lly
these lawyer-pilots "know their place" and put on no airs upon the
quarter-deck while they are temporarily in command. Not so Norman. He
took the full rank, authority--and emoluments--of commander. And as his
power, fame, and income were swiftly growing, it is fair to assume that
he knew what he was about.

He was admired--extravagantly admired--by young men with not too broad a
vein of envy. He was no woman hater--anything but that. Indeed, those
who wished him ill had from time to time hoped to see him tumble down,
through miscalculation in some of his audacities with women. No--he did
not hate women. But there were several women who hated him--or tried to;
and if wounded vanity and baffled machination be admitted as just causes
for hatred, they had cause. He liked--but he did not wholly trust. When
he went to sleep, it was not where Delilah could wield the shears. A
most irritating prudence--irritating to friends and intimates of all
degrees and kinds, in a race of beings with a mania for being trusted
implicitly but with no balancing mania for deserving trust of the
implicit variety.

And he ate hugely--and whatever he pleased. He could drink beyond
belief, all sorts of things, with no apparent ill effect upon either
body or brain. He had all the appetites developed abnormally, and
abnormal capacity for gratifying them. Where there was one man who
envied him his eminence, there were a dozen who envied him his physical
capacities. We cannot live and act without doing mischief, as well as
that which most of us would rather do, provided that in the doing we are
not ourselves undone. Probably in no direction did Norman do so much
mischief as in unconsciously leading men of his sets down town and up to
imitate his colossal dissipations--which were not dissipation for him
who was abnormal.

Withal, he was a monster for work. There is not much truth in men's
unending talk of how hard they work or are worked. The ravages from
their indulgences in smoking, drinking, gallantry, eating too much and
too fast and too often, have to be explained away creditably, to
themselves and to others--notably to the wives or mothers who nurse them
and suffer from their diminishing incomes. Hence the wailing about work.
But once in a while a real worker appears--a man with enormous ingenuity
at devising difficult tasks for himself and with enormous persistence in
doing them. Frederick Norman was one of these blue-moon prodigies.

Ob