



Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.









A Life's Morning


by

George Gissing




CONTENTS

       I  AN UNDERGRADUATE AT LEISURE
      II  BEATRICE REDWING
     III  LYRICAL
      IV  A CONFLICT OF OPINIONS
       V  THE SHADOW OF HOME
      VI  A VISITOR BY EXPRESS
     VII  ON THE LEVELS
    VIII  A STERNER WOOING
      IX  CIRCUMSTANCE
       X  AT THE SWORD'S POINT
      XI  EMILY'S DECISION
     XII  THE FINAL INTERVIEW
    XIII  THE CUTTING OF THE KNOT
     XIV  NEWS AND COMMENTS
      XV  MRS. BAXENDALE'S QUESTS
     XVI  RENUNCIATION
    XVII  THEIR SEVERAL WAYS
   XVIII  A COMPACT
     XIX  THE COMPLETION OF MISCHANCE
      XX  WILFRID THE LEGISLATOR
     XXI  DANGEROUS RELICS
    XXII  HER PATH IN THE SHADOW
   XXIII  HER PATH IN THE LIGHT
    XXIV  THE UNEXPECTED
     XXV  A FAMILY CONCLAVE
    XXVI  MID-DAY




CHAPTER I

AN UNDERGRADUATE AT LEISURE


Wilfrid Athel went down invalided a few days after the beginning of
Trinity term. The event was not unanticipated. At Christmas it had been
clear enough that he was overtaxing himself; his father remarked on the
fact with anxiety, and urged moderation, his own peculiar virtue.
Wilfrid, whose battle with circumstances was all before him, declined to
believe that the body was anything but the very humble servant of the
will. So the body took its revenge.

He had been delicate in childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism
which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of
self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his
frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly
about him; it was only an excess of nervous vitality that would not
allow body to keep pace with mind. He was a boy to be, intellectually,
held in leash, said the doctors. But that was easier said than done.
What system of sedatives could one apply to a youngster whose
imagination wrought him to a fever during a simple walk by the seashore,
who if books were forcibly withheld consoled himself with the
composition of five-act tragedies, interspersed with lyrics to which he
supplied original strains? Mr. Athel conceived a theory that such
exuberance of emotionality might be counterbalanced by studies of a
strictly positive nature; a tutor was engaged to ground young Wilfrid in
mathematics and the physical sciences. The result was that the tutor's
enthusiasm for these pursuits communicated itself after a brief
repugnance to the versatile pupil; instincts of mastery became as vivid
in the study of Euclid and the chemical elements as formerly in the
humaner paths of learning; the plan had failed. In the upshot Wilfrid
was sent to school; if that did not develop the animal in him, nothing
would.

He was not quite three-and-twenty when the break-down removed him from
Oxford. Going to Balliol with a scholarship, he had from the first been
marked for great things, at all events by the measure of the schools.
Removal from the system of home education had in truth seemed to answer
in some degree the ends aimed at; the lad took his fair share of cricket
and football, and kept clear of nervous crises. At the same time he made
extraordinary progress with his books. He acquired with extreme
facility, and his ambition never allowed him to find content in a second
place; conquest became his habit; he grew to deem it the order of nature
that Wilfrid Athel's name should come first in the list. Hence a
reputation to support. During his early terms at Balliol he fagged as
hard as the mere dullard whose dear life depended upon a first class and
a subsequent tutorship. What he would make of himself in the end was
uncertain; university distinctions would probably be of small moment to
him as soon as they were achieved, for already he spent the greater
portion of his strength in lines of study quite apart from the
curriculum, and fate had blessed him with exemption from sordid cares.
He led in a set devoted to what were called advanced ideas; without
flattering himself that he was on the way to solve the problem of the
universe, he had satisfaction in reviewing the milestones which removed
him from the unconscious man, and already clutched at a measure of
positive wisdom in the suspicion that lie might shortly have to lay
aside his school-books and recommence his education under other
teachers. As yet he was whole-hearted in the pursuit of learning. The
intellectual audacity which was wont to be the key-note of his
conversation did not, as his detractors held, indicate mere
bumptiousness and defect of self-measurement; it was simply the florid
redundancy of a young mind which glories in its strength, and plays at
victory in anticipation. It was true that he could not brook the
semblance of inferiority; if it were only five minutes' chat in the
Quad, he must come off with a phrase or an epigram; so those duller
heads who called Athel affected were not wholly without their
justification. Those who shrugged their shoulders with the remark that
he was overdoing it, and would not last out to the end of the race,
enjoyed a more indisputable triumph. One evening, when Athel was taking
the brilliant lead in an argument on 'Fate, free-will, foreknowledge
absolute,' his brain began to whirl, tobacco-smoke seemed to have dulled
all the lights before his eyes, and he fell from his chair in a
fainting-fit.

He needed nothing but rest; that, however, was imperative. Mr. Athel
brought him to London, and the family went down at once to their house
in Surrey. Wilfrid was an only son and an