Ripples from the thought waves of the world had reached him
in the dusty corners of his mill at Old Church. Since no man thinketh to
himself, he could no more have escaped the mental impulsion of his
time than he could have arrested his embryonic development from the
invertebrate to the vertebrate. His mind being open, ideas had
entered, and having entered, they proceeded immediately to take active
possession. He was serving a distant Utopia of industrial democracy as
ardently as a lover serves his mistress.

As for his actual mistress, she had become not only visionary, but
enskied. Some months ago, while his wound was still fresh, he had not
suffered his thoughts to dwell on her because of the violence of the
pain. Pride as well as common sense, he had told himself during the
first weeks of his loss, demanded that he should banish her image from
his mind. Though he had never, even in his first anger, called her
"a light woman," he had come perilously near the feeling that she had
grazed the skirts of impropriety with a recklessness which no sober
minded son of Sarah Revercomb could countenance for a minute. His
very success as a miller depended upon an integrity of character which
permitted no compromise with the fundamental moralities. Youth is the
period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches
thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.
What Abel had never divined was that Molly, like himself, might
approach the angelic in one mood and fall short of the merely human in
another--that she, also, was capable of moments of sublimation and of
hours of recusancy. There were the ashes of a poet in her soul as in
his, and to contain the ashes of a poet one must have been first the
crucible for purifying flames.