Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... XVIII THE RIDE HAD Kirby been told that his honored father had secretly lived a life of dissoluteness and murder the crude shock would have dazed him less than the discovery that he was merely that little white animal--man-- nailed to the flying debris of the stars. Stunned, he saw life afresh. It was not happiness, there was no rapture in the thoughts that Mary evoked, there was merely realization. Her personality seemed to have saturated his, and the obsession was almost painful. It was exactly as if his work, his schemes, his plots were a lot of little strings he had been tying together, each string leading to some new power out of sight, until finally, impatient, he had dropped a spark on them, to find, to his horror, that they were fuses that burned rapidly down to a mine that exploded all his life. He felt that somehow he had ruined himself; that by changing his whole direction from business success to the following of a woman he had become a helpless slave. Natures such as Kirby's, when once aroused, are hard to quiet. He did his best to pull out from his heart this woman's power. He told himself that he was adding himself to a whole swarm of suitors; that Mary was too keen not to see through his ambitions and pretensions; that even if she favored him she was like a king's daughter, bound to a high marriage; that he had nothing to offer such a woman but his unpleasant self; that he had been an unfortunate fool in trying to use a woman as a handle to success; and yet, despite this feverish reasoning, he could only go about as if he were drugged. He lost the zest of his work; he felt in the morning a distaste for the heaps of letters and reports; the buzz of J. J. and his employees was a petty noise of gnats in his ear, and as a...
