e than that of republican
Florence, and his heart no better than the alarm-bell that made work
slack and tumult busy.

Rex's love had been of that sudden, penetrating, clinging sort which
the ancients knew and sung, and in singing made a fashion of talk for
many moderns whose experience has by no means a fiery, demonic
character. To have the consciousness suddenly steeped with another's
personality, to have the strongest inclinations possessed by an image
which retains its dominance in spite of change and apart from
worthiness--nay, to feel a passion which clings faster for the tragic
pangs inflicted by a cruel, reorganized unworthiness--is a phase of
love which in the feeble and common-minded has a repulsive likeness to
his blind animalism insensible to the higher sway of moral affinity or
heaven-lit admiration. But when this attaching force is present in a
nature not of brutish unmodifiableness, but of a human dignity that can
risk itself safely, it may even result in a devotedness not unfit to be
called divine in a higher sense than the ancient. Phlegmatic
rationality stares and shakes its head at these unaccountable
prepossessions, but they exist as undeniably as the winds and waves,
determining here a wreck and there a triumphant voyage.

This sort of passion had nested in the sweet-natured, strong Rex, and
he had made up his mind to its companionship, as if it had been an
object supremely dear, stricken dumb and helpless, and turning all the
future of tenderness into a shadow of the past. But he had also made up
his mind that his life was not to be pauperized because he had had to
renounce one sort of joy; rather, he had begun life again with a new
counting-up of the treasures that remained to him, and he had even felt
a release of power such as may come from ceasing to be afraid of your
own neck.

And now, here he was pacing the shrubbery, angry with himself that the
sense of irrevocableness in his lot, which ought in reason to have been
as strong as ever, had been shaken by a change of circumstances that
could make no change in relation to him. He told himself the truth
quite roughly--

"She would never love me; and that is not the question--I could never
approach her as a lover in her present position. I am exactly of no
consequence at all, and am not likely to be of much consequence till my
head is turning gray. But what has that to do with it? She would not
have me on any terms, and I would not ask her.