“How unexpected you are!” commented Miss Madden. “You are almost the last person I should have looked to for a sentiment about Tudor foundations.”
Thorpe put out his lips a trifle. “Ah, you don't know me,” he replied, in a voice milder than his look had promised. “Because I'm rough and practical, you mustn't think I don't know good things when I see them. Why, all the world is going to have living proof very soon”--he paused, and sent a smile surcharged with meaning toward the silent member of the trio--“living proof that I'm the greatest judge of perfection in beauty of my time.”
He lifted his glass as he spoke, and the ladies accepted with an inclination of the head, and a touch of the wine at their lips, his tacit toast. “Oh, I think I do know you,” said Celia Madden, calmly discursive. “Up to a certain point, you are not so unlike other men. If people appeal to your imagination, and do not contradict you, or bore you, or get in your way, you are capable of being very nice indeed to them. But that isn't a very uncommon quality. What is uncommon in you--at least that is my reading--is something which according to circumstances may be nice, or very much the other way about. It's something which stands quite apart from standards of morals or ethics or the ordinary emotions. But I don't know, whether it is desirable for me to enter into this extremely personal analysis.”
“Oh yes, go on,” Thorpe urged her. He watched her face with an almost excited interest.
“Well--I should say that you possessed a capacity for sudden and capricious action in large matters, equally impatient of reasoning and indifferent to consequences, which might be very awkward, and even tragic, to people who happened to annoy you, or stand in your road. You have the kind of organization in which, within a second, without any warning or reason, a passing whim may have worked itself up into an imperative law--something you must obey.”
The man smiled and nodded approvingly: “You've got me down fine,” he said.
“I talk with a good deal of confidence,” she went on, with a cheerless, ruminative little laugh, “because it is my own organization that I am describing, too. The difference is that I was allowed to exploit my capacity for mischief very early. I had my own way in my teens--my own money, my own power--of course only of a certain sort, and in a very small place. But I know what I did with that power. I spread trouble and misery about me--always of course on a small scale. Then a group of things happened in a kind of climax--a very painful climax--and it shook the nonsense out of me. My brother and my father died--some other sobering things happened...and luckily I was still young enough to stop short, and take stock of myself, and say that there were certain paths I would never set foot on again--and stick to it. But with you--do you see?--power only comes to you when you are a mature man. Experiences, no matter how unpleasant they are, will not change you now. You will not be moved by this occurrence or that to distrust yourself, or reconsider your methods, or form new resolutions. Oh no! Power will be terrible in your hands, if people whom you can injure provoke you to cruel courses----”