"
"Strange," he reflected, "that her mediocre intelligence should have clung
to a man so outwardly mean as myself. If I thought that she had remembered
half I said when I was with her, or had made a single attempt to practice
the gospel I preached so finely--damned if I wouldn't have her back again
to-morrow and be proud of her too. But it can't be. She was such an
absolute fool. No, I much fear she only desires to find out what has become
of the goose who laid the big golden egg. Or if she doesn't, perhaps her
God-fearing father and mother do."
Which opinion is not uninteresting, for it illustrates the usual failure of
materialism to discover or gauge those mental possibilities which lie
hidden within the humblest and worst equipped intelligences. John Barron
was an able man in some respects, but his knowledge of Joan Tregenza had
taught him nothing concerning her character and its latent powers of
development.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DISENCHANTMENT
With summer, Nature, proceeding on her busy way, approached again the
annual phenomena of seed-time and harvest. To Joan, as spring had brought
with it a world of mothers, so the subsequent season filled Nature with
babies; and, in the light of all this newborn life, the mothers suffered a
change. Now, sorrow-guided, did Joan begin to read under the face of
things, "to get behind the sunset," as Barren had said in his letter to
Murdoch, to realize a little of the mystery hidden in green leaves and
swelling fruits and ripening grain, to observe at least the presence of
mystery though she could not translate more than an occasional
manifestation thereof.
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