He lifted his glass as he spoke, and the ladies accepted with an inclination of the head, and a touch of the wine at their lips, his tacit toast. “Oh, I think I do know you,” said Celia Madden, calmly discursive. “Up to a certain point, you are not so unlike other men. If people appeal to your imagination, and do not contradict you, or bore you, or get in your way, you are capable of being very nice indeed to them. But that isn't a very uncommon quality. What is uncommon in you—at least that is my reading—is something which according to circumstances may be nice, or very much the other way about. It's something which stands quite apart from standards of morals or ethics or the ordinary emotions. But I don't know, whether it is desirable for me to enter into this extremely personal analysis.”
“Oh yes, go on,” Thorpe urged her. He watched her face with an almost excited interest.
“Well—I should say that you possessed a capacity for sudden and capricious action in large matters, equally impatient of reasoning and indifferent to consequences, which might be very awkward, and even tragic, to people who happened to annoy you, or stand in your road. You have the kind of organization in which, within a second, without any warning or reason, a passing whim may have worked itself up into an imperative law—something you must obey.”
The man smiled and nodded approvingly: “You've got me down fine,” he said.
“I talk with a good deal of confidence,” she went on, with a cheerless, ruminative little laugh, “because it is my own organization that I am describing, too. The difference is that I was allowed to exploit my capacity for mischief very early. I had my own way in my teens—my own money, my own power—of course only of a certain sort, and in a very small place. But I know what I did with that power. I spread trouble and misery about me—always of course on a small scale. Then a group of things happened in a kind of climax—a very painful climax—and it shook the nonsense out of me. My brother and my father died—some other sobering things happened...and luckily I was still young enough to stop short, and take stock of myself, and say that there were certain paths I would never set foot on again—and stick to it. But with you—do you see?—power only comes to you when you are a mature man. Experiences, no matter how unpleasant they are, will not change you now. You will not be moved by this occurrence or that to distrust yourself, or reconsider your methods, or form new resolutions. Oh no! Power will be terrible in your hands, if people whom you can injure provoke you to cruel courses——”
“Oh, dear—dear!” broke in Lady Cressage. “What a distressing Mrs. Gummidge-Cassandra you are, Celia! Pray stop it!”
“No—she's right enough,” said Thorpe, gravely. “That's the kind of man I am.”
He seemed so profoundly interested in the contemplation of this portrait which had been drawn of him, that the others respected his reflective silence. He sat for some moments, idly fingering a fork on the table, and staring at a blotch of vivid red projected through a decanter upon the cloth.
“It seems to me that's the only kind of man it's worth while to be,” he added at last, still speaking with thoughtful deliberation. “There's nothing else in the world so big as power—strength. If you have that, you can get everything else. But if you have it, and don't use it, then it rusts and decays on your hands. It's like a thoroughbred horse. You can't keep it idle in the stable. If you don't exercise it, you lose it.”
He appeared to be commenting upon some illustration which had occurred to his own mind, but was not visible to his auditors. While they regarded him, he was prompted to admit them to his confidence.