With the coming of the young professor a new force seemed entered upon the saner side of her life. She recognized in him a master of the great outer world--the Eastern world, the world of the unafraid--and her determination to at least subordinate her "controls" had expanded swiftly to a most dangerous height during the few hours of her companionship with him. She felt that he would sympathize with her--that he would help her. The clear positiveness of his speech, his health, his humor, grew upon her each moment, and she resolved to confide in him when next they met.
Part of this upspringing revolt, this antagonism, Clarke divined, and the determination to arrest her purpose, the desire to possess her entirely and at once, excluded every other wish or plan, and to feel was to act with Anthony Clarke, for he was born to emotional experience as the sparks fly upward. He had ever been a creature of unreason, morbidly conscious of self--and naturally, for in him struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his mother--Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most mercurial father--remained an unsolved problem all her days, even to her husband. Her laughter was as illogical as her tears. Her household could never tell what the next hour would bring forth, so ready were her sympathies, so instant her despairs. She lived all her life at the heights or the depths, with never a day of serene, womanly, reasonable action, and when she died her passing was of the same emotional stress. She clung to earth like one whose body was about to drop into soundless deeps.
Her son had inherited all her fervency, her inconstancy of purpose, as well as her tendency to collapse under pressure. Physically he had always been of slender figure, with weak lungs, and these weaknesses he had used to free himself from work, from responsibility.
He was not a hypocrite--in that Britt was mistaken. He was by nature deeply religious. His soul aspired, at times, to high things. He was sympathetic to actual pain, and had always been morbidly in awe of death. The sight of any poor, lost, and suffering man threw him into instant, profound, and melancholy pity. A dead beetle in the road, a fly caught in a spider's web, a young robin water-soaked and bedraggled, appalled him, even as a boy, and he pondered them with sad and questioning eyes long after his young companions had forgotten them. Where had the light of their eyes fled? he asked himself. He found no sport in killing any creature, and more than once he used all his slender force to defend a cat from stoning; and yet he was known to have joined the worst youths of his native town in secret drinking-bouts, thereby acquiring the reputation of a liar and sneak, as well as that of licentiate. At seventeen, just when the appetite for liquor seemed beyond his control, a great "revivalist" won his soul, as the saying went, and at twenty-three he assumed his first pastorate.