always been recognised that some men who could do the Church good service were personally unfitted for those meek ministrations.  His place was in the hierarchy of intellect; if he were to be active at all, it must be with the brain.  In his conversation with Buckland Warricombe, last October, he had spoken not altogether insincerely.  Let him once be a member of the Church militant, and his heart would go with many a stroke against that democratic movement which desired, among other things, the Church’s abolition.  He had power of utterance.  Roused to combat by the proletarian challenge, he could make his voice ring in the ears of men, even though he used a symbolism which he would not by choice have adopted.

For it was natural that he should anticipate distinction.  Whatever his lot in life, he would not be able to rest among an inglorious brotherhood.  If he allied himself with the Church, the Church must assign him leadership, whether titular or not was of small moment.  In days to come, let people, if they would, debate his history, canvass his convictions.  His scornful pride invited any degree of publicity, when once his position was secure.

But in the meantime he was leaving aside the most powerful of all his motives, and one which demanded closest scrutiny.  Not ambition, in any ordinary sense; not desire of material luxury; no incentive recognised by unprincipled schemers first suggested his dishonour.  This edifice of subtle untruth had for its foundation a mere ideal of sexual love.  For the winning of some chosen woman, men have wrought vehemently, have ruined themselves and others, have achieved triumphs noble or degrading.  But Godwin Peak had for years contemplated the possibility of baseness at the impulse of a craving for love capable only of a social (one might say, of a political) definition.  The woman throned in his imagination was no individual, but the type of an order.  So strangely had circumstances moulded him, that he could not brood on a desire of spiritual affinities, could not, as is natural to most cultivated men, inflame himself with the ardour of soul reaching to soul; he was pre-occupied with the contemplation of qualities which characterise a class.  The sense of social distinctions was so burnt into him, that he could not be affected by any pictured charm of mind or person in a woman who had not the stamp of gentle birth and breeding.  If once he were admitted to the intimacy of such women, then, indeed, the canons of selection would have weight with him; no man more capable of disinterested choice.  Till then, the ideal which possessed him was merely such an assemblage of qualities as would excite the democrat to disdain or fury.