Weevil, surmounted by his impudent water-rat face, as the self-conscious youth once more began his gymnastics with the willow-tree, was a sort of moral atrophy. Sitting on the bank, hugging his knees, at a little distance from Jason and Lobbie, he had time to watch the Squire, and he was struck by the purged and almost hieratic look which the man now wore, as he stood leaning upon his cane, encouraging the silly manoeuvres of the sausage-seller. “He looks like a medieval bishop watching a tournament,” Wolf said to himself. And the placid sunburnt sympathy he felt for the man’s amiable passivity seemed seeping in upon him like a warm salt-tide⁠—a tide that was outside any “dualism”⁠—a tide that was threatening the banked-up discriminations of his whole life.

Then all in a moment he asked himself a very searching question.