THREE:Since his father's death he had denied himself woman's company, after two years lived in the throb and sweetness of it. A warm and vigorous temperament, controlled by a strong will, had promised a successful libertinism, and more than once he had drunk the extasies of passion without those dregs which spoil it for the more weakly dissolute. But now, with that same fierce strength and relentless purpose which had driven him to do the work of two men, to live hard, and sleep rough, he renounced all the delights which were only just beginning. Henceforth, with his great ambition before him, there could be nothing but marriageprudent, solid, and constructive. His girl at the Forstal knew him no more, nor any of her kind. He had set himself to build a house, and for the sake of that house there was nothing, whether of his own or of others, that he could not tame, break down, and destroy.
He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections
