He entered the surgery.  There he had been making some experiments with peroxide of manganese, a solution of which stood in a bottle on the table.  A ray of brilliant sunlight was upon it, casting its shadow on a piece of white paper, a glorious red.  It caught his eyes.  He could never tell what it had to do with the current of his thoughts, but neither could he afterward get rid of the feeling that it had had some influence upon it.  For as he looked at it, scarcely knowing he did, and thinking still how hard the minister had been upon him, suddenly he found himself in the minister’s place, and before him Juliet making her sad confession:  how had he met that confession?  The whole scene returned, and for the first time struck him right on the heart, and then first he began to be in reality humbled in his own eyes.  What if, after all, he was but a poor creature?  What if, instead of having any thing to be proud of, he was in reality one who, before any jury of men or women called to judge him, must hide his head in shame?

The thought once allowed to enter and remain long enough to be questioned, never more went far from him.  For a time he walked in the midst of a dull cloud, first of dread, then of dismay—­a cloud from which came thunders, and lightnings, and rain.  It passed, and a doubtful dawn rose dim and scared upon his consciousness, a dawn in which the sun did not appear, and on which followed a gray, solemn day.  A humbler regard of himself had taken the place of confidence and satisfaction.  An undefined hunger, far from understood by himself, but having vaguely for its object clearance and atonement and personal purity even, had begun to grow, and move within him.  The thought stung him with keen self-contempt, yet think he must and did, that a woman might be spotted not a little, and yet be good enough for him in the eyes of retributive justice.  He saw plainly that his treatment of his wife, knowing what he did of himself, was a far worse shame than any fault of which a girl, such as Juliet was at the time, could have been guilty.  And with that, for all that he believed it utterly in vain, his longing after the love he had lost, grew and grew, ever passing over into sickening despair, and then springing afresh; he longed for Juliet as she had prayed to him—­as the only power that could make him clean; it seemed somehow as if she could even help him in his repentance for the wrong done to Amanda’s mother.  The pride of the Pharisee was gone, the dignity of the husband had vanished, and his soul longed after the love that covers a multitude of sins, as the air in which alone his spirit could breathe and live and find room.  I set it down briefly:  the change passed upon him by many degrees, with countless alternations of mood and feeling, and without the smallest conscious change of opinion.