solitude he sat still and watchful as a spider sits in his web.

Whether from natural temperament or from his educational training
under such teachers as Mr. Mivers, who carried out the new ideas of
reform by revering nothing in the past, and Mr. Welby, who accepted
the routine of the present as realistic, and pooh-poohed all visions
of the future as idealistic, Kenelm's chief mental characteristic was
a kind of tranquil indifferentism. It was difficult to detect in him
either of those ordinary incentives to action,--vanity or ambition,
the yearning for applause or the desire of power. To all female
fascinations he had been hitherto star-proof. He had never
experienced love, but he had read a good deal about it; and that
passion seemed to him an unaccountable aberration of human reason, and
an ignominious surrender of the equanimity of thought which it should
be the object of masculine natures to maintain undisturbed. A very
eloquent book in praise of celibacy, and entitled "The Approach to the
Angels," written by that eminent Oxford scholar, Decimus Roach, had
produced so remarkable an effect upon his youthful mind that, had he
been a Roman Catholic, he might have become a monk. Where he most
evinced ardour it was a logician's ardour for abstract truth; that is,
for what he considered truth: and, as what seems truth to one man is
sure to seem falsehood to some other man, this predilection of his was
not without its inconveniences and dangers, as may probably be seen in
the following chapter.

Meanwhile, rightly to appreciate his conduct therein, I entreat thee,
O candid reader (not that any reader ever is candid), to remember that
he is brimful of new ideas, which, met by a deep and hostile
undercurrent of old ideas, become more provocatively billowy and
surging.