turn, grew
very grave and thoughtful.

CHAPTER XXV.

PAUL GRIGGS was a man compounded of dominant qualities and dormant
contradictions of them which threatened at any moment to become dominant
in their turn for a time. He himself almost believed that he had two
separate individualities, if not two distinct minds.

It may be doubted whether it can be good for any man to dwell long upon
such an idea in connexion with himself, however distinctly he may see in
others the foundation of truth on which it rests. To Griggs, however, it
presented itself so clearly that he found it impossible not to take it
into consideration in the more important actions of his life. The two
men were very sharply distinguished in his thoughts. The one man would
do what the other would not. The other could think thoughts above the
comprehension of the first.

The one was material, keen, strong, passionate, and selfish;
pre-eminently adapted for hard work; conscientious in the force of its
instinct to carry out everything undertaken by it to the very end, and
judging that whatever it undertook was good and worth finishing; having
something of the nature of a strong piece of clockwork which being
wound up must run to the utmost limit before stopping, whether regulated
to move fast or slow, with a fateful certainty independent of will;
possessed of such uncommon strength as to make it dangerous if opposed
while moving, and at the same time having an extraordinary inertia when
not wound up to do a certain piece of work; self-reliant to a fault, as
the lion is self-reliant in the superiority of physical endowment;
gentle when not opposed, because almost incapable of action without a
determinate object and aim; but developing an irresistible momentum when
the inertia was overcome; thorough, in the sense in which the tide is
thorough, in rising evenly and all at the same time, and as ruthless as
the tide because it was that part of the whole man which was a result,
and which, therefore, when once set in motion was almost beyond his
control; reasonable only because, as a result, it followed its causes
logically, and required a real cause to move it at first.

The other man in him was very different, almost wholly independent of
the first, and very generally in direct conflict with it, at that time.
It was an imaginative and meditative personality, easily deceived into
assuming a false premise, but logical beyond all liability to deception