'If sometimes I dream that so it is, it is to her I owe it—to her whom I carry on my bosom, and whose hand did once, or so it seemed, unlock to me the gates of God. Lucy! my Lucy!
'... All my past life becomes sometimes intolerable to me. I can see nothing in it that is not tarnished and flecked with black stains of egotism, pride, hardness, moral indolence.
'And the only reparation possible, "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds," at which my fainting heart sinks.
'Sometimes I find much comfort in the saying of a lonely thinker, "Let us humbly accept from God even our own nature; not that we are called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease."
'Que vivre est difficile—Ô mon cœur fatigué!'
CHAPTER XI
By the end of December David Grieve was near breaking down.
Dr. Mildmay insisted brusquely on his going away.
'As far as I can see you will live to be an old man,' he said, 'but if you go on like this, it will be with shattered powers. You are driving yourself to death, yet at the present moment you have no natural driving force. It is all artificial, a matter of will. Do, for heaven's sake, get away from these skies and these streets, and leave all work and all social reforms behind. The first business of the citizen—prate as you like!—is to keep his nerves and his digestion in going order.'
David laughed and yielded. The advice, in fact, corresponded to an inward thirst, and had, moreover, a coincidence to back it. In one of the Manchester papers two or three mornings before he had seen the advertisement of a farm to let, which had set vibrating all his passion for and memory of the moorland. It was a farm about half a mile from Needham Farm, on one of the lower slopes of Kinder Low. It had belonged to a peasant owner, lately dead. The heirs wished to sell, but failing a purchaser were willing to let on a short lease.