Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants. At
first they appeared singly, a lily, for instance, which the current,
across whose path it had unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest
for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it would
drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating
its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would be
straightened out, lengthened, strained almost to breaking-point until the
current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their
anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called its
starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before
moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after
another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims of
neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt
Leonie, who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle
of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine
themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retain
to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and
eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate
its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange,
ineluctable, fatal daily round.
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