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The fortnight of Athalia's absence wore greatly upon her husband. Apprehension lurked in the back of his mind. In the mill, or out on the farm, or when he sat down among his shabby, old, calf-skin books, he was assailed by the memory of all her various fancies during their married life. Some of them were no more remarkable or unexpected than this interest in Shakerism.
Often he spent the mornings by the side of the canal in the shade of the poplars, reading a few lines and then dreaming for half an hour. Sometimes he hired a rickety bicycle and rode along the dusty road that led to the forest, and then lay down in a clearing. His head was full of romantic fancies.
"A vague opinion prevails among men that society is moving onward to its appointed state by what is variously termed the 'force of circumstances, 'the instinct of the race, 'the general law of progress, 'Divine guidance. These loose opinions are speculative fancies adopted in the absence of real knowledge; whereas the fact is, that society can only reach its true state by the conscious and calculated efforts of human reason under the direction of an exact social science.
It was the romance of the walks we played in, the swing we sat in, the gardens we tended every day. To play at being the little Russians superseded all other games. To 'pretend' that the little Russians were with us, and to give dolls' entertainments in their honour, supplanted all former fancies.
But, dear Fanny, you must allow that you were not so absolutely unprepared to have the question asked as your cousin fancies. It is not possible but that you must have had some thoughts on the subject, some surmises as to what might be. You must have seen that he was trying to please you by every attention in his power. Was not he devoted to you at the ball? And then before the ball, the necklace!
Following his first amazement at beholding her had come a fantastic explanation of her presence for a moment or two it had seemed as if the fates had taken heed of his yearnings and had sent her to him out of the dusk wild fancies, like these, bother men who are much alone. Of course he had not dreamed that she was the mistress of Las Palmas.
Her head ached, and forms dreary, even in their terror, kept rising before her in miserable and aimless dreams; senseless words went on repeating themselves ill her very brain was sick of them; she was destitute, afflicted, tormented; now the centre for the convergence of innumerable atoms, now driven along in an uproar of hideous globes; faces grinned and mocked at her; her mind ever strove to recover itself, and was ever borne away in the rush of invading fancies; but through it all was the nameless unrest, not an aching, nor a burning, nor a stinging, but a bodily grief, dark, drear, and nameless.
Say: Have mercy on yourselves and on your fellowmen, and suffer not the Cause of God—a Cause which is immeasurably exalted above the inmost essence of sanctity—to be sullied with the stain of your idle fancies, your unseemly and corrupt imaginations.
Why do you bother about him? and what made you talk all that stuff this afternoon? Because you think he is in a queer way, and that if he goes on giving himself up to his fancies he will become mad yes, mad because Oh! what's the use of making excuses because you are fond of him, and always have been fond of him from a child, and can't help it. What a fate!
This is the notion which Voltaire himself three years afterwards illustrated in the witty fancies of Micromégas. The little animalcule in the square cap, who makes the giant laugh in a Homeric manner by its inflated account of itself as the final cause of the universe, is the type of the philosophy on which Catholicism is based.
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