purest moment of his
faultful life, as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it
was glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the
soldier and servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded
as at its best a frailty, and at its worst damnation. What Sue
had said in warmth was really the cold truth. When to defend
his affection tooth and nail, to persist with headlong force in
impassioned attentions to her, was all he thought of, he was
condemned _ipso facto_ as a professor of the accepted school of
morals. He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as he had been by
social position, to fill the part of a propounder of accredited
dogma.

Strange that his first aspiration--towards academical
proficiency--had been checked by a woman, and that his second
aspiration--towards apostleship--had also been checked by a woman.
"Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the
artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are
turned into devilish domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back
those who want to progress?"

It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble,
to his struggling fellow-creatures, without any thought of personal
gain. Yet with a wife living away from him with another husband, and
himself in love erratically, the loved one's revolt against her state
being possibly on his account, he had sunk to be barely respectable
according to regulation views.

It was not for him to consider further: he had only to confront the
obvious, which was that he had made himself quite an impostor as a
law-abiding religious teacher.

At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow hole,
to which he brought out all the theological and ethical works that
he possessed, and had stored here. He knew that, in this country of
true believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher price
than waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own
way, even if he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of
thus destroying them. Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with,
he cut the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and with a
three-pronged fork shook them over the flames. They kindled, and
lighted up the back of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till
they were more or less consumed.

Though he was almost a stranger here now, passing cottagers talked to
him over the garden hedge.

"Burn