So, leaving these fancies in his head too long, he soon became accustomed to them; and accustomed too, to the Nemesis which they bring with them; of chronic moodiness and concealed rage.  Day by day he was lashing himself up into fresh fury, and yet day by day he was becoming more careful to conceal that fury.  He had many reasons:  moral cowardice, which made him shrink from the tremendous consequences of an explosion—­ equally tremendous, were he right or wrong.  Then the secret hope, perhaps the secret consciousness, that he was wrong, and was only saying to God, like the self-deceiving prophet, “I do well to be angry;” then the honest fear of going too far; of being surprised at last into some hideous and irreparable speech or deed, which he might find out too late was utterly unjust:  then at moments (for even that would cross him) the devilish notion, that, by concealment, he might lure Lucia on to give him a safe ground for attack.  All these, and more, tormented him for a wretched fortnight, during which he became, at such an expense of self-control as he had not exercised for years, courteous to Campbell, more than courteous to Lucia; hiding under a smiling face, wrath which increased with the pressure brought to bear upon it.

Campbell and Lucia, Mellot, Valencia, and Frank, utterly deceived, went on more merrily than ever, little dreaming that they walked and talked daily with a man who was fast becoming glad to flee to the pit of hell, but for the fear that “God would be there also.”  They, meanwhile, chatted on, enjoying, as human souls are allowed to do at rare and precious moments, the mere sensation of being; of which they would talk at times in a way which led them down into deep matters:  for instance,—­

“How pleasant to sit here for ever!” said Claude, one afternoon, in the inn garden at Beddgelert, “and say, not with Descartes, ’I think, therefore I exist;’ but simply, ‘I enjoy, therefore I exist.’  I almost think those Emersonians are right at times, when they crave the ’life of plants, and stones, and rain.’  Stangrave said to me once, that his ideal of perfect bliss was that of an oyster in the Indian seas, drinking the warm salt water motionless, and troubling himself about nothing, while nothing troubled itself about him.”

“Till a diver came and tore him up for the sake of his pearls?” said Valencia.

“He did not intend to contain any pearls.  A pearl, you know, is a disease of the oyster, the product of some irritation.  He wished to be the oyster pure and simple, a part of nature.”

“And to be of no use?” asked Frank.

“Of none whatsoever.  Nature had made him what he was, and all beside was her business, and not his.  I don’t deny that I laughed at him, and made him wroth by telling him that his doctrine was ’the apotheosis of loafing.’  But my heart went with him, and the jolly oyster too.  It is very beautiful after all, that careless nymph and shepherd life of the old Greeks, and that Marquesas romance of Herman Melville’s—­to enjoy the simple fact of living, like a Neapolitan lazzaroni, or a fly upon a wall.”