SON OF THE WIND
breath of a hotter feeling, a burning sense of injury—of cruel injustice. Through the thick eddy of emotions, fragments of vision—half memories—began to flash upon him. Certain looks of that girl's stuck in him; certain words rang in his mind like a clanging bell. The quick drawing back of lips on the teeth: "You can't!" flung at him like a gauntlet.
Can't? What did the woman think he was made for? His smoldering thoughts burst into flame. "You can't!" rapped out on him on the edge of success. The words were as little as a needle point, yet they denied him, and everything he was, and wanted. Why hadn't she fought him, heaped him with reproaches, given him something to contend with? But this infernal turning her back on him, and closing her eyes! She did not know him—she couldn't see him—she had never heard of him! He was suffering. Vanity proclaimed itself shrieking, but some spirit deeper in him wept,-the ego, the pervading possessing presence men call the soul which is for ever looking for itself in some form outside of itself, foredoomed to disenchantment. Where was the mind which had had no thought that was not for him? The face that had been like a rose, now white, now red? It was all an immense fraud practised, a soft looking surface that, at the first blow, rang iron.
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