He knew that the Inside
Saints had a society and rules of their own inside the larger body,
and from that inner society he was quite definitely excluded. Of
that exclusion he would have been only too glad had it not been for
his father, but now when he saw him growing from day to day more
haggard and worn, more aloof from all human society, when lie saw
him wrapped further and further into some strange and as it seemed
to him insane absorption, he was determined to fight his way into
the heart of it. His growing intimacy with Maggie had relieved him,
for a moment, of the intensity of this other anxiety. Now suddenly
he was flung back into the very thick of it. His earlier plan of
forcing his father out of all this network of chicanery and
charlatanism now returned. He felt that if he could only seize his
father and forcibly abduct him and take him away from Amy and
Thurston and the rest, and all the associations of the Chapel, he
might cure him and lead him back to health and happiness again.
And yet he did not know. He had not himself escaped from it all by
leaving it, and then that undermining bewildering suspicion that
perhaps after all there was something in all of this, that it was
not only charlatanism, confused and disconcerted him.
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