- end_line
- 12751
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 12712
- text
- did this remarkable double-doom of his parents wholly fail to impress
his mind with presentiments concerning his own fate--his own hereditary
liability to madness. Presentiment, I say; but what is a presentiment?
how shall you coherently define a presentiment, or how make any thing
out of it which is at all lucid, unless you say that a presentiment is
but a judgment in disguise? And if a judgment in disguise, and yet
possessing this preternaturalness of prophecy, how then shall you escape
the fateful conclusion, that you are helplessly held in the six hands of
the Sisters? For while still dreading your doom, you foreknow it. Yet
how foreknow and dread in one breath, unless with this divine seeming
power of prescience, you blend the actual slimy powerlessness of
defense?
That his cousin, Glen Stanly, had been chosen by his mother to inherit
the domain of the Meadows, was not entirely surprising to Pierre. Not
only had Glen always been a favorite with his mother by reason of his
superb person and his congeniality of worldly views with herself, but
excepting only Pierre, he was her nearest surviving blood relation; and
moreover, in his christian name, bore the hereditary syllables,
Glendinning. So that if to any one but Pierre the Meadows must descend,
Glen, on these general grounds, seemed the appropriate heir.
But it is not natural for a man, never mind who he may be, to see a
noble patrimony, rightfully his, go over to a soul-alien, and that alien
once his rival in love, and now his heartless, sneering foe; for so
Pierre could not but now argue of Glen; it is not natural for a man to
see this without singular emotions of discomfort and hate. Nor in Pierre
were these feelings at all soothed by the report of Glen's renewed
attentions to Lucy. For there is something in the breast of almost
every man, which at bottom takes offense at the attentions of any other
man offered to a woman, the hope of whose nuptial love he himself may
have discarded. Fain would a man selfishly appropriate all the hearts
which have ever in any way confessed themselves his. Besides, in
Pierre's case, this resentment was heightened by Glen's previous
hypocritical demeanor. For now all his suspicions seemed abundantly
verified; and comparing all dates, he inferred that Glen's visit to
Europe had only been undertaken to wear off the pang of his rejection by
Lucy, a rejection tacitly consequent upon her not denying her affianced
relation to Pierre.
- title
- Chunk 3