“And so we were, Sir Willoughby, and we acknowledge it.  We never could have guessed that!”

Thus the phantom couple in the future delivered themselves, as well they might at the revelation.  He could run far ahead.

Ay, but to combat these dolts, facts had to be encountered, deeds done, in groaning earnest.  These representatives of the pig-sconces of the population judged by circumstances:  airy shows and seems had no effect on them.  Dexterity of fence was thrown away.

A flying peep at the remorseless might of dulness in compelling us to a concrete performance counter to our inclinations, if we would deceive its terrible instinct, gave Willoughby for a moment the survey of a sage.  His intensity of personal feeling struck so vivid an illumination of mankind at intervals that he would have been individually wise, had he not been moved by the source of his accurate perceptions to a personal feeling of opposition to his own sagacity.  He loathed and he despised the vision, so his mind had no benefit of it, though he himself was whipped along.  He chose rather (and the choice is open to us all) to be flattered by the distinction it revealed between himself and mankind.

But if he was not as others were, why was he discomfited, solicitous, miserable?  To think that it should be so, ran dead against his conqueror’s theories wherein he had been trained, which, so long as he gained success awarded success to native merit, grandeur to the grand in soul, as light kindles light:  nature presents the example.  His early training, his bright beginning of life, had taught him to look to earth’s principal fruits as his natural portion, and it was owing to a girl that he stood a mark for tongues, naked, wincing at the possible malignity of a pair of harridans.  Why not whistle the girl away?

Why, then he would be free to enjoy, careless, younger than his youth in the rebound to happiness!

And then would his nostrils begin to lift and sniff at the creeping up of a thick pestiferous vapour.  Then in that volume of stench would he discern the sullen yellow eye of malice.  A malarious earth would hunt him all over it.  The breath of the world, the world’s view of him, was partly his vital breath, his view of himself.  The ancestry of the tortured man had bequeathed him this condition of high civilization among their other bequests.  Your withered contracted Egoists of the hut and the grot reck not of public opinion; they crave but for liberty and leisure to scratch themselves and soothe an excessive scratch.  Willoughby was expansive, a blooming one, born to look down upon a tributary world, and to exult in being looked to.  Do we wonder at his consternation in the prospect of that world’s blowing foul on him?  Princes have their obligations to teach them they are mortal, and the brilliant heir of a tributary world is equally enchained by the homage it brings him;—­more, inasmuch as it is immaterial, elusive, not gathered by the tax, and he cannot capitally punish the treasonable recusants.  Still must he be brilliant; he must court his people.  He must ever, both in his reputation and his person, aching though he be, show them a face and a leg.