For the strange Fate that had planned this astounding revelation to me, had apparently led up to it by the subtlest arrangement of properties and events.  My disgrace at the Jervaises’ had prepared me for this moment.  My responses to humiliation had been, as it were, tested and strained by that ordeal.  And at the same time I had been powerfully influenced to despise the life of the Jervaises and all that they stood for, socially and ethically.  Then, almost without a pause, a new ideal of life had been presented to me; and the contrast had been so vivid as to awaken even my dulled powers of apprehension.  The Jervaise type was more or less familiar to me; their acceptance of security as an established right, their lack of anything like initiative, their general contentment with themselves, their standards of judgment and their surroundings, represented the attitude towards life with which I was most familiar.  It had been my own attitude.  I had even dreamed of re-establishing the half-ruined home of the elder branch of the Melhuish family in Derbyshire!

And the contrast afforded by the lives and ambitions of Anne and her brother had been so startling that I believe I must have been stirred by it to some kind of awakening even had I not fallen in love with Anne.  I had been given so perfect an opportunity to enter into their feelings and views by my strange and intimate association with their antagonism to all that was typified by the rule of the Hall.  By reason of my sympathy with the Banks I had been able to realise the virtue of struggle and the evils of the almost unlimited and quite indiscriminating power wielded by such landowners as old Jervaise.  And in condemning him and his family, I must condemn myself also.  We were all of us so smug and self-satisfied.  We had blindly believed that it was our birthright to reap where we had not sown.

Nevertheless, though the truth was so plain to me in that moment, I accepted it grudgingly.  The voice of my artificial self clamoured for a hearing.  But these things were so, had always been so, it protested; what could I do to change them?  And probably, if it had not been for the force of the thrilling passion of reverence and admiration for Anne that had suddenly illuminated my whole being, the cultivated inertia of a life-time would finally have conquered me.  I should have thrust the problem away from me and returned with a sensual satisfaction to the familiar way of life I understood.  I should have consoled myself with the reflection that mine was not the temperament to face the ardours and disappointments of struggle.