Page:Far from the Madding Crowd Vol 1.djvu/301

 an impossibility; whilst in the form of hope and the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve, curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.

Sergeant Troy, being entirely innocent of the practice of expectation, was never disappointed. To set against this negative gain there may have been some positive losses from a certain narrowing of the higher tastes and sensations which it entailed. But limitation of the capacity is never recognized as a loss by the loser therefrom: in this attribute moral or æsthetic poverty contrasts plausibly with material, since those who suffer do not mind it, whilst those who mind it soon cease to suffer. It is not a denial of anything to have been always without it, and what Troy had never enjoyed he did not miss; but, being fully conscious that what sober people missed he enjoyed, his capacity, though really less, seemed greater than theirs.

He was perfectly truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan—a system of ethics, above all others, calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society; and the possibility of the favour gained being but transient had reference only to the future.

He never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the ugly; and hence, though his morals had never been applauded, disapproval of