Her guest went out into the rain, asking himself by what theory of
the will his hostess could justify such a phrase---too simple to
see that she had only thrown it out, as the cuttlefish its ink, to
cover her retreat.
But the weather had got a little into his brain: into his soul it
was seldom allowed to intrude. He felt depressed and feeble and
dull. But at the first corner he turned, he met a little breath
of wind. It blew the rain in his face, and revived him a little,
reminding him at the same time that he had not yet opened his
umbrella. As he put it up he laughed.
"Here I am," he said to himself, "lance in hand, spurring to meet
my dragon!"
Once when he used a similar expression, Malcolm had asked him what
he meant by his dragon; "I mean," replied the schoolmaster, "that
huge slug, The Commonplace. It is the wearifulest dragon to fight
in the whole miscreation. Wound it as you may, the jelly mass of
the monster closes, and the dull one is himself again--feeding
all the time so cunningly that scarce one of the victims whom he
has swallowed suspects that he is but pabulum slowly digesting in
the belly of the monster."
If the schoolmaster's dragon, spread abroad as he lies, a vague
dilution, everywhere throughout human haunts, has yet any headquarters,
where else can they be than in such places as that to which he was
now making his way to fight him? What can be fuller of the wearisome,
depressing, beauty blasting commonplace than a dissenting chapel in
London, on the night of the weekly prayer meeting, and that night
a drizzly one? The few lights fill the lower part with a dull,
yellow, steamy glare, while the vast galleries, possessed by an
ugly twilight, yawn above like the dreary openings of a disconsolate
eternity.
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