"
The clock struck ten. Mr. Gresley was amazed. The hour had seemed like
ten minutes.
"I will just see what happens in the next chapter," he said. And he did
not hear the clock when it struck again. The story was absorbing. It was
as if through that narrow, shut-up chamber a gust of mountain air were
sweeping like a breath of fresh life. Mr. Gresley was vaguely stirred
in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic,
visionary. He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his
measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature. He would have
called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself. It was only
saved from that reproach by the fact that it hung on his kitchen hob.
What was so unfair about him was that he took gorillas and alligators,
and the "wart pig" and all its warts on trust, though he had never seen
them. But the emotions which have shaken the human soul since the world
began, long before the first "wart pig" was thought of--these he
disbelieved.
All the love which could not be covered by his own mild courtship of the
obviously grateful Mrs. Gresley, Mr. Gresley put down as exaggerated.
There was a good deal of such exaggeration in Hester's book, which could
only be attributed to the French novels of which he had frequently
expressed his disapproval when he saw Hester reading them.
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