Logotheti belonged to the primitives. As he had once laughingly
explained to Margaret, his people had dropped out of civilisation
during a good many centuries; they had absorbed a good deal of wild
blood in that time, and, scientifically speaking, had reverted to their
type; and now that he had chosen to mingle in the throng of the
moderns, whose fathers had lost no time in the race, while his own had
remained stationary, he found himself different from other people,
stronger than they, bolder and much more lawless, but also infinitely
more responsive to the creations of art and the facts of life, as well
as to the finer fictions of his imagination and the simple cravings of
his very masculine being.
Men who are especially gifted almost always seem exaggerated to average
society, either because, like Logotheti, they feel more, want more and
get more than other men, by sheer all-round exuberance of life and
energy, or else because, as in many great poets, some one faculty is
almost missing, which would have balanced the rest, so that in its
absence the others work at incredible speed and tension, wear
themselves out in half a lifetime and leave immortal records of their
brief activity.
There had been a time when Margaret had appealed only to Logotheti's
artistic perceptions; at their second meeting he had asked her to marry
him because he felt sure that until he could make her his permanent
possession, he could never again know what it was to be satisfied.
There had been a moment when she had risen in his estimation from an
artistic treasure to the dignity of an ideal, and had dominated him,
even when the human animal in him was most furiously roused.
Again, and lastly, the time had come when, by watching her unseen,
instead of spending hours with her every day, by abstracting himself
from her life instead of trying to take part in it, he had lost his
hold upon his ideal for ever, and had been cruelly robbed of what for a
few short days he had held most dear.
Moreover, after the ideal had withered and fallen, there remained
something of which the man felt ashamed, though it was what had seemed
most natural before the higher thought had sprung up full-grown in a
day, and had blossomed, and perished. It was simply this. Margaret was
as much as ever the artistic treasure he coveted, and he was tormented
by the fear lest some one else should get possession of her before him.
He remembered the sleepless nights he had spent while his marble
Aphrodite had lain above ground, before he was ready to carry her off,
the unspeakable anxiety lest she should be found and taken from him,
the terror of losing her which had driven him to make the attempt in
the teeth of weather which his craft had not been fit to face; and he
remembered, too, that the short time while she had lain at the bottom
of the bay had not passed without real dread lest by a miracle another
should find her and steal her.