"I'm full of new ideas," he explained, impulsively impatient
of the necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts.
"I see great things ahead. It's all come to me in a minute,
but I couldn't see it clearer if I'd thought it out for
a year. Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time and
didn't know it. But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead.
You don't know what it means to me to have something to do.
It makes another man of me, just to think about it.
Another man?--yes, twenty men! It's a thing that can be done,
and by God! I'm going to do it!"
She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy
glow of the man's native, coarse, imperious virility,
reasserting itself through the mask of torpor which this
vacuous year had superimposed. The large features
were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the
countenance as rough bold headlands dominate a shore.
It was the visage of a conqueror--of a man gathering
within himself, to expend upon his fellows, the appetites,
energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast of prey.
Her glance fluttered a little, and almost quailed,
before the frank barbarism of power in the look he bent
upon her. Then it came to her that something more was
to be read in this look; there was in it a reservation
of magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation,
for her special self.
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