Logotheti belonged to the primitives. As he had once laughingly

explained to Margaret, his people had dropped out of civilisation

during a good many centuries; they had absorbed a good deal of wild

blood in that time, and, scientifically speaking, had reverted to their

type; and now that he had chosen to mingle in the throng of the

moderns, whose fathers had lost no time in the race, while his own had

remained stationary, he found himself different from other people,

stronger than they, bolder and much more lawless, but also infinitely

more responsive to the creations of art and the facts of life, as well

as to the finer fictions of his imagination and the simple cravings of

his very masculine being.

Men who are especially gifted almost always seem exaggerated to average

society, either because, like Logotheti, they feel more, want more and

get more than other men, by sheer all-round exuberance of life and

energy, or else because, as in many great poets, some one faculty is

almost missing, which would have balanced the rest, so that in its

absence the others work at incredible speed and tension, wear

themselves out in half a lifetime and leave immortal records of their

brief activity.

There had been a time when Margaret had appealed only to Logotheti's

artistic perceptions; at their second meeting he had asked her to marry

him because he felt sure that until he could make her his permanent

possession, he could never again know what it was to be satisfied.

There had been a moment when she had risen in his estimation from an

artistic treasure to the dignity of an ideal, and had dominated him,

even when the human animal in him was most furiously roused.

Again, and lastly, the time had come when, by watching her unseen,

instead of spending hours with her every day, by abstracting himself

from her life instead of trying to take part in it, he had lost his

hold upon his ideal for ever, and had been cruelly robbed of what for a

few short days he had held most dear.

Moreover, after the ideal had withered and fallen, there remained

something of which the man felt ashamed, though it was what had seemed

most natural before the higher thought had sprung up full-grown in a

day, and had blossomed, and perished. It was simply this. Margaret was

as much as ever the artistic treasure he coveted, and he was tormented

by the fear lest some one else should get possession of her before him.

He remembered the sleepless nights he had spent while his marble

Aphrodite had lain above ground, before he was ready to carry her off,

the unspeakable anxiety lest she should be found and taken from him,

the terror of losing her which had driven him to make the attempt in

the teeth of weather which his craft had not been fit to face; and he

remembered, too, that the short time while she had lain at the bottom

of the bay had not passed without real dread lest by a miracle another

should find her and steal her.




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