P. was a man of a character so
completely outside the range of my experience that any skill of judgment
I might have acquired through contact with many men of many races would
avail me little in my intercourse with him.
That he was arbitrary, self-centered, and exacting mattered little to
me; it was a combination of qualities which rumor had led me to expect
in him, and with which I had become familiar in my acquaintance with men
of wide authority and outstanding ability. What disturbed me was that
his blindness, his ill health, and his suffering had united to these
traits an intense excitability and a morbid nervousness.
My first impulse was to attribute his capriciousness to a weakening of
his brain power; but I could not reconcile this view with the vigor of
his thought, with the clearness of his expression, with the amplitude of
his knowledge, with the scope of his memory as they had been disclosed
the previous night in his conversation with Paterson. No, the fact was
that I had not found the key to his motives, the cipher running through
the artificial confusion of his actions.
I could not foresee the issue of the adventure. In the meantime,
however, the yacht was a comfortable home, the Cote d'Azur was a new
field of observation, J.
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