"It may have been his enthusiasm, his great expectations, his ideality.
Perhaps he puzzled his people, asked too much imagination, too much
sacred fire from them. And then he has immense ideas about honesty, and
the rights of the individual; and, in fact, about a good many things
that seldom bother the head of the average man."

"Don't tell me he has developed into a crank," said Mrs. Derringham.
"There's something so underbred about crankiness; and the Harwich family
have always been essentially aristocrats."

"I shouldn't think Armine was a crank, but I do think he is an idealist.
He considers Watts's allegorical pictures the greatest things in Art
that have been done since Botticelli enshrined Purity in paint. In
modern music Elgar's his man; in modern literature, Tolstoy. He loves
those with ideals, even if their ideals are not his. I do not say he is
an artist. He is not. His motto is not 'Art for art's sake,' but 'Art
for man's sake.'"

"He is a humanitarian?"

"And a great believer."

"In man?"

"In the good that is in man. I often think at the back of his mind, or
heart, he believes that the act of belief is almost an act of creation."

"You mean, for instance, that if you believe in a man's truthfulness you
make him a truthful man?"