Cecilia could never bear to sit in that oasis; its colour in this wilderness was too precious to her spirit.
"It's an east wind, father; aren't you terribly cold without a fire ?" Mr.Stone came from his writing-desk, and stood so that light might fall on a sheet of paper in his hand.

Cecilia noted the scent that went about with him of peat and baked potatoes.

He spoke: "Listen to this: 'In the condition of society, dignified in those days with the name of civilisation, the only source of hope was the persistence of the quality called courage.

Amongst a thousand nerve-destroying habits, amongst the dramshops, patent medicines, the undigested chaos of inventions and discoveries, while hundreds were prating in their pulpits of things believed in by a negligible fraction of the population, and thousands writing down today what nobody would want to read in two days' time; while men shut animals in cages, and made bears jig to please their children, and all were striving one against the other; while, in a word, like gnats above a stagnant pool on a summer's evening, man danced up and down without the faintest notion why--in this condition of affairs the quality of courage was alive.
It was the only fire within that gloomy valley.'" He stopped, though evidently anxious to go on, because he had read the last word on that sheet of paper.

He moved towards the writing-desk.