conceive and formulate the magnificent phantoms of legality.
He smiled to think that any one should presume to become a parson
without having at least mastered analytical geometry.

The ferry had crossed and recrossed the river several times, but Gissing
had found no conclusion for these thoughts. As the boat drew toward
her slip, she passed astern of a great liner. Gissing saw the four tall
funnels loom up above the shed of the pier where she lay berthed.
What was it that made his heart so stir? The perfect rake of the
funnels--just that satisfying angle of slant--that, absurdly enough, was
the nobility of the sight. Why, then? Let's get at the heart of this, he
said. Just that little trick of the architect, useless in itself--what
was it but the touch of swagger, of bravado, of defiance--going out
into the vast, meaningless, unpitying sea with that dainty arrogance
of build; taking the trouble to mock the senseless elements, hurricane,
ice, and fog, with a 15-degree slope of masts and funnels: damn, what
was the analogy?

It was pride, it was pride! It was the same lusty impudence that he saw
in his perfect city, the city that cried out to the hearts of youth,
jutted her mocking pinnacles toward sky, her clumsy turrets verticalled
on gold! And God, the God of gales and gravity, loved His children to
dare and contradict Him, to rally Him with equations of their own.

"God, I defy you!" he cried.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried,
unresisting, with the current. They float through easy days. They live,
unquestioning, in the moment.

But Gissing was acutely conscious of Time. Though not subtle enough to
analyze the matter acutely, he had a troublesome feeling about it. He
kept checking off a series of Nows. "Now I am having my bath," he would
say to himself in the morning. "Now I am dressing. Now I am on the
way to the store. Now I am in the jewellery aisle, being polite to
customers. Now I am having lunch." After a period in which time ran by
unnoticed, he would suddenly realize a fresh Now, and feel uneasy at
the knowledge that it would shortly dissolve into another one. He tried,
vainly, to swim up-stream against the smooth impalpable fatal current.
He tried to dam up Time, to deepen the stream so that he could bathe in
it carelessly. Time, he said, is life; and life is God; time, then, is
little bits of God. Those who waste their time in vulgarity or foll