His tussles with these Jeremiahs of the Yorkshire village gave Old Mole the confidence he needed, and the exultant glow of a sharpening of the wits, which are like razors, most apt to cut the wielder of them when they are most dull. He tortured himself no more with his failure to satisfy Matilda, but laid all his hopes in the future and the amusing life in London that he wished to create for her. Intensely he desired her to develop her own life, to grow into the splendid creature he now saw struggling beneath the crust of ignorance and prejudice and shyness and immaturity that hemmed her in. There was such beauty in her, and he had failed to make it his, a part of himself, and in his blundering efforts to teach her, to lead her on to the realization and gift of herself, he had wounded her even when he most adored her. . . . The dead woman, Enid, had been more to her than he had ever been. He saw that now. She had known in that woman's lift something that was not in her own, and she desired it; how much it was painful to see. She never looked for it in him, but gazed in upon herself in a sort of pregnancy of the soul. And, like a pregnant woman, she must be satisfied in her whimsies, she must have her desires anticipated, she must be given the color and brightness of life, now before her sensitiveness had passed away for want of fair impressions. These she had been denied in the young years of her life. She must have them. . . . She must have them. . . . She accepted his proposal to go to London without enthusiasm. She thought over it for some time and at last she said: "Yes. It will be best for you. I don't want you to go away again." And the night before they left, when the train-service was restored, she took out the necklace as she was undressing and tried it on, and looked at herself in the mirror and said: "I'd like to wear this in London. But I shall want an evening dress, sha'n't I?" She smiled at him. His heart overflowed and colored the workings of his mind with a full humor. He thought: "If there be ideas, how better can they be expressed than in terms of Matilda?" V IN THE SWIM _Whoever has an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb, with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them._ A TALE OF A TUB V IN THE SWIM