Chance

He certainly resembled his father, who, by the way, wore out two women

without any satisfaction to himself, because they did not come up to his

supra-refined standard of the delicacy which is so perceptible in his

verses. That's your poet. He demands too much from others. The

inarticulate son had set up a standard for himself with that need for

embodying in his conduct the dreams, the passion, the impulses the poet

puts into arrangements of verses, which are dearer to him than his own

self--and may make his own self appear sublime in the eyes of other

people, and even in his own eyes.

Did Anthony wish to appear sublime in his own eyes? I should not like to

make that charge; though indeed there are other, less noble, ambitions at

which the world does not dare to smile. But I don't think so; I do not

even think that there was in what he did a conscious and lofty confidence

in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power which leads men so

often into impossible or equivocal situations. Looked at abstractedly

(the way in which truth is often seen in its real shape) his life had

been a life of solitude and silence--and desire.

Chance had thrown that girl in his way; and if we may smile at his

violent conquest of Flora de Barral we must admit also that this eager

appropriation was truly the act of a man of solitude and desire; a man

also, who, unless a complete imbecile, must have been a man of long and

ardent reveries wherein the faculty of sincere passion matures slowly in

the unexplored recesses of the heart. And I know also that a passion,

dominating or tyrannical, invading the whole man and subjugating all his

faculties to its own unique end, may conduct him whom it spurs and

drives, into all sorts of adventures, to the brink of unfathomable

dangers, to the limits of folly, and madness, and death.

To the man then of a silence made only more impressive by the

inarticulate thunders and mutters of the great seas, an utter stranger to

the clatter of tongues, there comes the muscular little Fyne, the most

marked representative of that mankind whose voice is so strange to him,

the husband of his sister, a personality standing out from the misty and

remote multitude. He comes and throws at him more talk than he had ever

heard boomed out in an hour, and certainly touching the deepest things

Anthony had ever discovered in himself, and flings words like "unfair"

whose very sound is abhorrent to him. Unfair! Undue advantage! He!

Unfair to that girl? Cruel to her!