eBooks Base 2000

Though
little enough--too little, so said some of his critics--hampered by
fear in any department, he consciously dreaded the smallest
modification of that relation. Among the many dissatisfactions and
bitternesses of life, it shone forth with a steady light of purity and
sweetness, as a thing unspoiled, unbreathed on, even, by what is
ignoble or base. And not the surface of it alone was thus free from all
breath of defilement. It showed clear right through, as some gem of the
purest water. To keep it thus inviolate, he had made sacrifices in the
past neither easy nor inconsiderable to a man of his temperament and
ambitions. Hence that its perfection should be now endangered was to
him the more exquisitely hateful.
Upon the altar of that hatred, promptly without scruple he sacrificed
the wretched Theresa. Most of us are so constituted that, at a certain
pass, pleasure--of a sort--is to be derived from witnessing the anguish
of a fellow creature. In all save the grossly degenerate that pleasure,
however, is short-lived.


Pages:
243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267