I
know it has played the very deuce with my life. It has made me
discontented with what I have; but it hasn't shown me anything else that
was worth striving for. I seem to have lost the power of wanting because
I've discovered that nothing is worth having after you get it. Every
apple has turned into Dead Sea fruit."
He had never before spoken so freely, and when he had finished he felt
awkward and half resentful. Margaret's extraordinary frankness had
started him, he supposed, on a similar strain; but he wished that he had
kept back all that sentimental nonsense about what his mother called
disapprovingly, his "frame of mind." Any frame of mind except the
permanently settled appeared unsafe to Mrs. Culpeper; and her son felt
at the moment that her opinion was justified. Somehow the whole thing
seemed to have resulted from his meeting with Gideon Vetch. It was Vetch
who had "unsettled" him, who had taken the wind out of the stiff sails
of his prejudices. Had the war awakened in him, he wondered, the need of
crude emotional stimulants, the dangerous allurement of the unfamiliar,
the exotic? Would it ever pass, and would life become again normal and
placid without losing its zest and its interest? For it was the zest of
life, he realized, that he had encountered in Gideon Vetch.
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