For Miltoun was not one of those who take things lying down; he took
things desperately, deeply, and with revolt. He took them like a rider
riding himself, plunging at the dig of his own spurs, chafing and
wincing at the cruel tugs of his own bitt; bearing in his friendless,
proud heart all the burden of struggles which shallower or more genial
natures shared with others.
He looked hardly less haggard, walking home, than some of those homeless
ones who slept nightly by the river, as though they knew that to lie
near one who could so readily grant oblivion, alone could save them
from seeking that consolation. He was perhaps unhappier than they, whose
spirits, at all events, had long ceased to worry them, having oozed out
from their bodies under the foot of Life:
Now that Audrey Noel was lost to him, her loveliness and that
indescribable quality which made her lovable, floated before him, the
very torture-flowers of a beauty never to be grasped--yet, that he
could grasp, 'if he only would! That was the heart and fervour of
his suffering. To be grasped if he only would! He was suffering, too,
physically from a kind of slow fever, the result of his wetting on the
day when he last saw her. And through that latent fever, things and
feelings, like his sensations in the House before his speech, were all
as it were muffled in a horrible way, as if they all came to him wrapped
in a sort of flannel coating, through which he could not cut.
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