The disgraceful and deadly habit of tippling had already told
physically on both Eric and Wildney. The former felt painfully that he
was losing his clear-headedness, and that his intellectual tastes were
getting not only blunted but destroyed; and while he perceived in
himself the terrible effects of his sinful indulgence, he saw them still
more indisputably in the gradual coarseness which seemed to be
spreading, like a grey lichen, over the countenance, the mind, and the
manners of his younger companion. Sometimes the vision of a Nemesis
breaking in fire out of his darkened future, terrified his guilty
conscience in the watches of the night; and the conviction of some
fearful Erynnis, some discovery dawning out of the night of his
undetected sins, made his heart beat fast with agony and fear. But he
fancied it too late to repent. He strangled the half-formed resolutions
as they rose, and trusted to the time when, by leaving school, he should
escape, as he idly supposed, the temptations to which he had yielded.
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