and exercise helped him to get rid of his headache. A burst of
sunshine in the afternoon would have made him reasonably cheerful,
but for the wretched meditations surviving from yesterday.

He pondered frequently on his spasmodic debauch, repeating, as well
as memory permitted, all his absurdities of speech and action.
Defiant self-justification was now far to seek. On the other hand,
he perceived very clearly how easy it would be for him to lapse by
degrees of weakened will into a ruinous dissoluteness. Anything of
that kind would mean, of course, the abandonment of his ambitions.
All he had to fight the world with was his brain; and only by
incessant strenuousness in its exercise had he achieved the moderate
prominence declared in yesterday's ceremony. By birth, by station,
he was of no account; if he chose to sink, no influential voice
would deplore his falling off or remind him of what he owed to
himself. Chilvers, now--what a wide-spreading outcry, what calling
upon gods and men, would be excited by any defection of that
brilliant youth! Godwin Peak must make his own career, and that he
would hardly do save by efforts greater than the ordinary man can
put forth. The ordinary man?--Was he in any respect extraordinary?
were his powers noteworthy? It was the first time that he had
deliberately posed this question to himself, and for answer came a
rush of confident blood, pulsing through all the mechanism of his
being.

The train of thought which occupied him during this long trudge was
to remain fixed in his memory; in any survey of the years of
pupilage this recollection would stand prominently forth,
associated, moreover, with one slight incident which at the time
seemed a mere interruption of his musing. From a point on the