 them, and seize and transform the expected fact, and
astonish them, when they came up to him, with a totally unanticipated fact.
    »You see, you were in error, ladies.«
    »And so we were, Sir Willoughby, and we acknowledge it. We never could have
guessed that!«
    Thus the phantom couple in the future delivered themselves, as well they
might at the revelation. He could run far ahead.
    Ay, but to combat these dolts, facts had to be encountered, deeds done, in
groaning earnest. These representatives of the pig-sconces of the population
judged by circumstances: airy shows and seems had no effect on them. Dexterity
of fence was thrown away.
    A flying peep at the remorseless might of dulness in compelling us to a
concrete performance counter to our inclinations, if we would deceive its
terrible instinct, gave Willoughby for a moment the survey of a sage. His
intensity of personal feeling struck so vivid an illumination of mankind at
intervals that he would have been individually wise, had he not been moved by
the source of his accurate perceptions to a personal feeling of opposition to
his own sagacity. He loathed and he despised the vision, so his mind had no
benefit of it, though he himself was whipped along. He chose rather (and the
choice is open to us all) to be flattered by the distinction it revealed between
himself and mankind.
    But if he was not as others were, why was he discomfited, solicitous,
miserable? To think that it should be so, ran dead against his conqueror's
theories wherein he had been trained, which, so long as he gained success
awarded success to native merit, grandeur to the grand in soul, as light kindles
light: nature presents the example. His early training, his bright beginning of
life, had taught him to look to earth's principal fruits as his natural portion,
and it was owing to a girl that he stood a mark for tongues, naked, wincing at
the possible malignity of a pair of harridans. Why not whistle the girl away?
    Why, then he would be free to enjoy, careless, younger than his youth in the
rebound to happiness!
    And then would his nostrils begin to lift and sniff at the creeping up of a
thick pestiferous vapour. Then in that volume of stench would he discern the
sullen yellow eye of malice. A malarious earth would hunt him all over it. The
breath of the world, the world's view of him, was partly his vital breath, his
view of himself. The ancestry of
