with his eyes and hear with his ears,
adopt his theories as truth, take his judgment for their own. All that
he thought _was_--to him. He never doubted himself, therefore he could
not bear that those around him should not think with him, act towards
men and women as he acted, face life as he faced it. Yet he was too
subtle ever to be dogmatic. He never shouted in the market-place. He led
those with whom he came in contact as adroitly as if he had been evil,
and to the influence of others he was as adamant.

Events brought into his life a woman, complex, subtle too, with a
naturally noble character and fine understanding, a woman who, like so
many women, might have been anything, and was far worse than nothing--a
hopeless, helpless slave, the victim of the morphia habit, which had
gradually degraded her, driven her through sloughs of immorality,
wrecked a professional career which at one time had been almost great,
shattered her constitution, though not all her still curious beauty, and
ruined her, to all intents and purposes, body and soul. The man and the
woman met, and in a flash the man saw what she had been, what she might
have been, what, perhaps, in spite of all, she still was, somewhere,
somehow. In her horrible degradation, in her dense despair, she
fascinated him. He could only see the fire bursting out of the swamp. He
could only feel on his cheek the breath of the spring in the darkness of
the charnel-house. He knew that she gave to him his great lifework. Her
monstrous habit he simply could not comprehend. It was altogether as
fantastic to him as absolute virtue sometimes seems to absolute vice. He
looked upon it, and felt as little kinship with it as a saint might feel
with a vampire. To him it was merely a hideous and extraordinary growth,
which had fastened like a cancer upon a beautiful and wonderful body,
and which must be cut out. He was profoundly interested.

He loved the woman. Seeing her governed entirely by a vice, he made the
very common mistake of believing her to have a weak personality, easily
falling, perhaps for that very reason as easily lifted to her feet. He
resolved to save her, to devote all his powers, all his subtlety, all
his intellect, all his strong force of will, to weaning this woman from
her fatal habit. She was a married woman, long ago left, to kill herself
if she would, by the husband whose happiness she had wrecked. He took
her to live with him. For her sake he defied the wo