one, the folly is as big as the worldly offence:  no justification is to be imagined.  Nay, and there is no justification for the breach of a moral law.  Beauchamp owned it, and felt that Renee’s resistance to him in Normandy placed her above him.  He remembered a saying of his moralist:  ’We who interpret things heavenly by things earthly must not hope to juggle with them for our pleasures, and can look to no absolution of evil acts.’  The school was a hard one.  It denied him holidays; it cut him off from dreams.  It ran him in heavy harness on a rough highroad, allowing no turnings to right or left, no wayside croppings; with the simple permission to him that he should daily get thoroughly tired.  And what was it Jenny Denham had said on the election day?  ‘Does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?’

His mind was clear enough to put the case, that either he beheld a tremendous magnification of things, or else that other men did not attach common importance to them; and he decided that the latter was the fact.

An incessant struggle of one man with the world, which position usually ranks his relatives against him, does not conduce to soundness of judgement.  He may nevertheless be right in considering that he is right in the main.  The world in motion is not so wise that it can pretend to silence the outcry of an ordinarily generous heart even—­the very infant of antagonism to its methods and establishments.  It is not so difficult to be right against the world when the heart is really active; but the world is our book of humanity, and before insisting that his handwriting shall occupy the next blank page of it, the noble rebel is bound for the sake of his aim to ask himself how much of a giant he is, lest he fall like a blot on the page, instead of inscribing intelligible characters there.

Moreover, his relatives are present to assure him that he did not jump out of Jupiter’s head or come of the doctor.  They hang on him like an ill-conditioned prickly garment; and if he complains of the irritation they cause him, they one and all denounce his irritable skin.

Fretted by his relatives he cannot be much of a giant.

Beauchamp looked from Dr. Shrapnel in his invalid’s chair to his uncle Everard breathing robustly, and mixed his uncle’s errors with those of the world which honoured and upheld him.  His remainder of equability departed; his impatience increased.  His appetite for work at Dr. Shrapnel’s writing-desk was voracious.  He was ready for any labour, the transcribing of papers, writing from dictation, whatsoever was of service to Lord Avonley’s victim:  and he was not like the Spartan boy with the wolf at his vitals; he betrayed it in the hue his uncle Everard detested, in a visible nervousness, and indulgence in fits of scorn.  Sharp epigrams and notes of irony provoked his laughter more than fun.  He seemed to acquiesce in some of the current contemporary despair of our immoveable England, though he winced