He was satisfied, profoundly, yet
dreamingly, satisfied by an achievement long proposed, long waited for,
the door upon which had opened to-day by the merest accident--if anything
can justly be called accident, which he inclined to believe it could not.
He had appointed, it should be added, a limit in respect of that
achievement, which he forbade himself to pass; and it was his habit very
rigidly to obey his own orders, however little disposed he might be to
obey those of other people. He had received, as he owned, more than he
could reasonably have expected, good measure pressed down and running
over. The limit was now reached. He should practise restraint--leave the
whole, affair where it stood. But the effect of this darkness, and of
drifting, drifting, over the black water in the fine soundless rain, with
its illusion of permanence, and of the extinction of to-morrow--and the
retributions and adjustments in which to-morrow is so frequently and
inconveniently fertile--enervated him, rendering him a comparatively easy
prey to impulse, should impulse chance to be stirred by some adventitious
circumstance.
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