ciously self-sufficing, and as his mind became more and more stocked with images from books—books like Candide, Vanity Fair, Eugénie Grandet, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Last Days of Pompeii, Adam Bede, Hypatia, The Light of Asia, Knight Errant, The First Violin, Ben Hur—he found that life was changing from a fixed thing, as it appeared on the afternoon when he had driven into Hale's Turning with Dr. Wilcove, into a shifting drama, with ever new characters and settings. Even customs and institutions which he had always thought of as irreproachable, and in their nature immutable, he found were arbitrary. Everything under the sun, he made out, was challengeable.
At first this truth made him hold to his surroundings to see if he was steady. But as his critical faculty spread tentative wings a little thrill went through him, and he surmised that life was going to consist in an endless flitting, a long quest for the honey of truth, broken by intervals of recreation in the choicest flower-beds.
As a small child he had felt that all the security and permanence of life were harboured within Aunt Verona's kitchen and his playroom and bedroom. Now the gaunt old house was becoming an abode of ghostly ideas, and he saw it as a waning phase in the progress of his life, a single variation of the big theme, while a richer security, the culminating variations were to be sought outside this house, outside this village, beyond the farthest horizon. The value of life would be great or small in the measure that one's faring forth in search of its treasures were bold or timid. In exalted moments, moments when the truths buried in books came out of their graves to dazzle him with an astral radiance, he promised himself that he would fly carefully, but high and far. And his smouldering scepticism, the concealed sparks that ever gnawed at the roots of his daily habits, gave signs of bursting through in flame. So far the fire was known only to
