How fortunate, how incredibly fortunate, that he should, in weather like this, and in so abounding a mood of creative energy, be completely his own master, except for the need of propitiating two naive and amusing women! He entertained himself by the thought of how little they really knew him,--these friendly Romers--how little they sounded his real purposes, his essential feelings! To them no doubt, he was no more than he was to these excellent villagers,--a tall, fair, slouching, bony figure, with a face,--if they went as far as his face,--massively heavy and irregular, with dreamy humorous eyes and a mouth addicted to nervous twitching. A clump of dandelions, obtruding their golden indifference to human drama, into the dust of the road at his feet, mixed oddly, at that moment, in these obscure workings of his brain, with a sort of savage caress of self-complacent congratulation which he suddenly bestowed on his interior self; as, beneath his pleasant chatter with his rural companions, he thought how imperturbable, how ferocious, his secret egoism was, and how well he concealed it under his indolent good-nature! He had passed now the entrance to the vicarage garden, and in the adjoining field he observed with a curious thrill of psychic sympathy the tenacious grip with which a viciously-knotted ash-tree held to the earth with its sturdy roots. Out-walked at last by all the other returned travellers, Dangelis glanced without pausing down the long Italianated avenue, at the end of which shone red, in the afternoon sun, the mullioned windows of the great house. He preferred to prolong his stroll, by taking the circuitous way, round by the village. He knew the expression of that famous west front too well now, to linger in admiration over its picturesque repose in the afternoon sunshine. As a matter of fact a slight chill of curious antipathy crossed his consciousness as he quickened his steps. Happily situated though he was, in his pleasant lodging beneath that capacious roof, the famous edifice itself had not altogether won his affection. The thing suggested to his wayward and prairie-nurtured soul, a stately product rather of convention than of life. He felt oddly conscious of it as something symbolic of what would be always intrinsically opposed to him, of what would willingly, if it were able, suppress him and render him helpless.