"We're most of us too full of effort," said the Parson abruptly; "we think too much of trying to be good, of whether what we are going to do is right or wrong. Whereas if we only got our minds into the right attitude the rest would follow naturally and be worth all the striving. If we could only be more flower-like—let ourselves grow and blossom. Look at that field, the only thing moving; d'you see it? Well, it's rippling like that all by itself because it's the only thing able to answer to the little breath that's abroad. If you get yourself sound and right and don't worry about yourself, then you respond to the breath of the Spirit, like that grass. For the wind bloweth where it listeth…."
He fell into a silence, and Ishmael, stirred out of the crust of depression which had held him so many days, felt all his heart and high hopes, his eagerness for life and its possibilities, stirring within him again. He drew a deep breath and stretched widely, sloughing off mental sloth in the physical act as young things can. He felt more alive because more conscious of himself and his surroundings than ever before, eager and ready to take up the remainder of his time at St. Renny. He stirred a little by the Parson's side.
Boase brought his thought to an ending with the rest of the quotation:
"So is everyone that is born of the Spirit…."
BOOK II
GROWTH
CHAPTER I
A FAMILY ALBUM
Vassilissa Beggoe stooped to take a final look at herself in the small mirror, for she was so tall that, in her flowery bonnet that swooped upwards from her piled chignon, she nearly touched the sloping roof of her bedroom. She stooped and gave a glow—half smile, half a quickening of light, over her whole face—at what she saw in the cloudy glass, which could not materially dim her white and gold splendour. A slight thickness of modelling here and there, notably in the short nose and too-rounded chin, blurred the fineness of her beauty and might make for hardness later on, but now, at twenty-one, Vassie's wonderful skin and her splendid assurance were too dazzling for criticism to look at her and live. She gave a pat, more approbation than correction, to a rose on the bonnet, smoothed the lapels of her Alexandra jacket—so-called after the newly-made Princess of Wales—and pulled up her gloves under its pegtop sleeves. Then she turned with a swoop and a swish of her wide blue taffeta skirts.
"There!" she exclaimed in the studiously clear notes she had not been able to free from a slight metallic quality; "that's not so bad a sight to go and meet a little brother, I believe?"
The younger, softer, slighter bit of femininity on the bed gave a gentle little sound that meant admiration, and clasped a pair of dimpled, not very clean, little hands together.