THE STEADFAST HEART
was less easy to bear because it was a matter about which he could speak to none—not even to Dave Wilkins…. It was a thing about which he could not talk; about which he had an uneasy feeling that it was a profanation to think. The boy was as greatly disturbed by the fact of his love as if he had committed a deliberate act of insult to Lydia. It was a morbid, unhealthy condition but, perhaps, not to be avoided….
There were days when his will—such was its tension—seemed on the point of snapping, of releasing him to run to Lydia and to pour out in hot, excited words his confession. He imagined himself before her, could almost hear the incoherent outpouring of his words…. He could see her face—the repulsion of it, the disdain…. It shamed him, this weakness; he called himself unmanly to give way to the thing, to permit his love to dwell in his thoughts.
It must be borne in mind that Angus had lived a fifth of a century of repression: years of consciousness that he was not like other boys; years made harrowing by contempt, and by the attitude of Rainbow which had demanded he should be made an outcast…. Constant repression is constant tension. There had been a perpetual holding in; a pressure of self-expression outward, that, though he was not aware of it, had pushed and driven and worried the reinforce-
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