Er there. Where a less complex man would have brought in, if not the
menace of a storm, at least an intimation of masterfulness that should
advertise the uselessness of opposition, Stonor brought a subtler ally
in what, for lack of better words, must be called an air of heightened
fastidiousness--mainly physical. Man has no shrewder weapon against the
woman he has loved and wishes to exorcise from his path. For the simple,
and even for those not so much simple as merely sensitive, there is
something in that cool, sure assumption of unapproachableness on the
part of one who once had been so near--something that lames advance and
hypnotizes vision. Geoffrey Stonor's aloofness was not in the 'high
look' alone; it was as much as anything in the very way he walked, as if
the ground were hardly good enough, in the way he laid his shapely hand
on the carved back of the sofa, the way his eyes rested on inanimate
things in the room, reducing whoever was responsible for them to the
need of justifying their presence and defending their value. As the
woman in the chair, leaning cheek on hand, sat silently watching him, it
may have been that obscure things in those headlong hours of the past
grew plainer. However ludicrous the result may look in the last
analysis, it is clear that a faculty such as Stonor's for overrating the
value of the individual in the scheme of things, does seem more
effectually than any mere patent of nobility to confer upon a man the
'divine right' to dictate to his fellows and to look down upon them. The
thing is founded on illusion, but it is founded as firm as many another
figment that has governed men and seen the generations come to heel and
go crouching to their graves. But the shining superiority of the man
seemed to be a little dimmed for the woman
