As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring1 struggle for existence, it fol-lows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.
—Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
The China-bound victim had in reality that evening to play host at a surprise planned by Ernestina and himself for Aunt Tranter. The two ladies were to come and dine in his sitting room at the White Lion. A dish of succulent first lobsters2 was prepared, a fresh-run salmon3 boiled, the cellars of the inn ransacked4; and that doctor we met briefly5 one day at Mrs. Poulteney’s was pressed into establishing the correct balance of the sexes.
One of the great characters of Lyme, he was generally supposed to be as excellent a catch in the river Marriage as the salmon he sat down to that night had been in the river Axe6. Ernestina teased her aunt unmercifully about him, ac-cusing that quintessentially mild woman of heartless cruelty to a poor lonely man pining for her hand. But since this tragic7 figure had successfully put up with his poor loneliness for sixty years or more, one may doubt the pining as much as the heartless cruelty.
Dr. Grogan was, in fact, as confirmed an old bachelor as Aunt Tranter a spinster. Being Irish, he had to the full that strangely eunuchistic Hibernian ability to flit and flirt9 and flatter womankind without ever allowing his heart to become entangled10. A dry little kestrel of a man, sharp, almost fierce on occasion, yet easy to unbend when the company was to his taste, he added a pleasant astringency11 to Lyme society; for when he was with you you felt he was always hovering12 a little, waiting to pounce13 on any foolishness—and yet, if he liked you, it was always with a tonic14 wit and the humanity of a man who had lived and learned, after his fashion, to let live. There was, too, something faintly dark about him, for he had been born a Catholic; he was, in terms of our own time, not unlike someone who had been a Communist in the 1930s—accepted now, but still with the devil’s singe15 on him. It was certain—would Mrs. Poulteney have ever allowed him into her presence otherwise?—that he was now (like Disrae-li) a respectable member of the Church of England. It must be so, for (unlike Disraeli) he went scrupulously16 to matins every Sunday. That a man might be so indifferent to religion that he would have gone to a mosque17 or a synagogue, had that been the chief place of worship, was a deceit beyond the Lymers’ imagination. Besides he was a very good doctor, with a sound knowledge of that most important branch of medicine, his patients’ temperament18. With those that secretly wanted to be bullied19, he bullied; and as skillfully chivvied, cosseted20, closed a blind eye, as the case required.
Nobody in Lyme liked good food and wine better; and the repast that Charles and the White Lion offered meeting his approval, he tacitly took over the role of host from the younger man. He had studied at Heidelberg, and practiced in London, and knew the world and its absurdities21 as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap. No one believed all his stories; or wanted any the less to hear them. Aunt Tranter probably knew them as well as anyone in Lyme, for the doctor and she were old friends, and she must have known how little consis-tent each telling was with the previous; yet she laughed most—and at times so immoderately that I dread22 to think what might have happened had the pillar of the community up the hill chanced to hear.
It was an evening that Charles would normally have en-joyed; not least perhaps because the doctor permitted himself little freedoms of language and fact in some of his tales, especially when the plump salmon lay in anatomized ruins and the gentlemen proceeded to a decanter of port, that were not quite comme il faut in the society Ernestina had been trained to grace. Charles saw she was faintly shocked once or twice; that Aunt Tranter was not; and he felt nostalgia24 for this more open culture of their respective youths his two older guests were still happy to slip back into. Watching the little doctor’s mischievous25 eyes and Aunt Tranter’s jolliness he had a whiff of corollary nausea26 for his own time: its stifling27 propriety28, its worship not only of the literal machine in transport and manufacturing but of the far more terrible machine now erecting29 in social convention.
This admirable objectivity may seem to bear remarkably30 little relation to his own behavior earlier that day. Charles did not put it so crudely to himself; but he was not quite blind to his inconsistency, either. He told himself, now swinging to another tack31, that he had taken Miss Woodruff altogether too seriously—in his stumble, so to speak, instead of in his stride. He was especially solicitous32 to Ernestina, no longer souffrante, but a little lacking in her usual vivacity33, though whether that was as a result of the migraine or the doctor’s conversational34 Irish reel, it was hard to say. And yet once again it bore in upon him, as at the concert, that there was something shallow in her—that her acuteness was largely constituted, intellectually as alphabetically35, by a mere36 cuteness. Was there not, beneath the demure37 knowingness, something of the automaton38 about her, of one of those ingenious girl-machines from Hoffmann’s Tales?
But then he thought: she is a child among three adults— and pressed her hand gently beneath the mahogany table. She was charming when she blushed.
The two gentlemen, the tall Charles with his vague resem-blance to the late Prince Consort39 and the thin little doctor, finally escorted the ladies back to their house. It was half past ten, the hour when the social life of London was just beginning; but here the town was well into its usual long sleep. They found themselves, as the door closed in their smiling faces, the only two occupants of Broad Street.
The doctor put a finger on his nose. “Now for you, sir, I prescribe a copious40 toddy dispensed41 by my own learned hand.” Charles put on a polite look of demurral. “Doctor’s orders, you know. Dulce est desipere, as the poet says. It is sweet to sip42 in the proper place.”
Charles smiled. “If you promise the grog to be better than the Latin, then with the greatest pleasure.”
Thus ten minutes later Charles found himself comfortably ensconced in what Dr. Grogan called his “cabin,” a bow-fronted second-floor study that looked out over the small bay between the Cobb Gate and the Cobb itself; a room, the Irishman alleged43, made especially charming in summer by the view it afforded of the nereids who came to take the waters. What nicer—in both senses of the word—situation could a doctor be in than to have to order for his feminine patients what was so pleasant also for his eye? An elegant little brass44 Gregorian telescope rested on a table in the bow window. Grogan’s tongue flickered45 wickedly out, and he winked46.
“For astronomical47 purposes only, of course.”
Charles craned out of the window, and smelled the salt air, and saw on the beach some way to his right the square black silhouettes48 of the bathing-machines from which the nereids emerged. But the only music from the deep that night was the murmur49 of the tide on the shingle50; and somewhere much farther out, the dimly raucous51 cries of the gulls52 roosting on the calm water. Behind him in the lamp-lit room he heard the small chinks that accompanied Grogan’s dispensing53 of his “medicine.” He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
The grog was excellent, the Burmah cheroot that accom-panied it a pleasant surprise; and these two men still lived in a world where strangers of intelligence shared a common landscape of knowledge, a community of information, with a known set of rules and attached meanings. What doctor today knows the classics? What amateur can talk comprehensibly to scientists? These two men’s was a world without the tyranny of specialization; and I would not have you—nor would Dr. Grogan, as you will see—confuse progress with happiness.
For a while they said nothing, sinking back gratefully into that masculine, more serious world the ladies and the occasion had obliged them to leave. Charles had found himself curious to know what political views the doctor held; and by way of getting to the subject asked whom the two busts54 that sat whitely among his host’s books might be of.
The doctor smiled. “Quisque suos patimur manes.” Which is Virgil, and means something like “We make our destinies by our choice of gods.”
Charles smiled back. “I recognize Bentham, do I not?”
“You do. And the other lump of Parian is Voltaire.”
“Therefore I deduce that we subscribe55 to the same party.”
The doctor quizzed him. “Has an Irishman a choice?”
Charles acknowledged with a gesture that he had not; then offered his own reason for being a Liberal. “It seems to me that Mr. Gladstone at least recognizes a radical56 rottenness in the ethical57 foundations of our times.”
“By heavens, I’m not sitting with a socialist58, am I?”
Charles laughed. “Not as yet.”
“Mind you, in this age of steam and cant23, I could forgive a man anything —except Vital Religion.”
“Ah yes indeed.”
“I was a Benthamite as a young man. Voltaire drove me out of Rome, the other man out of the Tory camp. But this new taradiddle now—the extension of franchise59. That’s not for me. I don’t give a fig8 for birth. A duke, heaven knows a king, can be as stupid as the next man. But I thank Mother Nature I shall not be alive in fifty years’ time. When a government begins to fear the mob, it is as much as to say it fears itself.” His eyes twinkled. “Have you heard what my fellow countryman said to the Chartist who went to Dublin to preach his creed60? ‘Brothers,’ the Chartist cried, ‘is not one man as good as another?’ ‘Faith, Mr. Speaker, you’re right,’ cries back Paddy, ‘and a divilish bit better too!’” Charles smiled, but the doctor raised a sharp finger. “You smile, Smithson. But hark you—Paddy was right. That was no bull. That ‘divilish bit better’ will be the ruin of this country. You mark my words.”
“But are your two household gods quite free of blame? Who was it preached the happiness of the greatest number?”
“I do not dispute the maxim62. But the way we go about it. We got by very well without the Iron Civilizer” (by which he meant the railway) “when I was a young man. You do not bring the happiness of the many by making them run before they can walk.”
Charles murmured a polite agreement. He had touched exactly that same sore spot with his uncle, a man of a very different political complexion63. Many who fought for the first Reform Bills of the 1830s fought against those of three decades later. They felt an opportunism, a twofacedness had cancered the century, and given birth to a menacing spirit of envy and rebellion. Perhaps the doctor, born in 1801, was really a fragment of Augustan humanity; his sense of prog-ress depended too closely on an ordered society—order being whatever allowed him to be exactly as he always had been, which made him really much closer to the crypto-Liberal Burke than the crypto-Fascist Bentham. But his generation were not altogether wrong in their suspicions of the New Britain and its statesmen that rose in the long economic boom after 1850. Many younger men, obscure ones like Charles, celebrated64 ones like Matthew Arnold, agreed with them. Was not the supposedly converted Disraeli later heard, on his deathbed, to mutter the prayers for the dead in He-brew? And was not Gladstone, under the cloak of noble oratory65, the greatest master of the ambiguous statement, the brave declaration qualified66 into cowardice67, in modern politi-cal history? Where the highest are indecipherable, the worst ... but clearly the time had come to change the subject. Charles asked the doctor if he was interested in paleontology.
“No, sir. I had better own up. I did not wish to spoil that delightful68 dinner. But I am emphatically a neo-ontologist.” He smiled at Charles from the depths of his boxwing chair. “When we know more of the living, that will be the time to pursue the dead.”
Charles accepted the rebuke69; and seized his opportunity. “I was introduced the other day to a specimen70 of the local flora71 that inclines me partly to agree with you.” He paused cun-ningly. “A very strange case. No doubt you know more of it than I do.” Then sensing that his oblique72 approach might suggest something more than a casual interest, he added quickly, “I think her name is Woodruff. She is employed by Mrs. Poulteney.”
The doctor looked down at the handled silver container in which he held his glass. “Ah yes. Poor Tragedy.’”
“I am being indiscreet? She is perhaps a patient.”
“Well, I attend Mrs. Poulteney. And I would not allow a bad word to be said about her.”
Charles glanced cautiously at him; but there was no mis-taking a certain ferocity of light in the doctor’s eyes, behind his square-rimmed spectacles. The younger man looked down with a small smile.
Dr. Grogan reached out and poked73 his fire. “We know more about the fossils out there on the beach than we do about what takes place in that girl’s mind. There is a clever German doctor who has recently divided melancholia into several types. One he calls natural. By which he means, one is born with a sad temperament. Another he calls occasional, by which he means, springing from an occasion. This, you understand, we all suffer from at times. The third class he calls obscure melancholia. By which he really means, poor man, that he doesn’t know what the devil it is that causes it.”
“But she had an occasion, did she not?”
“Oh now come, is she the first young woman who has been jilted? I could tell you of a dozen others here in Lyme.”
“In such brutal74 circumstance?”
“Worse, some of them. And today they’re as merry as crickets.”
“So you class Miss Woodruff in the obscure category?”
The doctor was silent a few moments. “I was called in—all this, you understand, in strictest confidence—I was called in to see her ... a tenmonth ago. Now I could see what was wrong at once—weeping without reason, not talk-ing, a look about the eyes. Melancholia as plain as measles75. I knew her story, I know the Talbots, she was governess there when it happened. And I think, well the cause is plain—six weeks, six days at Marlborough House is enough to drive any normal being into Bedlam76. Between ourselves, Smithson, I’m an old heathen. I should like to see that palace of piety77 burned to the ground and its owner with it. I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t dance a jig78 on the ashes.”
“I think I might well join you.”
“And begad we wouldn’t be the only ones.” The doctor took a fierce gulp79 of his toddy. “The whole town would be out. But that’s neither here nor the other place. I did what I could for the girl. But I saw there was only one cure.”
“Get her away.”
The doctor nodded vehemently80. “A fortnight later, Grogan’s coming into his house one afternoon and this colleen’s walking towards the Cobb. I have her in, I talk to her, I’m as gentle to her as if she’s my favorite niece. And it’s like jumping a jarvey over a ten-foot wall. Not-on, my goodness, Smithson, didn’t she show me not-on! And it wasn’t just the talking I tried with her. I have a colleague in Exeter, a darling man and a happy wife and four little brats81 like angels, and he was just then looking out for a governess. I told her so.”
“And she wouldn’t leave!”
“Not an inch. It’s this, you see. Mrs. Talbot’s a dove, she would have had the girl back at the first. But no, she goes to a house she must know is a living misery82, to a mistress who never knew the difference between servant and slave, to a post like a pillow of furze. And there she is, she won’t be moved. You won’t believe this, Smithson. But you could offer that girl the throne of England—and a thousand pounds to a penny she’d shake her head.”
“But... I find this incomprehensible. What you tell me she refused is precisely83 what we had considered. Ernestina’s mother—“
“Will be wasting her time, my dear fellow, with all respect to the lady.” He smiled grimly at Charles, then stopped to top up their glasses from the grog-kettle on the hob. “But the good Doctor Hartmann describes somewhat similar cases. He says of one, now, a very striking thing. A case of a widow, if I recall, a young widow, Weimar, husband a cavalry84 officer, died in some accident on field exercises. You see there are parallels. This woman went into deep mourning. Very well. To be expected. But it went on and on, Smithson, year after year. Nothing in the house was allowed to be changed. The dead man’s clothes still hung in his wardrobe, his pipe lay beside his favorite chair, even some letters that came ad-dressed to him after his death ... there ...” the doctor pointed85 into the shadows behind Charles ... “there on the same silver dish, unopened, yellowing, year after year.” He paused and smiled at Charles. “Your ammonites will never hold such mysteries as that. But this is what Hartmann says.”
He stood over Charles, and directed the words into him with pointed finger. “It was as if the woman had become addicted86 to melancholia as one becomes addicted to opium87. Now do you see how it is? Her sadness becomes her hap-piness. She wants to be a sacrificial victim, Smithson. Where you and I flinch88 back, she leaps forward. She is possessed89, you see.” He sat down again. “Dark indeed. Very dark.”
There was a silence between the two men. Charles threw the stub of his cheroot into the fire. For a moment it flamed. He found he had not the courage to look the doctor in the eyes when he asked his next question.
“And she has confided90 the real state of her mind to no one?”
“Her closest friend is certainly Mrs. Talbot. But she tells me the girl keeps mum even with her. I flatter myself . . . but I most certainly failed.”
“And if ... let us say she could bring herself to reveal the feelings she is hiding to some sympathetic other person—“
“She would be cured. But she does not want to be cured. It is as simple as if she refused to take medicine.”
“But presumably in such a case you would...”
“How do you force the soul, young man? Can you tell me that?” Charles shrugged91 his impotence. “Of course not. And I will tell you something. It is better so. Understanding never grew from violation92.”
“She is then a hopeless case?”
“In the sense you intend, yes. Medicine can do nothing. You must not think she is like us men, able to reason clearly, examine her motives93, understand why she behaves as she does. One must see her as a being in a mist. All we can do is wait and hope that the mists rise. Then perhaps ...” he fell silent. Then added, without hope, “Perhaps.”
At that very same moment, Sarah’s bedroom lies in the black silence shrouding95 Marlborough House. She is asleep, turned to the right, her dark hair falling across her face and almost hiding it. Again you notice how peaceful, how untragic, the features are: a healthy young woman of twenty-six or -seven, with a slender, rounded arm thrown out, over the bedclothes, for the night is still and the windows closed ... thrown out, as I say, and resting over another body.
Not a man. A girl of nineteen or so, also asleep, her back to Sarah, yet very close to her, since the bed, though large, is not meant for two people.
A thought has swept into your mind; but you forget we are in the year 1867. Suppose Mrs. Poulteney stood suddenly in the door, lamp in hand, and came upon those two affec-tionate bodies lying so close, so together, there. You imagine perhaps that she would have swollen96, an infuriated black swan, and burst into an outraged97 anathema98; you see the two girls, dressed only in their piteous shifts, cast from the granite99 gates.
Well, you would be quite wrong. Since we know Mrs. Poulteney dosed herself with laudanum every night, it was very unlikely that the case should have been put to the test. But if she had after all stood there, it is almost certain that she would simply have turned and gone away—more, she might even have closed the door quietly enough not to wake the sleepers100.
Incomprehensible? But some vices101 were then so unnatural102 that they did not exist. I doubt if Mrs. Poulteney had ever heard of the word “lesbian”; and if she had, it would have commenced with a capital, and referred to an island in Greece. Besides, it was to her a fact as rock-fundamental as that the world was round or that the Bishop103 of Exeter was Dr. Phillpotts that women did not feel carnal pleasure. She knew, of course, that the lower sort of female apparently104 enjoyed a certain kind of male caress105, such as that monstrous106 kiss she had once seen planted on Mary’s cheeks, but this she took to be the result of feminine vanity and feminine weak-ness. Prostitutes, as Lady Cotton’s most celebrated good work could but remind her, existed; but they were explicable as creatures so depraved that they overcame their innate107 woman’s disgust at the carnal in their lust108 for money. That indeed had been her first assumption about Mary; the girl, since she giggled109 after she was so grossly abused by the stableboy, was most patently a prostitute in the making.
But what of Sarah’s motives? As regards lesbianism, she was as ignorant as her mistress; but she did not share Mrs. Poulteney’s horror of the carnal. She knew, or at least sus-pected, that there was a physical pleasure in love. Yet she was, I think, as innocent as makes no matter. It had begun, this sleeping with Millie, soon after the poor girl had broken down in front of Mrs. Poulteney. Dr. Grogan recommended that she be moved out of the maids’ dormitory and given a room with more light. It so happened that there was a long unused dressing110 room next to Sarah’s bedroom; and Millie was installed in it. Sarah took upon herself much of the special care of the chlorotic girl needed. She was a plow-man’s daughter, fourth of eleven children who lived with their parents in a poverty too bitter to describe, her home a damp, cramped111, two-room cottage in one of those valleys that radiates west from bleak112 Eggardon. A fashionable young London architect now has the place and comes there for weekends, and loves it, so wild, so out-of-the-way, so pic-turesquely rural; and perhaps this exorcizes the Victorian horrors that took place there. I hope so; those visions of the contented113 country laborer114 and his brood made so fashionable by George Morland and his kind (Birket Foster was the arch criminal by 1867) were as stupid and pernicious a sentimentalization, therefore a suppression of reality, as that in our own Hollywood films of “real” life. One look at Millie and her ten miserable115 siblings116 should have scorched117 the myth of the Happy Swain into ashes; but so few gave that look. Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls round its Ver-sailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
One night, then, Sarah heard the girl weeping. She went into her room and comforted her, which was not too diffi-cult, for Millie was a child in all but her years; unable to read or write and as little able to judge the other humans around her as a dog; if you patted her, she understood—if you kicked her, then that was life. It was a bitterly cold night, and Sarah had simply slipped into the bed and taken the girl in her arms, and kissed her, and quite literally118 patted her. To her Millie was like one of the sickly lambs she had once, before her father’s social ambitions drove such peasant procedures from their way of life, so often brought up by hand. And heaven knows the simile119 was true also for the plowman’s daughter.
From then on, the lamb would come two or three times a week and look desolate120. She slept badly, worse than Sarah, who sometimes went solitary121 to sleep, only to wake in the dawn to find the girl beside her—so meekly-gently did Millie, at some intolerable midnight hour, slip into her place. She was afraid of the dark, poor girl; and had it not been for Sarah, would have asked to go back to the dormitory up-stairs.
This tender relationship was almost mute. They rarely if ever talked, and if they did, of only the most trivial domestic things. They knew it was that warm, silent co-presence in the darkness that mattered. There must have been something sexual in their feelings? Perhaps; but they never went beyond the bounds that two sisters would. No doubt here and there in another milieu122, in the most brutish of the urban poor, in the most emancipated123 of the aristocracy, a truly orgastic lesbianism existed then; but we may ascribe this very com-mon Victorian phenomenon of women sleeping together far more to the desolating124 arrogance125 of contemporary man than to a more suspect motive94. Besides, in such wells of loneliness is not any coming together closer to humanity than perver-sity?
So let them sleep, these two innocents; and let us return to that other more rational, more learned and altogether more nobly gendered pair down by the sea.
The two lords of creation had passed back from the subject of Miss Woodruff and rather two-edged metaphors126 concerning mist to the less ambiguous field of paleontology.
“You must admit,” said Charles, “that Lyell’s findings are fraught127 with a much more than intrinsic importance. I fear the clergy128 have a tremendous battle on their hands.”
Lyell, let me interpose, was the father of modern geology. Already Buffon, in the famous Epoques de la Nature of 1778, had exploded the myth, invented by Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth century and recorded solemnly in count-less editions of the official English Bible, that the world had been created at nine o’clock on October 26th, 4004 B.C. But even the great French naturalist129 had not dared to push the origin of the world back further than some 75,000 years. Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833—and so coinciding very nicely with reform elsewhere— had burled it back millions. His is a largely unremembered, but an essential name; he gave the age, and countless130 scien-tists in other fields, the most meaningful space. His discov-eries blew like a great wind, freezing to the timid, but invigorating to the bold, through the century’s stale meta-physical corridors. But you must remember that at the time of which I write few had even heard of Lyell’s masterwork, fewer believed its theories, and fewer still accepted all their implications. Genesis is a great lie; but it is also a great poem; and a six-thousand-year-old womb is much warmer than one that stretches for two thousand million.
Charles was therefore interested—both his future father-in-law and his uncle had taught him to step very delicately in this direction—to see whether Dr. Grogan would confirm or dismiss his solicitude131 for the theologians. But the doctor was unforthcoming. He stared into his fire and murmured, “They have indeed.”
There was a little silence, which Charles broke casually132, as if really to keep the conversation going.
“Have you read this fellow Darwin?”
Grogan’s only reply was a sharp look over his spectacles. Then he got to his feet and taking the camphine lamp, went to a bookshelf at the back of the narrow room. In a moment he returned and handed a book to Charles. It was The Origin of Species. He looked up at the doctor’s severe eyes.
“I did not mean to imply—“
“Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you should know better than to talk of a great man as ‘this fellow.’”
“From what you said—“
“This book is about the living, Smithson. Not the dead.”
The doctor rather crossly turned to replace the lamp on its table. Charles stood.
“You are quite right. I apologize.”
The little doctor eyed him sideways.
“Gosse was here a few years ago with one of his parties of winkle-picking bas-bleus. Have you read his Omphalos?”
Charles smiled. “I found it central to nothing but the sheerest absurdity133.”
And now Grogan, having put him through both a positive and a negative test, smiled bleakly134 in return.
“I told him as much at the end of his lecture here. Ha! Didn’t I just.” And the doctor permitted his Irish nostrils135 two little snorts of triumphant136 air. “I fancy that’s one bag of fundamentalist wind that will think twice before blowing on this part of the Dorset littoral137 again.”*
[* Omphalos: an attempt to untie138 the geological knot is now forgot-ten; which is a pity, as it is one of the most curious—and uninten-tionally comic—books of the whole era. The author was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the leading marine139 biologist of his day; yet his fear of Lyell and his followers140 drove him in 1857 to advance a theory in which the anomalies between science and the Biblical account of Creation are all neatly141 removed at one fine blow: Gosse’s ingenious argument being that on the day God created Adam he also created all fossil and extinct forms of life along with him—which must surely rank as the most incomprehensible cover-up operation ever attributed to divinity by man. Even the date of Omphalos—just two years before The Origin—could not have been more unfortunate. Gosse was, of course, immortalized half a century later in his son Edmund’s famous and exquisite142 memoir143.]
He eyed Charles more kindly144.
“A Darwinian?”
“Passionately.”
Grogan then seized his hand and gripped it; as if he were Crusoe, and Charles, Man Friday; and perhaps something passed between them not so very unlike what passed uncon-sciously between those two sleeping girls half a mile away. They knew they were like two grains of yeast145 in a sea of lethargic146 dough—two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid147 broth61.
Our two carbonari of the mind—has not the boy in man always adored playing at secret societies?—now entered on a new round of grog; new cheroots were lit; and a lengthy148 celebration of Darwin followed. They ought, one may think, to have been humbled149 by the great new truths they were discussing; but I am afraid the mood in both of them—and in Charles especially, when he finally walked home in the small hours of the morning—was one of exalted150 superiority, intel-lectual distance above the rest of their fellow creatures.
Unlit Lyme was the ordinary mass of mankind, most evidently sunk in immemorial sleep; while Charles the natu-rally selected (the adverb carries both its senses) was pure intellect, walking awake, free as a god, one with the unslum-bering stars and understanding all.
All except Sarah, that is.
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recurring
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lobsters
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salmon
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ransacked
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briefly
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axe
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tragic
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fig
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flirt
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entangled
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| adj.卷入的；陷入的；被缠住的；缠在一起的v.使某人（某物/自己）缠绕，纠缠于（某物中），使某人（自己）陷入（困难或复杂的环境中）( entangle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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11
astringency
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| n.收敛性，严酷 | |
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hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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13
pounce
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| n.猛扑；v.猛扑，突然袭击，欣然同意 | |
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tonic
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| n./adj.滋补品，补药，强身的，健体的 | |
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singe
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| v.(轻微地)烧焦；烫焦；烤焦 | |
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scrupulously
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| adv.一丝不苟地；小心翼翼地，多顾虑地 | |
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17
mosque
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| n.清真寺 | |
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18
temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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19
bullied
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| adj.被欺负了v.恐吓，威逼( bully的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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20
cosseted
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| v.宠爱，娇养，纵容( cosset的过去式 ) | |
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21
absurdities
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| n.极端无理性( absurdity的名词复数 )；荒谬；谬论；荒谬的行为 | |
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22
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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23
cant
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| n.斜穿，黑话，猛扔 | |
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24
nostalgia
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| n.怀乡病，留恋过去，怀旧 | |
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25
mischievous
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| adj.调皮的，恶作剧的，有害的，伤人的 | |
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26
nausea
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| n.作呕，恶心；极端的憎恶(或厌恶) | |
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27
stifling
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| a.令人窒息的 | |
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28
propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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29
erecting
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| v.使直立，竖起( erect的现在分词 )；建立 | |
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30
remarkably
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| ad.不同寻常地，相当地 | |
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31
tack
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| n.大头钉；假缝，粗缝 | |
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32
solicitous
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| adj.热切的，挂念的 | |
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33
vivacity
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| n.快活，活泼，精神充沛 | |
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34
conversational
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| adj.对话的，会话的 | |
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35
alphabetically
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| adv.照字母顺序排列地 | |
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36
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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37
demure
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| adj.严肃的；端庄的 | |
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38
automaton
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| n.自动机器，机器人 | |
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39
consort
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| v.相伴；结交 | |
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40
copious
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| adj.丰富的，大量的 | |
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41
dispensed
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| v.分配( dispense的过去式和过去分词 )；施与；配（药） | |
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42
sip
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| v.小口地喝，抿，呷；n.一小口的量 | |
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43
alleged
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| a.被指控的，嫌疑的 | |
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44
brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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45
flickered
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| （通常指灯光）闪烁，摇曳( flicker的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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46
winked
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| v.使眼色( wink的过去式和过去分词 )；递眼色（表示友好或高兴等）；（指光）闪烁；闪亮 | |
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47
astronomical
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| adj.天文学的，（数字）极大的 | |
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48
silhouettes
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| 轮廓( silhouette的名词复数 )； （人的）体形； （事物的）形状； 剪影 | |
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49
murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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50
shingle
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| n.木瓦板；小招牌(尤指医生或律师挂的营业招牌)；v.用木瓦板盖（屋顶）；把（女子头发）剪短 | |
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51
raucous
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| adj.(声音)沙哑的，粗糙的 | |
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52
gulls
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| n.鸥( gull的名词复数 )v.欺骗某人( gull的第三人称单数 ) | |
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53
dispensing
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| v.分配( dispense的现在分词 )；施与；配（药） | |
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54
busts
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| 半身雕塑像( bust的名词复数 )； 妇女的胸部； 胸围； 突击搜捕 | |
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55
subscribe
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| vi.(to)订阅，订购；同意；vt.捐助，赞助 | |
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56
radical
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| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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57
ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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58
socialist
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| n.社会主义者；adj.社会主义的 | |
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59
franchise
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| n.特许，特权，专营权，特许权 | |
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60
creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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61
broth
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| n.原(汁)汤(鱼汤、肉汤、菜汤等) | |
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62
maxim
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| n.格言，箴言 | |
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63
complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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64
celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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65
oratory
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| n.演讲术；词藻华丽的言辞 | |
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66
qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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67
cowardice
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| n.胆小，怯懦 | |
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68
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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69
rebuke
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| v.指责，非难，斥责 [反]praise | |
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70
specimen
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| n.样本，标本 | |
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71
flora
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| n.(某一地区的)植物群 | |
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72
oblique
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| adj.斜的，倾斜的，无诚意的，不坦率的 | |
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73
poked
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| v.伸出( poke的过去式和过去分词 )；戳出；拨弄；与（某人）性交 | |
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74
brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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75
measles
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| n.麻疹，风疹，包虫病，痧子 | |
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76
bedlam
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| n.混乱，骚乱；疯人院 | |
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77
piety
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| n.虔诚，虔敬 | |
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78
jig
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| n.快步舞（曲）；v.上下晃动；用夹具辅助加工；蹦蹦跳跳 | |
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79
gulp
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| vt.吞咽，大口地吸（气）；vi.哽住；n.吞咽 | |
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80
vehemently
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| adv. 热烈地 | |
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81
brats
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| n.调皮捣蛋的孩子( brat的名词复数 ) | |
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82
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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83
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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84
cavalry
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| n.骑兵；轻装甲部队 | |
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85
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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86
addicted
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| adj.沉溺于....的，对...上瘾的 | |
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87
opium
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| n.鸦片；adj.鸦片的 | |
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88
flinch
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| v.畏缩，退缩 | |
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89
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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90
confided
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| v.吐露（秘密，心事等）( confide的过去式和过去分词 )；（向某人）吐露（隐私、秘密等） | |
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91
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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92
violation
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| n.违反(行为)，违背(行为)，侵犯 | |
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93
motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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94
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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95
shrouding
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| n.覆盖v.隐瞒( shroud的现在分词 )；保密 | |
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96
swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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97
outraged
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| a.震惊的，义愤填膺的 | |
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98
anathema
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| n.诅咒；被诅咒的人(物)，十分讨厌的人(物) | |
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99
granite
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| adj.花岗岩，花岗石 | |
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100
sleepers
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| n.卧铺（通常以复数形式出现）；卧车( sleeper的名词复数 )；轨枕；睡觉（呈某种状态）的人；小耳环 | |
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101
vices
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| 缺陷( vice的名词复数 )； 恶习； 不道德行为； 台钳 | |
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102
unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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103
bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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104
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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105
caress
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| vt./n.爱抚，抚摸 | |
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106
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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107
innate
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| adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的 | |
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108
lust
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| n.性(淫)欲；渴(欲)望；vi.对…有强烈的欲望 | |
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109
giggled
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| v.咯咯地笑( giggle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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110
dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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111
cramped
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| a.狭窄的 | |
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112
bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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113
contented
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| adj.满意的，安心的，知足的 | |
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114
laborer
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| n.劳动者，劳工 | |
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115
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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116
siblings
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| n.兄弟，姐妹( sibling的名词复数 ) | |
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117
scorched
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| 烧焦，烤焦( scorch的过去式和过去分词 )； 使（植物）枯萎，把…晒枯； 高速行驶； 枯焦 | |
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118
literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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119
simile
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| n.直喻，明喻 | |
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120
desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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121
solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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122
milieu
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| n.环境；出身背景；(个人所处的)社会环境 | |
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123
emancipated
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| adj.被解放的，不受约束的v.解放某人（尤指摆脱政治、法律或社会的束缚）( emancipate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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124
desolating
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| 毁坏( desolate的现在分词 )； 极大地破坏； 使沮丧； 使痛苦 | |
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125
arrogance
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| n.傲慢，自大 | |
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126
metaphors
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| 隐喻( metaphor的名词复数 ) | |
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127
fraught
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| adj.充满…的，伴有(危险等)的；忧虑的 | |
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128
clergy
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| n.[总称]牧师，神职人员 | |
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129
naturalist
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| n.博物学家(尤指直接观察动植物者) | |
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130
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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131
solicitude
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| n.焦虑 | |
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132
casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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133
absurdity
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| n.荒谬，愚蠢；谬论 | |
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134
bleakly
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| 无望地，阴郁地，苍凉地 | |
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135
nostrils
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| 鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 ) | |
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136
triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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137
littoral
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| adj.海岸的；湖岸的；n.沿（海）岸地区 | |
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138
untie
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| vt.解开，松开；解放 | |
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139
marine
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| adj.海的；海生的；航海的；海事的；n.水兵 | |
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140
followers
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| 追随者( follower的名词复数 )； 用户； 契据的附面； 从动件 | |
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141
neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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142
exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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143
memoir
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| n.[pl.]回忆录，自传；记事录 | |
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144
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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145
yeast
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| n.酵母；酵母片；泡沫；v.发酵；起泡沫 | |
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146
lethargic
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| adj.昏睡的，懒洋洋的 | |
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147
insipid
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| adj.无味的，枯燥乏味的，单调的 | |
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148
lengthy
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| adj.漫长的，冗长的 | |
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149
humbled
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| adj. 卑下的，谦逊的，粗陋的 vt. 使 ... 卑下，贬低 | |
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150
exalted
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| adj.(地位等)高的，崇高的；尊贵的，高尚的 | |
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