Such inverted possibility, the infernal
possibility, I mean, lies latent in every one of us, and, except
we stir ourselves up to the right, will gradually, from a
possibility, become an energy. The wise man dares not yield to a
temptation, were it only for the terror that, if he do, he will
yield the more readily again. The commonplace critic, who
recognizes life solely upon his own conscious level, mocks
equally at the ideal and its antipode, incapable of recognizing
the art of Shakespeare himself as true to the human nature that
will not be human.
I have said that Letty did her best with what money Tom gave her;
but when she came to find that he had not paid the lodging for
two months; that the payment of various things he had told her to
order and he would see to had been neglected, and that the
tradespeople were getting persistent in their applications; that,
when she told him anything of the sort, he treated it at one time
as a matter of no consequence which he would speedily set right,
at another as behavior of the creditor hugely impertinent, which
he would punish by making him wait his time--her heart at length
sank within her, and she felt there was no bulwark between her
and a sea of troubles; she felt as if she lay already in the
depths of a debtor's jail. Therefore, sparing as she had been
from the first, she was more sparing than ever.
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