It was the vanity in him--even in the bitter days--that throbbed with
the agony of the bright world's insolence; it was vanity which sustained
him in better days where he sat nursing in his crooked mind the crooked
thoughts that swarmed there. His desire for position and power was that;
even his yearning for corruption was but the desire for the satiation of
a vanity as monstrous as it was passionless. His to have what was shared
by those he envied--the power to pick and choose, to ignore, to punish.
His to receive, not to seek; to dispense, not to stand waiting for his
portion; his the freedom of the forbidden, of everything beyond him, of
all withheld, denied by this bright, loose-robed, wanton-eyed goddess
from whose invisible altar he had caught a whiff of sacrificial odours,
standing there through the wintry years in the squalor and reek of
things.
Now he had arrived among those outlying camps where camp-followers and
masters mingled. Certain card-rooms were open to him, certain
drawing-rooms, certain clubs.
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