The pressure remained with him, and a little later as he drove over the
frosted roads, he could still feel, as in a dream, the soft clinging
touch of her fingers. Essentially an idealist, his character was the
result of a veneering of insufficient culture on a groundwork of raw
impulse. People and objects appeared to him less through forms of
thought than through colours of the emotions; and he saw them out of
relation because he saw them under different conditions from those that
hold sway over this planet. The world he moved in was peopled by a race
of beings that acted under ideal laws and measured up to an impossible
standard; and this mixture of rustic ignorance and religious fervor
had endowed him with a power of sacrifice in large matters, while it
rendered him intolerant of smaller weaknesses. It was characteristic of
the man that he should have arranged for Molly in his thoughts, and at
the cost of great suffering to himself, a happiness that was suited to
the ideal figure rather than to the living woman.
When he entered the kitchen, after putting the mare into her stall,
the familiar room, with its comfortable warmth, dragged him back into
a reality in which the dominating spirit was Sarah Revercomb.
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