"Yes, that
would get over the difficulty. Now if we could only manage to keep my
front ... if my design for the front cannot be preserved, I might as well
abandon the whole thing! And then?"
And then life seemed to him void of meaning and light. He might as well
settle down and marry....
His face contracted in an expression of anger. He rose from the table,
and he looked round the room. Its appearance was singularly jarring,
shattering as it did his dream of the cloister, and up-building in fancy
the horrid fabric of marriage and domesticity. The room seemed to him a
symbol--with the great bed, voluptuous, the corpulent arm-chair, the
toilet-table shapeless with muslin--of the hideous laws of the world
and the flesh, ever at variance and at war, and ever defeating the
indomitable aspirations of the soul. John ordered his room to be
changed; and, in the face of much opposition from his mother, who
declared that he would never be able to sleep there, and would lose his
health, he selected a narrow room at the end of the passage. He would
have no carpet. He placed a small iron bed against the wall; two plain
chairs, a screen to keep off the draught from the door, a basin-stand
such as you might find in a ship's cabin, and a prie-dieu, were all the
furniture he permitted himself.
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