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.
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