Violet Jacob > Flemington

8o
FLEMINGTON
Truly this was a fascinating place, with its
changing element of distant water, its great plain
lines of pasture, its ordered vistas of foliage !
The passion for beauty lay deep below the tossing,
driving impulses of Flemington’s nature, and it
rose up now as he stood on the yew-edged ter¬
races of Balnillo and gazed before him. For the
moment everything in his mind was swallowed
up but the abstract, fundamental desire for per¬
fection, which is, when all is said and done,
humanity’s mainspring, its incessant though often
erring guide, whose perverted behests we call sin,
whose legitimate ones we call virtue ; whose very
existence is a guarantee of immortality.
The world, this crystalline morning, was so
beautiful to Archie that he ached with the un¬
comprehended longing to identify himself with
perfection; to cast his body down upon the light-
pervaded earth and to be one with it, to fling his
soul into the heights and depths of the limitless
encompassing ether, to be drawn into the heart
of God’s material manifestation on earth—the sun.
He understood nothing of what he felt, neither
the discomfort of his imprisonment of flesh, nor
the rapturous, tentative, wing-sweeps of the spirit
within it. He left the garden terrace and went
off towards the Basin, with the touch of that
elemental flood of truth into which he had been
plunged for a moment fresh on his soul. The
whole universe and its contents seemed to him
good—and not only good, but of consummate
interest—humanity was fascinating. His failure