of passion.

The higher the nature, the more its greatness is taken for granted.
Edward turned and went to his room.

Reddin, under his black roof of pines, counted the lights, and seeing
that there were three, turned homewards with a sigh of relief. But as
he went through the fields he remembered how Hazel had looked last
night; how she had danced like a leaf; how slender and young she was.
He was a man everlastingly maddened by slightness and weakness. As a
boy, when his father and mother still kept up their position a little,
he had broken a priceless Venetian glass simply because he could not
resist the temptation to close his hand on it. His father had flogged
him, being of the stupid kind who believe that corporal punishment can
influence the soul. And Reddin had done the same thing next day with a
bit of egg-shell china.

So now, as he thought of Hazel's lissom waist, her large eyes, rather
scared, her slender wrists he cursed until the peewits arose mewing all
about him. In the thick darkness of the lonely fields he might have
been some hero of the dead, mouthing a satanic recitative amid a chorus
of lost souls.

The long search for Hazel, begun in a whim, had ended in passion. If he
had never looked for her, never felt the nettled sense of being foiled,
or if he had found her at once, he would never have desired her so
fiercely. Now, for the first time in his life impassioned, he felt
something mysterious and unwelcome to him begin to mingle with his
desire. Above all, life without her meant dullness, lack of vitality,
the swift onset of middle-age. He saw this with shrinking. He walked