Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/104

96 work as a kind of pictorial obiter dictum: he had made what he could of it and would have been at a loss to see how he could make more. If it was not finished, this was because it was not finishable; at any rate he had said all he had to say in that particular phrase. Nick Dormer, as it happened, was not just now in the highest spirits; his imagination had within two or three days become conscious of a check which he tried to explain by the idea of a natural reaction. Any important change, any new selection in one's life was exciting, and exaggerate that importance and one's own as little as one would, there was an inevitable strong emotion in renouncing, in the face of considerable opposition, one sort of responsibility for another sort. That made life not perhaps necessarily joyous, but decidedly thrilling, for the hour; and it was all very well till the thrill abated. When this occurred, as it inevitably would, the romance and the poetry of the thing would be exchanged for the flatness and the prose. It was to these latter elements that Nick Dormer had waked up pretty wide on this particular morning; and the prospect was not appreciably more blooming from the fact that he had warned himself in advance that it would be dull. He had known how dull it would be, but now he would have time to learn that even better. A reaction was a reaction, but it was not after all a catastrophe. A part of its privilege would be to make him ask himself if he had not committed a great mistake; that privilege would doubtless even remain within the limits of its nature in leading him to reply to this question in the affirmative. But he would live to withdraw such a concession—this was the first thing to bear in mind.