"And were they sick with gratitude?"
"Their thankfulness did not go so far as that. In fact, some of Armine's schemes for making people happy met with a good deal of opposition. Finally there was a tremendous row about a right of way. The tenants were in the wrong, and Armine was so disgusted at their trying to rob him of what was his, after he had showered benefits upon them, that he let his place and hasn't been there since."
"That's so like people, to ignore libraries and village halls, and shriek for the right to get over a certain stile, or go down a muddy path that leads from nothing to nowhere."
"The desire of the star for the moth!"
"You call humanity a star?"
"I think there is a great brightness burning in it; don't you?"
"There seems to be in Mr. Armine, certainly. What an enthusiastic look he has! How could he get wrong with his tenants?"
"It may have been his enthusiasm, his great expectations, his ideality. Perhaps he puzzled his people, asked too much imagination, too much sacred fire from them. And then he has immense ideas about honesty, and the rights of the individual; and, in fact, about a good many things that seldom bother the head of the average man."
"Don't tell me he has developed into a crank," said Mrs. Derringham. "There's something so underbred about crankiness; and the Harwich family have always been essentially aristocrats."
"I shouldn't think Armine was a crank, but I do think he is an idealist. He considers Watts's allegorical pictures the greatest things in Art that have been done since Botticelli enshrined Purity in paint. In modern music Elgar's his man; in modern literature, Tolstoy. He loves those with ideals, even if their ideals are not his. I do not say he is an artist. He is not. His motto is not 'Art for art's sake,' but 'Art for man's sake.'"