The parson and the school-master had often walked out to the Falconers'
together in the days when John imagined his suit to be faring prosperously;
and from Amy's conduct, and his too slight knowledge of the sex, this arctic
explorer had long since adjusted his frosted faculties to the notion that
she expected to become John's wife. He was sorry; it sent an extra chill
through the icebergs of his imagination; but perhaps he gathered comforting
warmth from the hope that some of John's whiteness would fall upon her and
that thus from being a blackish lambkin she would at least eventually turn
into a light-gray ewe.
When the tidings reached his far-inward ear that she was to marry Joseph
instead of his friend, a general thaw set in over the entire landscape of
his nature: it was like spring along the southern fringes of Greenland.
The error must not be inculcated here that the parson had no passions: he
had three-ruling ones: a passion for music, a passion for metaphysics, and a
passion for satirizing the other sex.
Dropping in one afternoon and glancing with delicate indirection at John's
short shelf of books, he inquired whether he had finished with his Paley.
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