The problems
of life were beginning to bite. Everywhere things appeared uneven.
He was not one to complain of mere external inequalities: if he was
inclined to envy Lord Meikleham, it was not because of his social
position: he was even now philosopher enough to know that the life
of a fisherman was preferable to that of such a marquis as Lord
Lossie--that the desirableness of a life is to be measured by
the amount of interest and not by the amount of ease in it, for the
more ease the more unrest; neither was he inclined to complain of
the gulf that yawned so wide between him and Lady Florimel; the
difficulty lay deeper: such a gulf existing, by a social law only
less inexorable than a natural one, why should he feel the rent
invading his individual being? in a word, though Malcolm put it in
no such definite shape: Why should a fisher lad find himself in
danger of falling in love with the daughter of a marquis? Why should
such a thing, seeing the very constitution of things rendered it
an absurdity, be yet a possibility?
The church bell began, rang on, and ceased. The sound of the psalms
came, softly mellowed, and sweetly harmonized, across the churchyard
through the gray Sabbath air, and he found himself, for the first
time, a stray sheep from the fold. The service must have been half
through before a lackey, to whom Mrs Courthope had committed the
matter when she went to church, brought him the message that the
marquis would see him.
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