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It was when he made this alarming discovery that his struggles became desperate, and in his wild efforts to free himself from his self-set trap, he tore and mutilated his flesh most cruelly. The wounds and the want of air had done their work.
It seemed to her unworthy of a thinking being to act or to feel, without clearly defining the cause of every feeling and action. Youth dreams of an impossible completeness in carrying out its self-set rules of perfection, and is swayed and stunned, and often paralysed, when they are broken to pieces by rebellious human nature.
How many, many hours had he studied those ancient works! How many times had he despaired of ever learning their truths, and gone out to the roof of the museum to stand in silent thought looking out across the awful void to the steady flame of the yellow star! Then quietly he had returned to his self-set task.
All these years he had, like an old blind horse, stolidly plodded round and round in a dull self-set routine. And now, just when the spirit had come for rebellion, the mood for a harmless truancy, there had fallen with them too this hideous enigma. He sat there with the dusky silhouette of the face that was now drenched with sunlight in his mind's eye. He set off again up the stony incline.
Aleck went on up town, as it was called, and the men hung themselves a little more over the rail and growled at the boys who were following the visitor, to "be off," and to "get out of that; now," with the result that they still followed the lad and watched him, flattening their noses against the panes of the fishing-tackle shop window, and following him again when he came out to visit one or two other places of business, till all the lad's self-set commissions were executed, and he turned to retrace his steps to the harbour.
He has deliberately allowed his critical prepossessions to exclude him from all chance of greatness, but within his self-set limits he moves with a certain serene mastery, and his detail is finely accurate. Miss Mary Wilkins, who is a very much younger writer than any of the three here dealt with, reminds an English reader both of George Eliot and Miss Mitford.
This resentment, however, might have been not, indeed, neutralized, but somewhat mitigated, if the temper and spirit in which the Duumvirate discharged its self-set functions had been free from hauteur and softened by modesty.
But the next moment, with a cry of "I'll stay awake!" he was up again and at his self-set task, mind, muscles and nerves centering in his one desperate resolve. Then the dawn came peeping over the big spruces, and found him still at his grim gambols. He set forth once more down the road, slipping and stumbling, his body doubled forward.
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