When Dorothy came, Norman went into the garden with her in a frame of
mind so different from any he had ever before experienced that he
scarcely recognized himself. As the influence of the father's glowing
imagination of genius waned before the daughter's physical loveliness
and enchantment for him, he said to himself, "I'll keep away from him."
Why? He did not permit himself to go on to examine into his reasons. But
he could not conceal them from himself quickly enough to hide the
knowledge that they were moral.
"What is the matter with you to-day?" said Dorothy. "You are not a bit
interesting."
"Interested, you mean," he said with a smile of raillery, for he had
long since discovered that she was not without the feminine vanity that
commands the centering of all interest in the woman herself and resents
any wandering of thought as a slur upon her own powers of fascination.
"Well, interested then," said she. "You are thinking about something
else."
"Not now," he assured her.
But he left early. No sooner had he got away from the house than the
scientific dreaming vanished and he wished himself back with her
again--back where every glance at her gave him the most exquisite
sensations. And when he came the following day he apparently had once
more restored her father to his proper place of a nonessential. All that
definitely remained of the day before's impression was a certain
satisfaction that he was aiding with his money an enterprise of greater
value and of less questionable character than merely his own project.
But the powerful influences upon our life and conduct are rarely direct
and definite. He, quite unconsciously, had a wholly different feeling
about Dorothy because of her father, because of what his new knowledge
of and respect for her father had revealed and would continue to reveal
to him as to the girl herself--her training, her inheritance, her
character that could not but be touched with the splendor of the
father's noble genius. And long afterward, when the father as a distinct
personality had been almost forgotten, Norman was still, altogether
unconsciously, influenced by him--powerfully, perhaps decisively
influenced. Norman had no notion of it, but ever after that talk in the
laboratory, Dorothy Hallowell was to him Newton Hallowell's daughter.
When he came the following day, with his original purposes and plans
once more intact, as he thought, he found that she had made more of a
toilet than usual, had devised a new way of doing her hair that enabled
him to hang a highly prized addition in his memory gallery of widely
varied portraits of her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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