In his gloomy passage through this land of ill omens,
however, he shivered a little as he thought of the other
possibility--tortured himself with imagining what might happen
during her revulsion of feeling, if Philippa discovered the truth.
A sense of something greater than he had yet known in life seemed
to lift him into some lofty state of aloofness, from which he
could look down and despise himself, the poor, tired plodder
wearing the heavy chains of duty. There was a life so much more
wonderful, just the other side of the clouds, a very short distance
away, a life of alluring and passionate happiness. Should he ever
find the courage, he wondered, to escape from the treadmill and
go in search of it? Duty, for the last two years, had taken him
by the hand and led him along a pathway of shame. He had never
been a hypocrite about the war. He was one of those who had
acknowledged from the first that Germany had set forth, with the
sword in her hand, on a war of conquest. His own inherited
martial spirit had vaguely approved; he, too, in those earlier
days, had felt the sunlight upon his rapier. Later had come the
enlightenment, the turbulent waves of doubt, the nightmare of a
nation's awakening conscience, mirrored in his own soul. It was
in a depression shared, perhaps, in a lesser degree by millions
of those whose ranks he had joined, that he felt this passionate
craving for escape into a world which took count of other things.
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