And he made
her feel these contrasts and mysteries as she had never yet felt them;
and so he enlarged the world for her, he plunged her, if only by
contact with his own bitter and irritable genius, into new regions of
sentiment and feeling. For in spite of the vulgar elements in him there
were also elements of genius. The man was a poet and a thinker, though
he were at the same time, in some sense, an adventurer. His mind was
stored with eloquent and beautiful imagery, the poetry of others, and
poetry of his own. He could pursue the meanest personal objects in an
unscrupulous way; but he had none the less passed through a wealth of
tragic circumstance; he had been face to face with his own soul in the
wilds of the earth; he had met every sort of physical danger with
contempt; and his arrogant, imperious temper was of the kind which
attracts many women, especially, perhaps, women physically small and
intellectually fearless, like Kitty, who feel in it a challenge to their
power and their charm.
His society, then, had in these six weeks become, for Kitty, a
passion--a passion of the imagination. For the man himself, she would
probably have said that she felt more repulsion than anything else.
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