CHAPTER XV
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rent found himself in a most peculiar situation. He had hated the severediscipline of his youth, and had finally rebelled against it and renounced itsresults as far as they went materially. This he had thought to mean hisemancipation. But when the hour to assert his freedom had come, he foundthat the long years of rigid training had bound his volition with iron bands.He was wrapped in a mantle of habit which he was ashamed to display andyet could not shake off. The pendulum never stops its swing in the middleof the arc. So he would have gone to the other extreme and revelled in thepleasures whose very breath had been forbidden to his youth; but he foundhis sensibilities revolting from everything that did not accord with the oldPuritan code by which they had been trained. He knew himself to be full ofcapabilities for evil, but it seemed as if some power greater than his heldhim back. It was Frederick Brent who looked on sin abstractly, but itspresence in the concrete was seen through the eyes of Mrs. Hester Hodges.It could hardly be called the decree of conscience, because so instantaneouswas the rejection of evil that there was really no time for reference to theinternal monitor. The very restriction which he had complained of he wasnow putting upon himself. The very yoke whose burden he hated he wasplacing about his own neck. He had run away from the sound of "right"and "duty," but had not escaped their power. He felt galled, humiliated, andangry with himself, because he had long seen the futility of blindindignation against the unseen force which impelled him forward in a hatedpath. One thing that distressed him was a haunting fear of the sights whichPerkins would show him on the morrow’s night. He had seen enough forhimself to conjecture of what nature they would be. He did not want to seemore, and yet how could he avoid it? He might plead illness, but that wouldbe a lie; and then there would be other nights to follow, so it would only bea postponement of what must ultimately take place or be boldly rejected.Once he decided to explain his feelings on the subject, but in his mind's eye 86
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