IX 
  
THE BAD GLAZIER 
  
  
THERE are natures which are purely con-
templative and altogether unfitted for action, 
yet which, under a mysterious and unknown 
impulse, sometimes act with a rashness of 
which they would have believed themselves to 
be incapable. 
One such, fearing to find some disappoint-
ing intelligence at the porter’s lodge, hangs 
about for an hour without daring to go home; 
another keeps a letter for a fortnight without 
unsealing it, or only makes up his mind after 
six months to take some step which was nec-
essary a year before: such feel themselves 
sometimes hurried brusquely into action by an 
irresistible force, like the arrow from a bow. 
The moralist and the doctor, who set up to 
know everything, cannot explain whence 
comes so suddenly so mad an energy to flood 
these lazy and self-indulgent souls, and how, 
incapable as they are of accomplishing the 
most simple and necessary things, they find, at 
a certain moment, an ecstatic courage to exe-