FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127  
128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   >>   >|  
shrugged her shoulders impatiently and did not answer. Keyork relinquished the fencing. "It is of no importance," he said, changing his tone. "Your dream--or whatever it was--seems to have been the second of your two experiences. You said there were two, did you not? What was the first?" Unorna sat silent for some minutes, as though collecting her thoughts. Keyork, who never could have enough light, busied himself with another lamp. The room was now brighter than it generally was in the daytime. Unorna watched him. She did not want to make confidences to him, and yet she felt irresistibly impelled to do so. He was a strange compound of wisdom and levity, in her opinion, and his light-hearted moods were those which she most resented. She was never sure whether he was in reality tactless, or frankly brutal. She inclined to the latter view of his character, because he always showed such masterly skill in excusing himself when he had gone too far. Neither his wisdom nor his love of jesting explained to her the powerful attraction he exercised over her whole nature, and of which she was, in a manner, ashamed. She could quarrel with him as often as they met, and yet she could not help being always glad to meet him again. She could not admit that she liked him because she dominated him; on the contrary, he was the only person she had ever met over whom she had no influence whatever, who did as he pleased without consulting her, and who laughed at her mysterious power so far as he himself was concerned. Nor was her liking founded upon any consciousness of obligation. If he had helped her to the best of his ability in the great experiment, it was also clear enough that he had the strongest personal interest in doing so. He loved life with a mad passion for its own sake, and the only object of his study was to find a means of living longer than other men. All the aims and desires and complex reasonings of his being tended to this simple expression--the wish to live. To what idolatrous self-worship Keyork Arabian might be capable of descending, if he ever succeeded in eliminating death from the equation of his immediate future, it was impossible to say. The wisdom of ages bids us beware of the man of one idea. He is to be feared for his ruthlessness, for his concentration, for the singular strength he has acquired in the centralization of his intellectual power, and because he has welded, as it were, the rough metal of many pa
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127  
128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
Keyork
 

wisdom

 

Unorna

 
influence
 

liking

 

consciousness

 

pleased

 

obligation

 

passion

 

living


object

 
experiment
 

mysterious

 
helped
 
longer
 

ability

 

laughed

 

personal

 

interest

 

strongest


consulting

 

founded

 

concerned

 

expression

 

impossible

 
future
 

equation

 

beware

 

singular

 

concentration


strength

 

centralization

 
acquired
 

intellectual

 

welded

 

feared

 

ruthlessness

 

eliminating

 

succeeded

 

tended


simple
 
reasonings
 

complex

 

desires

 

capable

 
descending
 

Arabian

 
worship
 
idolatrous
 

jesting