Strangely enough, the thoughts of Abner Fownes were not upon the words he had read in the newspaper, but on the writer of them. He was thinking of her apart from this journalistic bomb which she had set off under the feet of Gibeon. Presently he would give that his consideration, but now Carmel Lee stood in the midst of his thoughts, and he reached out to engulf her in his hatred. He hated her with a burning, aching, hungry intensity—with the hatred of a vain man who has been humiliated and stripped stark of his vanity. The very words she had used, but, more than those, the expression of her eyes, was with him now. He watched her and listened to her again, and felt himself shrinking and deflating before her anger.... She despised him—him, Abner Fownes! Despised him! And he hated her for despising him. He hated her for stripping away so ruthlessly the mantle of pretense he had erected between himself and his own eyes. She had humiliated him before his own soul, and his soul was sick with the shame of it.
For years he had lived with his pretense until it had become a part of himself, like the grafted branch upon the sterile tree. None in Gibeon had gainsaid his own estimate of himself. In his small realm he had been supreme—until he had come himself to believe his own pretense.... He hid Abner Fownes from himself studiously; allowed him to admire himself, to look upon himself as good and great.... In those wakeful moments of his soul when it opened its eyes and saw him as he was, he suffered acutely—and applied the ever-ready anesthetic.
Now this girl, to whom he had grandly thrown his handkerchief like some Oriental potentate, had dared to snatch away his disguise and to destroy it utterly. Never again could he wear it, because he would feel her eyes piercing it. Such a garment is only to be worn when there is none in all the world to recognize that it is a disguise. Once a single soul lifts the mask and gazes upon the reality lurking within, and the thing is done. Abner Fownes knew Carmel saw him as he was—not by sure knowledge, grounded upon fact, perhaps, but by intuition. Now he would forever question, and his question would be: Did others see him as he was? Was the adulation showered on him a pretense? Was the attitude people maintained before him a sham, an ironical sham? Was the world laughing at and despising him, as Carmel Lee despised him?... It was unbearably bitter to a man whose natural element was vanity; who had existed in vanity, breathed it, fed upon it, for a score of years.
It is no wonder he hated her!... He no longer desired her. His one thought was to revenge himself upon her, to humiliate her publicly as she had humiliated him before his own eyes. He wanted to degrade her, to besmirch her, to defile her so that her soul would cry out with horror at sight of herself, as his soul revolted at the thing she had conjured up before his own eyes. His was not that hatred which kills. It was more cruel than that, more cowardly, more treacherous, more horrible. His was the hatred which could satisfy itself only by setting Carmel in the pillory; by damning her body and soul and then by exhibiting her to a taunting world....
He wrenched his eyes away from his desk, his thoughts away from his hatred.
“What d’you mean by coming here with this, you fool?” he demanded, savagely.
Deputy Jenney reared back on his heels from the shock of it and goggled at Abner.
“Want to advertise to the world that I care a damn what she prints about whisky? Want the town to clack and question and wonder what I’ve got to do with it?”
“I—I thought you’d want to know.”
“I’d find out soon enough.”