Victor’s novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight.  Not many of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that index:  nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure of value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides.  The passing by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to sit beneath her green forehead-shade—­Venetian-blind of a henbane-visage!—­had precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract verity:  and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world to the practical mind.  But he made no advance.  He stopped in a fever of sensibility, to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a source that was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.

In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school of its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums done on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the creditor on the defaulter.  Debtors are always paying like those who are guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth, they have made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in soul; and the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete burden is undischarged.  You know the Liar; you must have seen him diminishing, until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to humanity’s preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of things, he must from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive nimbleness, up to the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it again.  There is a repentance that does reconstitute!  It may help to the traceing to springs of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out of the wood.

Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every debt with a scrupulous exactitude:  money, of course; and prompt apologies for a short brush of his temper.  Nay, he had such a conscience for the smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge, softened his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once.  Although this man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature which drives to unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen at its beating after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for the reverse of lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship.  So social a man could not otherwise incline.  But when it came to the examination of accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of physical revulsion, loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out of Court.  To men, it was impossible for him to speak the torments of those days of the monstrous alliance.  The heavens were cognizant.  He pleaded his case in their accustomed hearing:—­a