flights of his intellect and of his imagination he was immeasurably
above the intel-lects of his neighbours and knew that he was
immeasurably above them. Therefore, and in both moods, he commonly
hated and despised them. "Fools, fools! Unread, pompous, petty!"

At the rectory, among his family, he seemed to himself to be
surrounded by incompetent women and herds of children.

He was a terribly lonely man when Rosalie first came to know him
and thought of him as Prospero. He is to be imagined in those days
as a fierce, flying, futile figure scudding about on the face of
the parish and in the vast gaunt spaces of the rectory, with his
burning face and his jutting nose, trying to get away from people,
hungering to meet sympathetic people; trying to get way from
himself, hungering after the things that his self had lost. In his
young manhood he was known for moods of intense reserve alternated
by fits of tremendous gaiety and boisterous high spirits. ("A
fresh start! Hurrah!" when release from the school came. "What does
anything matter? Now we're really off at last! Hurrah! Hurrah!")
In his set manhood, when Rosalie knew him, there were substituted
for the fits of boisterous spirits, paroxysms of violent outburst
against his lot. "Infernal parish! Hateful parish! Forsaken parish!"
after the ignominy of flight before the bull. "Blow the dinner!
Dash the dinner! Blow the dinner!" after wrestling a soggy steak
from his pocket and hurling it half a mile through the air. These
and that single but terrible occasion of "Cambridge! Cambridge! My
youth! My God, my God, my youth!"

A terribly lonely man.