He plunged into them breathless and tense, deep, deep,
like a mad sailor taking a desperate dive from the masthead into the blue
unfathomable sea so many men have execrated and loved at the same time.
And his vanity was immense. It had been touched to the quick by that
muscular little feminist, Fyne. "I! I! Take advantage of her
helplessness. I! Unfair to that creature--that wisp of mist, that white
shadow homeless in an ugly dirty world. I could blow her away with a
breath," he was saying to himself with horror. "Never!" All the
supremely refined delicacy of tenderness, expressed in so many fine lines
of verse by Carleon Anthony, grew to the size of a passion filling with
inward sobs the big frame of the man who had never in his life read a
single one of those famous sonnets singing of the most highly civilized,
chivalrous love, of those sonnets which . . . You know there's a volume
of them. My edition has the portrait of the author at thirty, and when I
showed it to Mr. Powell the other day he exclaimed: "Wonderful! One
would think this the portrait of Captain Anthony himself if .
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