"No!" he replied with sharp emphasis.
"Egbert, remember you have given your mother the gravest provocation."
"I also remember that she did her best to make me the fool I have been, and she might have a little more patience now. The truth is that mother's God was respectability, and she will never forgive me for destroying her idol."
"Read the other letters; there may be that in them which will be more reassuring."
"No, I thank you," he replied, bitterly; "I have had all that I can stand for one day. She believes the infernal lie which that scoundrel Shrumpf tells, and gives me no hearing;" and he related to Mrs. Arnot the true version of the affair.
She had the tact to see that his present perturbed condition was not her opportunity, and she soon after left him in a mood that promised little of good for the future.
But in the long, quiet hours that followed her departure his thoughts were busy. However much he might think that others were the cause of his unhappy plight, he had seen that he was far more to blame. It had been made still more clear that, even if he could shift this blame somewhat, he could not the consequences. Mrs. Arnot's words had given him a glimpse of light, and had revealed a path, which, though still vague and uncertain, promised to lead out of the present labyrinth of evil. During the morning hours he had dared to hope, and even to pray, that he might find a way of escape from his miserable self and the wretched condition to which it had brought him.
For a long time he turned the leaves of Mrs. Arnot's Bible, and here and there a text would flash out like a light upon the clouded future, but as a general thing the words had little meaning.
To his ardent and somewhat imaginative nature she had presented the struggle toward a better life in the most attractive light. He was not asked to do something which was vague and mystical; he was not exhorted to emotions and beliefs of which he was then incapable, nor to forms and ceremonies that were meaningless to him, nor to professions equally hollow. On the contrary, the evils, the defects of his own nature, were given an objective form, and he could almost see himself, like a knight, with lance in rest, preparing to run a tilt against the personal faults which had done him such injury. The deeper philosophy, that his heart was the rank soil from which sprang these faults, like Cadmus' armed men, would come with fuller experience.