distorted, bruised, defeated, still lived within him, and it was
this that brought upon him those hours of mortal anguish which he
had so vainly tried to drown in his glass. From the mirror his
gaze passed to his red and knotted hand, with its blunted nails,
and the straight furrow grew deeper between his eyebrows. He
remembered suddenly that his earliest ambition--the ambition of
his childhood--had been that of a gentlemanly scholar of the old
order. He had meant to sit in a library and read Horace, or to
complete the laborious translation of the "Iliad" which his
father had left unfinished. Then his studies had ended abruptly
with the Greek alphabet, and from the library he had passed out
to the plough. In the years of severe physical labour which
followed he had felt the spirit of the student go out of him
forever, and after a few winter nights, when he fell asleep over
his books, he had sunk slowly to the level of the small tobacco
growers among whom he lived. With him also was the curse of
apathy--that hereditary instinct to let the single throw decide
the issue, so characteristic of the reckless Blakes. For more
than two hundred years his people had been gay and careless
livers on this very soil; among them all he knew of not one who
had gone without the smallest of his desires, nor of one who had
permitted his left hand to learn what his right one cast away.
Big, blithe, mettlesome, they passed before him in a long, comely
line, flushed with the pleasant follies which had helped to sap
the courage in their descendants' veins.

At first he had made a pitiable attempt to remain "within his
class," but gradually, as time went on, this, too, had left him,
and in the end he had grown to feel a certain pride in the
ignorance he had formerly despised--a clownish scorn of anything