Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much

as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every

time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence,

and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even

more distinctly foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental

aspirations--still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of

things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell--were as foreign to his

own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet.

Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse

of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds

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which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to

regulate. On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing

divergence from the Angel Clare of former times. It was chiefly a

difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly

his brothers.

He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his

legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his

eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The

manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner

of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had

lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the

contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and

swains. After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,

well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest

fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by

the lathe of a systematic tuition. They were both somewhat

short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass

and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the

custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was

the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all

without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own

vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies;

and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on

their shelves. When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they

admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour

of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal

objection. If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed

their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church;

Cuthbert all College.

His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the

mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each

brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score

of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were

neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated

rather than reckoned with and respected.




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