He rather
fancied that this was the part of a gentleman, and he could not have
penetrated to that aesthetic and moral complexity which formed the
consciousness of a nature like Beaton's and was chiefly a torment to
itself; he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at
every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed and
well-nigh lost under their tangle. To do whatever one likes is finally to
do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do what one will;
but Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven, was still too young to
understand this.
Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps because he was not yet
twenty-seven. He only knew that his will was somehow sick; that it spent
itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of
the most vehement wish. But he was aware that his wishes grew less and
less vehement; he began to have a fear that some time he might have none
at all. It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was
thoroughly distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in the right
direction; but when he tried this on a small scale, it failed, and it
seemed stupid. Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was
sure; but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate; a man
could not expiate his temperament, and his temperament was what Beaton
decided to be at fault.
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