ONE:Reuben was going through a new experience. For the first time in his life he had fallen under the dominion of a personality. From his boyhood he had been enslaved by an idea, but people, in anything except their relation to that idea, had never influenced him. Now for the first time he had a life outside Boarzell, an interest, a set of thoughts, which were not only apart from Boarzell but antagonistic to it.
FORE:"That is well," returned De Boteler; and then, after a momentary but earnest gaze at Margaret, he turned away and left the cottage.
FORE:Albert could not help a grudging admiration of his father. Reuben could be angry and fling threats, and yet keep at the same time a certain splendour, which no[Pg 139] violence or vulgarity could dim. The boy, in spite of his verses, which were execrable enough, had a poet's eye for the splendid, and he could not be blind to the qualities of his father's tyranny, even though that tyranny crushed him at times. Reuben was now forty-three; a trifle heavier in build, perhaps, but otherwise as fine and straight a man as he had been at twenty. His clear brown skin, keen eyes, thick coal-black hair, his height, his strength, his dauntless spirit, could not fail to impress one in whom the sense of life and beauty was developing. Albert even once began a poem to his father: