It seemed as if, underground, souls met by secret roots that
stretched through the night of instinct, that unknown region, where
observation rarely ventures. For our psychology stops at that part
of self which emerges from the soil, noting minutely individual
differences, but forgetting that this is only the top of the plant,
that nine-tenths are buried, the feet held by those of other plants.
This profound, or lower, region of the soul is ordinarily below the
threshold of consciousness, the mind feels nothing of it; but the war,
by waking up this underground life, revealed moral relationships
which no one had suspected. A sudden intimacy showed itself between
Clerambault and a brother of his wife whom he had looked upon until
now, and with good reason, as the type of a perfect Philistine.
Leo Camus was not quite fifty years old. He was tall, thin, and
stooped a little; his skin was grey, his beard black, not much hair on
his head,--you could see the bald spots under his hat behind,--little
wrinkles everywhere, cutting into each other, crossing, like a
badly-made net; add to this a frowning, sulky expression, and a
perpetual cold in the head. For thirty years he had been employed by
the State, and his life had passed in the shadow of a court-yard at
the Department.
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