g rubbish about love and passion there is no end--and will be
no end until the venerable traditional nonsense about those interesting
emotions shares the fate that should overtake all the cobwebs of
ignorance thickly clogging the windows and walls of the human mind. Of
all the fiddle-faddle concerning passion probably none is more
shudderingly admired than the notion that one possessed of an
overwhelming desire for another longs to destroy that other. It is true
there is a form of murderous mania that involves practically all the
emotions, including of course the passions--which are as readily subject
to derangement as any other part of the human organism. But passion in
itself--even when it is so powerful that it dominates the whole life, as
in the case of Frederick Norman--passion in itself is not a form of
mental derangement in the medical sense. And it does not produce acute
selfishness, paranoiac egotism, but a generous and beautiful kind of
unselfishness. Not from the first moment of Fred Norman's possession did
he wish to injure or in any way to make unhappy the girl he loved. He
longed to be happy with her, to have her happy with and through him. He
represented his plotting to himself as a plan to make her happier than
she ever had been; as for ultimate consequences, he refused to consider
them. The most hardened rake, when passion possesses him, wishes all
happiness to the woman of his pursuit. Indifference, coldness--the
natural hard-heartedness of the normal man--returns only when the
inspiration and elevation of passion disappear in satiety. The man or
the woman who continues to inspire passion continues to inspire
tenderness and considerateness.

So when Norman left Dorothy that Sunday afternoon, he, being a normal if
sore beset human being, was soon in the throes of an agonized remorse.
There may have been some hypocrisy in it, some struggling to cover up
the baser elements in his infatuation for her. What human emotion of
upward tendency has not at least a little of the varnish of hypocrisy on
certain less presentable spots in it? But in the main it was a
creditable, a manly remorse, and not altogether the writhings of
jealousy and jealous fear of losing her.

He saw clearly that she was telling the truth, and telling it too
gently, when she said he was responsible for her having standards of
living which she could not unaided hope to attain. It is a dreadful
thing to interfere in the destiny of a fellow