Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II MAMMON, GREATEST GOD BELOW THE SKY We feel for the ugly duckling in Hans Andersen's immortal story; but our pity is tempered by the knowledge that one day he will grow a pair of glorious wings and soar upward into the spaces of the blue, where his fellows are floating on outspread pinions. What, however, if we could not tell whether the great wings were destined to sprout? if it depended on the other ducklings, which were neither ugly nor uncommon, to allow their perplexing mate a free course, or to keep him awkward and discontented in the muddy pool at the farmer's door? And what if the suspected uncompanionable creature had a presentiment as dim as it was importunate of the snowy wings and the swan-music which ought to be his, yet were like an idle dream, waking every night, to be scattered and laughed out in the day-time by the sceptical quacking which went on all round the pool? Would our pity be less? Marian Greystoke was such an ugly duckling. She was all that she fancied, and more. The passionate character, at odds with the little world of Rylsford, had only begun to display itself; and its capability of inflicting pain, or enduring it, was almost latent. She was perverse, wilful, obstinate and proud. She rebelled against circumstances. She vexed her own heart. The white wings— she was always in imagination spreading them. The swan's song—she tried over its inarticulate music day by day, in her diary, which was a volume of hopes, laments, protests, castles in the air, an unfinished romance ofher own life, to which she could not discover or invent a denoument. She sketched her face from the looking- glass, and tried to read her fortune in its lines. But the admirable beauty, the dark, bright eyes, told her no more than if they had been a stranger's. Under...