She felt as if this whirlwind were calming down somehow! As if this

feeling of support, which was tempting her to close her eyes deliciously

and let herself be carried on and on into the unknown undefiled by vile

experiences, were less certain, had wavered threateningly. She tried to

read something in his face, in that energetic kindly face to which she

had become accustomed so soon. But she was not yet capable of

understanding its expression. Scared, discouraged on the threshold of

adolescence, plunged in moral misery of the bitterest kind, she had not

learned to read--not that sort of language.

If Anthony's love had been as egoistic as love generally is, it would

have been greater than the egoism of his vanity--or of his generosity, if

you like--and all this could not have happened. He would not have hit

upon that renunciation at which one does not know whether to grin or

shudder. It is true too that then his love would not have fastened

itself upon the unhappy daughter of de Barral. But it was a love born of

that rare pity which is not akin to contempt because rooted in an

overwhelmingly strong capacity for tenderness--the tenderness of the

fiery kind--the tenderness of silent solitary men, the voluntary,

passionate outcasts of their kind. At the time I am forced to think that

his vanity must have been enormous.

"What big eyes she has," he said to himself amazed. No wonder. She was

staring at him with all the might of her soul awakening slowly from a

poisoned sleep, in which it could only quiver with pain but could neither

expand nor move. He plunged into them breathless and tense, deep, deep,

like a mad sailor taking a desperate dive from the masthead into the blue

unfathomable sea so many men have execrated and loved at the same time.

And his vanity was immense. It had been touched to the quick by that

muscular little feminist, Fyne. "I! I! Take advantage of her

helplessness. I! Unfair to that creature--that wisp of mist, that white

shadow homeless in an ugly dirty world. I could blow her away with a

breath," he was saying to himself with horror. "Never!" All the

supremely refined delicacy of tenderness, expressed in so many fine lines

of verse by Carleon Anthony, grew to the size of a passion filling with

inward sobs the big frame of the man who had never in his life read a

single one of those famous sonnets singing of the most highly civilized,

chivalrous love, of those sonnets which . . . You know there's a volume

of them. My edition has the portrait of the author at thirty, and when I

showed it to Mr. Powell the other day he exclaimed: "Wonderful! One

would think this the portrait of Captain Anthony himself if . . ." I

wanted to know what that if was. But Powell could not say. There was

something--a difference. No doubt there was--in fineness perhaps. The

father, fastidious, cerebral, morbidly shrinking from all contacts, could

only sing in harmonious numbers of what the son felt with a dumb and

reckless sincerity.




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