Paths of Judgement

either industrious, nor independent, nor even anxious to please those who might help his disadvantages. He was helpless, and he would not recognize the fact; w

is pursuit implied that other people's apparent attainments rested on a highly illusory basis. Austin Merric

ttle articles of incoherent scepticism-the one book, as sceptical and even more incoheren

sternly practical father, a passionately transcendental mother, she seize

o see life steadily, and to see it whole. The steadiness sh

e had little conception of risks or of formalities, and regarded all individuals as offering deeply interesting experiences. The aunt sat reading Flaubert, with a dictionary, in her bedroom, finding the duty dimly alarming, and refreshing it

age of her outlook. She was startlingly indifferent to conventional claims, seriously uninfluenced by the world's weights and measures. Austin, conscious in his

to Miss Grey, and as he was already in love with her, he did not dare to laugh at them. Indeed, Miss Grey had not much sense of humour, and did not understand subtle scorns. He was in love, glorying in the abandonment of the feeling, and very sincerely unaware that had Miss Grey not been modestly e

t, by speaking contemplatively of devoting her money to the cause of Russian freedom, and of making her own livi

ys impressed Miss Grey; she was the least arrogant of beings, and in spite of her steady seeing of life, took people exactly at their own valuation. She, too, thought Mr. Merrick

fe was to be lived with money than without it, and, a f

of hill-top land that came to Austin through his mother, and in the Greek temple, under the rather pinched cond

never seemed clearly to see it. He was loving and devoted; he thought her perfect, as he thought all his possessions; she did not know that it was her echo of his imaginary self that he prized, that she was the living surety of his own worth, never felt that the key-note of his cha

life, in spite of its pompous premisses, had, in reality, little more actual significance than the lives of any of the n

. Merrick had not, in reality, advanced beyond this first crude negation. The largeness of his doubts was the result not of deep thinking, but of a lazy lack of thought. His pessimism was caused more by the ignorant optimism he saw about him than by any thwarted spiritual demand of his own nature. He was, indeed, in the position, dubiously fortunate for him, of being twenty years behind the best thought of his time and fifty ahead of that of his neighbours, to many of whom Darwinism was still a looming, half-ludicrous monkey-monster, to be dispatched at the hands of a vigorous clergy, and naturalistic determinism an hypothesis that did not even remotely impinge upon the outskirts of their consciousness. But with all his complacencies, indolences, a

her life into the uprearing of her daughter, who had been treated with the gentleness due to a child, the Emersonian reverence due to a human soul. Felicia remembered the na?vely sententious aphorisms with which she armed her. "In this life to fail is to triumph,

ble her steadfastness. She was very fond of her father, and she thought him very foolish; she resented keenly the fact that people more foolish than he