"In telling me of your reading just now, you spoke of that progress of the soul that each new horizon in literature seems to stimulate and ensure for you. And you quoted some hackneyed and beautiful lines of Longfellow. Cling always to that idea of progress, but remember that we don't really rise to higher things upon the stepping stones of our dead selves so much as on the stepping stones of our dead opinions. That is Progress. Progress means the capability of seeing new forms of beauty."
"But there are places where one wants to linger."
"I know, but it's dangerous. You were splendidly right when you bade me move from that garden just now. The road was waiting. It is so with states of the soul. The limpet is the lowest of organisms. Movement is everything. One life may seem to be like sunlight moving over sombre ground and another like the shadow of a cloud traversing a sunlit space. But both have meaning and value. Never strike an average and imagine you have found content. The average life is nothing but a pudding in a fog!"
Lothian had been talking very earnestly, his eyes full of light, fixed on her eyes. And now, in a moment, he saw what had been there for many minutes, he saw what he had roused.
He was startled.
During this delightful evening that side of their intercourse had not been very present in his mind. She was a delightful flower, a flower with a mind. It is summed up very simply. He had never once wanted to touch her.
His face changed and grew troubled. A new presence was there, a problem rose where there had been none before. The realisation of her physical loveliness and desirability came to him in a flood of new sensation. The strong male impulse was alive and burning for the first time that night.
A waiter had brought a silver dish of big peaches, and as she ate the fruit there was that in her eyes which he recognised, though he knew her mind was unconscious of it.
In the sudden stir and tumult of his thoughts, one became dominant.
It was an evil thought, perhaps the most subtle and the most evil that can come to a man. The pride of intellect in its most gross and devilish manifestation awoke.