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Walpole, Hugh, Sir, 1884-1941

"The Captives"

It had
been given to John Warlock many years before by an old lady who
heard him preach and had been, for a week, converted, but on his
demand that she should give her wealth to the poor and fling aside
her passion for Musical Comedy, left him with indignation. The
picture had remained; it hung there now crooked on its cord.
John Warlock was unconscious of the dust and disorder that
surrounded him. His own passion for personal cleanliness sprang from
the early days with his father, to whom bodily cleanliness had been
part of a fanatical mysticism. Partly also by reason of that early
training, sloth, drunkenness, immorality, had no power over him. And
of the whole actual world that surrounded him he was very little
conscious except that he hated towns and longed always for air and
space.
So that the windows were open one room was to him as another.
He had often, during his work with the members of his community,
been conscious of his ignorance of the impulses and powers that went
up to make the ordinary sensual physical life of the normal man. His
own troubles, trials, failures were so utterly of another kind that
in this other world his imagination refused to aid him.


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