He was a
peasant lad, a penniless bursary student at Edinburgh University. In the
Long Vacation, he worked at his native farming, reading voraciously all
the time and feeding sparingly, saving his wages against the coming
bleak winter in his fireless attic in an Edinburgh wynd. He talked to
Marcella, dogmatically, prodigiously, unanswerably. On her legends and
fairy-tales and poetry he poured contempt. He read the "Riddle of the
Universe" and the "Kritic of Pure Reason," orating them to Marcella as
they worked together in the harvest field. She did not even understand
their terminology. He had a quite unreasoning belief in the stolidly
utilitarian of German philosophers and laid siege to Marcella's
mysticism, but after he went back one day she discovered a box of her
mother's poetry books and so Tennyson, Shelley and Keats shone into her
life and, reading an ancient copy of "David and Bethsaibe," she gathered
that the Bible Aunt Janet read sourly had quite human possibilities.
This box of books was her first glimpse of a world that was not a long
tale of stern fights; it was her first glimpse of something softly
sensuous instead of austere and natural and passionate.
Marcella never knew quite how her folks came to live at the farm; it had
happened when she was three years old and she took for granted her world
of crumbling, decayed splendours.
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