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!

No scorn could stand against the impression of such charges advanced
with heat and conviction. They shook him. They were yet vibrating in
the air of that stuffy hotel-room, terrific, disturbing, impossible to
get rid of, when the door opened and Flora de Barral entered.

He did not even notice that she was late. He was sitti