Is a good gift to be refused?  And this was his first love!  The brilliant Renee, many-hued as a tropic bird! his lady of shining grace, with her sole fault of want of courage devotedly amended! his pupil, he might say, of whom he had foretold that she must come to such a pass, at the same time prefixing his fidelity.  And he was handing her over knowingly to one kind of wretchedness—­’son amour, mon ami,’ shot through him, lighting up the gulfs of a mind in wreck;—­and one kind of happiness could certainly be promised her!

All these and innumerable other handsome pleadings of the simulacra of the powers he had set up to rule, were crushed at daybreak by the realities in a sense of weight that pushed him mechanically on.  He telegraphed to Roland, and mentally gave chase to the message to recall it.  The slumberer roused in darkness by the relentless insane-seeming bell which hales him to duty, melts at the charms of sleep, and feels that logic is with him in his preference of his pillow; but the tireless revolving world outside, nature’s pitiless antagonist, has hung one of its balances about him, and his actions are directed by the state of the scales, wherein duty weighs deep and desireability swings like a pendant doll:  so he throws on his harness, astounded, till his blood quickens with work, at the round of sacrifices demanded of nature:  which is indeed curious considering what we are taught here and there as to the infallibility of our august mother.  Well, the world of humanity had done this for Beauchamp.  His afflicted historian is compelled to fling his net among prosaic similitudes for an illustration of one thus degradedly in its grip.  If he had been off with his love like the rover! why, then the Muse would have loosened her lap like May showering flower-buds, and we might have knocked great nature up from her sleep to embellish his desperate proceedings with hurricanes to be danced over, to say nothing of imitative spheres dashing out into hurly-burly after his example.

Conscious rectitude, too, after the pattern of the well-behaved AEneas quitting the fair bosom of Carthage in obedience to the Gods, for an example to his Roman progeny, might have stiffened his backbone and put a crown upon his brows.  It happened with him that his original training rather imposed the idea that he was a figure to be derided.  The approval of him by the prudent was a disgust, and by the pious tasteless.  He had not any consolation in reverting to Dr. Shrapnel’s heavy Puritanism.  On the contrary, such a general proposition as that of the sage of Bevisham could not for a moment stand against the pathetic special case of Renee:  and as far as Beauchamp’s active mind went, he was for demanding that Society should take a new position in morality, considerably broader, and adapted to very special cases.