He considered how far in his pessimism he was a representative of the century.  He thought how much better he would have done in another age, and how out of sympathy he was with the utilitarian dullness of the present time; how much more brilliant he would have been had he lived at any other period of the Temple’s history.  Then he stopped to study the style of the old staircase, the rough woodwork twisting up the wall so narrowly, the great banisters full of shadow lighted by the flickering lanterns.  The yellowing colonnade—­its beams and overhanging fronts were also full of suggestion, and the suggestion of old time was enforced by the sign-board of a wig-maker.

“The last of an ancient industry,” thought Mike.  “The wig is representative of the seventeenth as the silk hat is of the nineteenth century.  I wonder why I am so strongly fascinated with the seventeenth century?—­I, a peasant; atavism, I suppose; my family were not always peasants.”

Turning from the old Latin inscription he viewed the church, so evocative in its fortress form of an earlier and more romantic century.  The clocks were striking one, two hours would bring the dawn close again upon the verge of the world.  Mike trembled and thought how he might escape.  The beauty of the cone of the church was outlined upon the sky, and he dreamed, as he walked round the shadow-filled porch, full of figures in prayer and figures holding scrolls, of the white-robed knights, their red crosses, their long swords, and their banner called Beauseant.  He dreamed himself Grand Master of the Order; saw himself in chain armour charging the Saracen.  The story of the terrible idol with the golden eyes, the secret rites, the knight led from the penitential cell and buried at daybreak, the execution of the Grand Master at the stake, turned in his head fitfully; cloud-shapes that passed, floating, changing incessantly, suddenly disappearing, leaving him again Mike Fletcher, a strained, agonized soul of our time, haunted and hunted by an idea, overpowered by an idea as a wolf by a hound.

His life had been from the first a series of attempts to escape from the idea.  His loves, his poetry, his restlessness were all derivative from this one idea.  Among those whose brain plays a part in their existence there is a life idea, and this idea governs them and leads them to a certain and predestined end; and all struggles with it are delusions.  A life idea in the higher classes of mind, a life instinct in the lower.  It were almost idle to differentiate between them, both may be included under the generic title of the soul, and the drama involved in such conflict is always of the highest interest, for if we do not read the story of our own soul, we read in each the story of a soul that might have been ours, and that passed very near to us; and who reading of Mike’s torment is fortunate enough to say, “I know nothing of what is written there.”