, which were in
harmony with his native sensibilities. Fanny Warricombe was but an undeveloped
girl, yet he valued her friendship above the passionate attachment of any woman
bred on a lower social plane. Had it been possible, he would have kissed her
fingers with purest reverence.
    When out of sight of the house, he paused to regard the sky again. Its
noontide splendour was dazzling; masses of rosy cloud sailed swiftly from
horizon to horizon, the azure deepening about them. Yet before long the west
would again send forth its turbulent spirits, and so the girls might perhaps be
led to think of him.
    By night the weather grew more tranquil. There was a full moon, and its
radiance illumined the everchanging face of heaven with rare grandeur. Godwin
could not shut himself up over his books; he wandered far away into the country,
and let his thoughts have freedom.
    He was learning to review with calmness the course by which he had reached
his now steadfast resolve. A revulsion such as he had experienced after his
first day of simulated orthodoxy, half a year ago, could not be of lasting
effect, for it was opposed to the whole tenor of his mature thought. It spoilt
his holiday, but had no chance of persisting after his return to the atmosphere
of Rotherhithe. That he should have been capable of such emotion was, he said to
himself, in the just order of things; callousness in the first stages of an
undertaking which demanded gross hypocrisy would signify an ignoble nature - a
nature, indeed, which could never have been submitted to trial of so strange a
kind. But he had overcome himself; that phase of difficulty was outlived, and
henceforth he saw only the material obstacles to be defied by his vindicated
will.
    What he proposed to himself was a life of deliberate baseness. Godwin Peak
never tried to play the sophist with this fact. But he succeeded in justifying
himself by a consideration of the circumstances which had compelled him to a
vile expedient. Had his project involved conscious wrong to other persons, he
would scarcely even have speculated on its possibilities. He was convinced that
no mortal could suffer harm, even if he accomplished the uttermost of his
desires. Whom was he in danger of wronging? The conventional moralist would cry:
Everyone with whom he came in slightest contact! But a mind such as Peak's has
very little to do with conventional morality. Injury to himself he foresaw and
accepted; he could never be the man nature designed in him; and he must
frequently submit to a self-contempt which would be very hard to bear. Those