"Oh, well, that's all right. I'll forgive him till he feels better."
To fear nothing, to count no costs, to be unlimited! The two years seemed as long as lifetimes, since that summer when things happened; and Morgan was still Morgan. He had never cared who was angry with him, or who liked or disliked him. Helen had longed not to care and been bitterly driven to do so always. She struggled to imitate him. In the face of sudden danger, attack of angry game-preserver or owner of posted stream, or any crisis of the woods when the partridge whirred or the fox broke into the open, Morgan's face would not flush nor his hand tremble; but he only seemed to gather his brows and centre himself on the subject, while little Nellie wondered and worshipped. So he stood for an ideal of effectiveness and freedom from the tyranny of circumstances, which to her small experience and large deduction seemed visibly to bend aside before and around him, from the tyranny of other people's opinions, which he cared so little about that they turned into harmless murmurs behind him instead of planting themselves monumentally in front.
For at times this world appeared to exist for opposition only, in iron battle order, bristling with spears, stolid, reasonless, forbidding. It was a caste system, a privileged aristocracy of one's elders, the dead-line of an old régime. Morgan walked through it promptly. "People," he said, "pretend a lot more than they are, most of 'em. My dad doesn't so much."
But freedom seems not to be an end in itself, only an opportunity to do things differently. It has its own régime, its tyranny of devotions, heroisms, and heroes, military, imperial.
That Morgan proposed a Napoleonic career for himself—reasonably such, for he was no dreamer—that he proposed to dominate, to break through limits and oppositions, to drive a path through the jam of men wide enough for his shoulder muscles to work in, was merely his own candid statement. And regarding Thaddeus, his expression sprang equally from candor. A man's dislike for him was a poor reason for disliking that man. To carry malice was to carry a load. A man was an engine for covering ground and arriving at ends, and malice was burned-out slack. Resentments of old hostilities and memories of old loves were slack, likes and dislikes mostly whims. Mankind was various and whimsical, and few were such as discarded futilities and went on, which was lucky for the few.
"You're very sure of yourself, Morgan."
"Aren't you as sure of me, Nellie? You used to be. Well," he said, slowly, "you see, if Thaddeus Bourn tried to take a fall out of me, he'd want to be subtle, and then it would be all up with him, for I shouldn't understand it."
"Why should he want to take a fall out of you?"
"If he doesn't, why should I mind his disliking me?"