Morley Roberts

“ Hadn't Hale taken him as if he were a child and rolled him, as it were, upon a table and flattened and molded and modeled, aye! and made him? What could a woman do with such a man, if he set himself the task of conquering her? Even as Hector stared at the mere portrait he recognized the underlying force that was there, and in his own soul wished he had it, too. Was it not power, after all? And it was only one sign of power in Hale. It seemed possible that in some unknown society this might be the very ideal man. ”

“ Hale dominated his surroundings utterly. Nothing lost its savor to him, he remained a boy till his death. Here and now, thinking of his dealings with women, Hector felt that even they were not a sign of disease as they would have been with most men; they were only a part of his intense life, the necessary outcome of it. In their inmost hearts, putting aside the moral law as men do in their dreams at any rate, to be like Hale, always youthful, always gay, magnificently well, intellectually sound and balanced, was the very ideal they would desire. ”

“ Why should not one marry such as Anne? To say one should not was to argue one's self ignorant of the very meaning of life, to declare that any law should never be transcended. This affair had been an accident. No, it was rather a fatality.
That was the word, and it struck him now, when he revolted against tolerance and wisdom. This man Hale had been so powerful that his power stood for Anne's excuse without any labored apologetics. Hale had known it himself. Hector recalled what in others might have been the merest braggadocio. ”