A single sudden thought sufficed to scatter--not the devotion,
but its peace. Of course she would marry some day, and what then?
He looked the inevitable in the face; but as he looked, that face
grew an ugly one. He broke into a laugh: his soul had settled like
a brooding cloud over the gulf that lay between a fisher lad and
the daughter of a peer! But although he was no coxcomb, neither had
fed himself on romances, as Lady Florimel had been doing of late,
and although the laugh was quite honestly laughed at himself, it was
nevertheless a bitter one. For again came the question: Why should
an absurdity be a possibility? It was absurd, and yet possible:
there was the point. In mathematics it was not so: there, of two
opposites to prove one an absurdity, was to prove the other a fact.
Neither in metaphysics was it so: there also an impossibility and
an absurdity were one and the same thing. But here, in a region
of infinitely more import to the human life than an eternity
of mathematical truth, there was at least one absurdity which was
yet inevitable--an absurdity--yet with a villainous attendance
of direst heat, marrow freezing cold, faintings, and ravings, and
demoniacal laughter.
Had it been a purely logical question he was dealing with, he
might not have been quite puzzled; but to apply logic here, as he
was attempting to do, was like--not like attacking a fortification
with a penknife, for a penknife might win its way through the
granite ribs of Cronstadt--it was like attacking an eclipse with
a broomstick: there was a solution to the difficulty; but as the
difficulty itself was deeper than he knew, so the answer to it
lay higher than he could reach--was in fact at once grander and
finer than he was yet capable of understanding.
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