Flint gravely promised a Life of Wordsworth, to be sent to the "Etruria" to-morrow, and then, bidding his companions adieu, he passed out into the night.
His mood, as he strolled up the avenue, was [Pg 203] far from complacent. He felt a contempt for himself, as the sport of every passing impression. It was not enough, it seemed, that he should have cut short a summer vacation, and come hurrying back to the city at Winifred Anstice's behest. He must vibrate to every whim about him. He had found, with inward disgust, that he was raising his elbow to shake hands with the Grahams, instead of holding his hand at the customary, self-respecting angle; and that he might be still further convicted of weak mindedness, he had a sense of being in some inexplicable fashion dominated by the vision of Nora Costello and her comrades. Not that he experienced any sudden drawing to the Salvation Army; he felt, to the core, its crudeness, its limitations, its social dangers. His reason assured him that its methods threatened socialism and anarchy. He could have demolished all General Booth's pet theories by an appeal to the simplest logical processes, but that it seemed absurd to apply logic to so crude a scheme. "Nevertheless," said conscience, "these people are striving, however blunderingly, to better the condition of the forlorn, the wicked, and the wretched. What are you doing about it?" He had almost framed a defence, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was under no accusations, except from his own soul, and such thoughts [Pg 204] and impulses as had arisen at sight of Nora Costello, moving in the world outside the social wall behind which he had intrenched himself.
"I suppose," he said to himself, with a shrug, "if I were living in the Massachusetts of a hundred years ago, I should be considered in a hopeful way to conversion. Now, we have learned just how far we may indulge an emotion, without allowing it to eventuate in action."
Yet the passing of Nora Costello, like the passing of Pippa in the poem, had left its light, ineffaceable touch on at least one life that night.
CHAPTER XIII
A SOLDIER
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| "'T was August, and the fierce sun overhead |
| Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green; |
| And the pale weaver, through his windows seen |
| In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited. |
| "I met a preacher there I knew, and said: |
| 'Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?' |
| 'Bravely!' he said; 'for I of late have been |
| Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.'" |