painful hours in recalling these trifles, and rendering them
more misty and unsubstantial than at first, by the quantity of speculative
musing, thus kneaded in with them. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! These
three had absorbed my life into themselves. Together with an inexpressible
longing to know their fortunes, there was likewise a morbid resentment of my own
pain, and a stubborn reluctance to come again within their sphere.
    All that I learned of them, therefore, was comprised in a few brief and
pungent squibs, such as the newspapers were then in the habit of bestowing on
our socialist enterprise. There was one paragraph which, if I rightly guessed
its purport, bore reference to Zenobia, but was too darkly hinted to convey even
thus much of certainty. Hollingsworth, too, with his philanthropic project,
afforded the penny-a-liners a theme for some savage and bloody-minded jokes;
and, considerably to my surprise, they affected me with as much indignation as
if we had still been friends.
    Thus passed several weeks; time long enough for my brown and toil-hardened
hands to re-accustom themselves to gloves. Old habits, such as were merely
external, returned upon me with wonderful promptitude. My superficial talk, too,
assumed altogether a worldly tone. Meeting former acquaintances, who showed
themselves inclined to ridicule my heroic devotion to the cause of human
welfare, I spoke of the recent phase of my life as indeed fair matter for a
jest. But I also gave them to understand that it was, at most, only an
experiment, on which I had staked no valuable amount of hope or fear; it had
enabled me to pass the summer in a novel and agreeable way, had afforded me some
grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity, and could not, therefore, so far
as I was concerned, be reckoned a failure. In no one instance, however, did I
voluntarily speak of my three friends. They dwelt in a profounder region. The
more I consider myself, as I then was, the more do I recognize how deeply my
connection with those three had affected all my being.
    As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I might, in the time I was
away from Blithedale, have snatched a glimpse at England, and been back again.
But my wanderings were confined within a very limited sphere. I hopped and
fluttered, like a bird with a string about its leg, gyrating round a small
circumference, and keeping up a restless activity to no purpose. Thus, it was
still in our familiar Massachusetts - in one of its white country