It struck
those who knew him well that he might do greater things than carry
on a cotton-factory; there was nothing cottony about Caspar
Goodwood, and his friends took for granted that he would somehow and
somewhere write himself in bigger letters. But it was as if
something large and confused, something dark and ugly, would have to
call upon him: he was not after all in harmony with mere smug peace
and greed and gain, an order of things of which the vital breath was
ubiquitous advertisement. It pleased Isabel to believe that he might
have ridden, on a plunging steed, the whirlwind of a great war- a
war like the Civil strife that had overdarkened her conscious
childhood and his ripening youth.
She liked at any rate this idea of his being by character and in
fact a mover of men- liked it much better than some other points in
his nature and aspect. She cared nothing for his cotton-mill- the
Goodwood patent left her imagination absolutely cold. She wished him
no ounce less of his manhood, but she sometimes thought he would be
rather nicer if he looked, for instance, a little differently. His jaw
was too square and set and his figure too straight and stiff: these
things suggested a want of easy consonance with the deeper rhythms
of life.
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