at college. . . . The Lord is a swift and terrible Being Who worketh His will in the night."
Hester was dead. Elim involuntarily walked to a window, gazing with unseeing eyes at the familiar pleasant prospect. A realization flashed unbidden through his mind, a realization like a stab of lightning—he was free. He overbore it immediately, but it left within him a strange tingling sensation. He directed his mind upon Hester and the profitable contemplation of death; but rebellion sprang up within him, thoughts beyond control whirled in his brain.
Free! A hundred impulses, desires, of which—suppressed by his rigid adherence to a code of duty—he had not been conscious, leaped into vitality. His vision of life swung from its focus upon outward and invisible things to a new surprising regard of his own tangible self. He grew aware of himself as an entity, of the world as a broad and various field of exploit and discovery.
There was, his father had bluntly indicated, no place for him at home; and suddenly he realized that his duties at college had been a tedious grind for inconsiderable return. This admission brought to him the realization that he detested the whole thing—the hours in class; the droning negligent recitations of the men; the professor of philosophy and letters' pedantic display; the cramped academic spirit of the institution. The vague resentment he had felt at the half-concealed disdain of his fellows gave place to a fiery contempt for their majority; the covert humility he had been forced to assume—by the thought of Hester and the few miserable dollars of an inferior position—turned to a bitter freedom of opinion.
