adolescence and afterwards buying his way through life and achieving
triumphs on the strength of his, handsome face and unique position
would have stared in incredulous amazement at the sight of this
love-sick man in his intense pursuit of a girl who was able to twist
him around her little finger and make him follow her about as if he
were a green and callow youth. Palgrave, the lady-killer; Palgrave, the
egoist; Palgrave, the superlative person, who, with nonchalant
impertinence, had picked and chosen. Was it possible?

Everything is possible when a man is whirled off his feet by the Great
Emotion. History reeks with the stories of men whose natures were
changed, whose careers were blasted, whose honor and loyalty and common
sense were sacrificed, whose pride and sense of the fitness of things
were utterly and absolutely forgotten under the stress of the sex storm
that hits us all and renders us fools or heroes, breaking or making as
luck will have it and, in either case, bringing us to the common level
of primevality for the love of a woman. Nature, however refined and
cultivated the man, or rarified his atmosphere, sees to this. Herself
feminine, she has no consideration for persons. To her a man is merely
a man, a creature with the same heart and the same senses, working to
the same end from the same beginning. Let him struggle and cry
"Excelsior!" and fix his eyes upon the heights, let him devote himself
to prayer or go grimly on his way with averted eyes, let him become
cynic or misogynist, what's it matter? Sooner or later she lays hands
upon him and claims him as her child. Man, woman and love. It is the
oldest and the newest story in the world, and in spite of the sneers of
thin-blooded intellectuals who think that it is clever to speak of love
as the particular pastime of the Bolsheviki and the literary parasites
who regard themselves as critics and dismiss love as "mere sex stuff,"
it is the everlasting Story of Everyman.

Young and new and careless, obsessed only with the one idea of having a
good time,--never mind who paid for it,--Joan knew nothing of the
danger of trifling with the feelings of a high-strung man who had never
been denied, a man over-civilized to the point of moral decay. If she
had paused in her determined pursuit of amusement and distraction to
analyze her true state of mind she might have discovered an angry
desire to pay Fate out for the way in which he had made things go with
Martin