t to note is that his sense of reality had always remained in a
rudimentary state; it was, as it were, diffused over the world and
mankind. For instance, his belief in the misery and degradation of
earthly life, and the natural bestiality of man, was incurable; but of
this or that individual he had no opinion; he was to John Norton a blank
sheet of paper, to which he could not affix even a title. His childhood
had been one of bitter tumult and passionate sorrow; the different and
dissident ideals growing up in his heart and striving for the mastery,
had torn and tortured him, and he had long lain as upon a mental rack.
Ignorance of the material laws of existence had extended even into his
sixteenth year, and when, bit by bit, the veil fell, and he understood,
he was filled with loathing of life and mad desire to wash himself
free of its stain; and it was this very hatred of natural flesh that
precipitated a perilous worship of the deified flesh of the God. But
mysticity saved him from plain paganism, and the art of the Gothic
cathedral grew dear to him. It was nearer akin to him, and he assuaged
his wounded soul in the ecstacies of incense and the great charms of
Gregorian chant.

But fear now for the first time took possession of him, and he
realised--if not in all its truth, at least in part--that his love of
God had only taken the form of a gratification of the senses, a
sensuality higher but as intense as those which he so much reproved.
Fear smouldered in his very entrails, and doubt fumed and went out like
steam--long lines and falling shadows and slowly dispersing clouds. His
life had been but a sin, an abomination, and the fairest places darkened
as the examination of conscience proceeded. His thought whirled in
dreadful night, soul-torturing contradictions came suddenly under his
eyes, like images in a night-mare; and in horror and despair, as a woman
rising from a bed of small-pox drops the mirror after the first glance,
and shrinks from destroying the fair remembrance of her face by pursuing
the traces of the disease through every feature, he hid his face in his
hands and called for forgiveness--for escape from the endless record of
his conscience. With staring eyes and contracted brows he saw the flames
which await him who blasphemes. To the verge of those flames he had
drifted. If God in His infinite mercy had not withheld him?... He
pictured himself lost in fires and furies. Then looking up he saw the
face