And the contrast afforded by the lives and ambitions of Anne and her brother had been so startling that I believe I must have been stirred by it to some kind of awakening even had I not fallen in love with Anne. I had been given so perfect an opportunity to enter into their feelings and views by my strange and intimate association with their antagonism to all that was typified by the rule of the Hall. By reason of my sympathy with the Banks I had been able to realise the virtue of struggle and the evils of the almost unlimited and quite indiscriminating power wielded by such landowners as old Jervaise. And in condemning him and his family, I must condemn myself also. We were all of us so smug and self-satisfied. We had blindly believed that it was our birthright to reap where we had not sown.
Nevertheless, though the truth was so plain to me in that moment, I accepted it grudgingly. The voice of my artificial self clamoured for a hearing. But these things were so, had always been so, it protested; what could I do to change them? And probably, if it had not been for the force of the thrilling passion of reverence and admiration for Anne that had suddenly illuminated my whole being, the cultivated inertia of a life-time would finally have conquered me. I should have thrust the problem away from me and returned with a sensual satisfaction to the familiar way of life I understood. I should have consoled myself with the reflection that mine was not the temperament to face the ardours and disappointments of struggle.
As it was, I longed so furiously to justify myself before Anne; to win, by some heroic measure, her good opinion, that the incentive of my passion bore me triumphantly over the first re-actions of inertia and protest. I could never return to my old complacency, although the mechanical, accustomed habit of my thought had for me, as yet, no suggestion other than some change in the ideal and manner of my writing. I thought vaguely of attempting some didactic drama to illustrate the tragic contrast between gentle and simple that had been so glaringly illuminated for me by recent experience. Yet, even as I played with that idea, I recognised it as a device of my old self to allay my discontent. I caught myself speculating on the promise of the play's success, on the hope of winning new laurels as an earnest student of sociology. I thrust that temptation from me with a sneer at my own inherent hypocrisy.