He now returned with feverish desperation to his study for the
priesthood--in the recognition that the single-mindedness of his
aims, and his fidelity to the cause, had been more than questionable
of late. His passion for Sue troubled his soul; yet his lawful
abandonment to the society of Arabella for twelve hours seemed
instinctively a worse thing--even though she had not told him of her
Sydney husband till afterwards. He had, he verily believed, overcome
all tendency to fly to liquor--which, indeed, he had never done from
taste, but merely as an escape from intolerable misery of mind. Yet
he perceived with despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of
too many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope
for was that in a life of constant internal warfare b
