"I thought of
writing a book. But that is not the thing I was talking about. I want
to be normal, aggressively normal, to court the suffrages of Gledsmuir.
Do you know Stocks?"
"Surely."
"An excellent person, but I never heard him utter a word above a child's
capacity. He can talk the most shrieking platitudes as if he had found
at last the one and only truth. And people are impressed."
Wratislaw pulled down his eyebrows and proceeded to defend a Scottish
constituency against the libel of gullibility. But Lewis was not
listening. He did not think of the impression made on the voting
powers, but on one small girl who clamorously impeded all his thoughts.
She was, he knew, an enthusiast for the finer sentiments of life, and of
these Mr. Stocks had long ago claimed a monopoly. He felt bitterly
jealous-the jealousy of the innocent man to whom woman is an
unaccountable creature, whose habits and likings must be curiously
studied. He was dimly conscious of lacking the stage attributes of a
lover. He could not pose as a mirror of all virtues, a fanatic for the
True and the Good. Somehow or other he had acquired an air of
self-seeking egotism, unscrupulousness, which he felt miserably must
make him unlovely in certain eyes. Nor would the contest he was
entering upon improve this fancied reputation of his. He would have to
say hard, unfeeling things against what all the world would applaud as
generous sentiment.
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