Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/24

16 This was the beginning of my acquaintance with a man who had a greater number of positive ideas than any one else that ever I have known, with wonderful intrepidity and skill in expounding or defending them. However fine the faculties of some other Russians whom I have encountered, they seemed to move in a heavily obstructive atmosphere; Vernet appeared to be oppressed by none. His resolutions were as prompt as his thought; what ever resourse he could command in any difficulty, whether the least or the greatest, presented itself to his mind instantly, with the occasion for it; and every movement of his body had the same quickness and precision. His pride, his pride of aristocracy, could tower to extraordinary heights; his sensibility to personal slights and indignities was so trenchant that I have seen him white and quivering with rage when he thought himself rudely jostled by a fellow-passenger in a crowded street. And yet any comrade in conspiracy was his familiar if he only brought daring enough into the common business; and wife, child, fortune, the exchange of ease for the most desperate misery, all were put at stake for the sake of the People and at the call of their sorrows and oppressions. And of one sort of pride he had no sense whatever—fine gentleman as he was, and used from his birth to every refinement of service and luxury: no degree of poverty, nor any blameless shift for relieving it, touched him as humiliating. Privation, whether for others or himself, angered him; the contrast between slothful wealth and toiling misery enraged him; but he had no conception of want and its wretched little expedients as mortifying.

For example. It was in November, that dreary and inclement month, when he began life anew in England with a capital or three shillings and sevenpence. It was a bleak afternoon in December, sleet lightly falling as the dusk came on and melting Rh