There is something monstrous in a man's pretending to lay down the law to a sort of emotion with which he is quite unacquainted--in his asking a fellow to give up a lovely woman for conscience' sake, when he has never had the impulse to strike a blow for one for passion's!" "Oh, oh!" cried Rowland.
"All that 's very easy to say," Roderick went on; "but you must remember that there are such things as nerves, and senses, and imagination, and a restless demon within that may sleep sometimes for a day, or for six months, but that sooner or later wakes up and thumps at your ribs till you listen to him! If you can't understand it, take it on trust, and let a poor imaginative devil live his life as he can!" Roderick's words seemed at first to Rowland like something heard in a dream; it was impossible they had been actually spoken--so supreme an expression were they of the insolence of egotism.

Reality was never so consistent as that! But Roderick sat there balancing his beautiful head, and the echoes of his strident accent still lingered along the half-muffled mountain-side.

Rowland suddenly felt that the cup of his chagrin was full to overflowing, and his long-gathered bitterness surged into the simple, wholesome passion of anger for wasted kindness.

But he spoke without violence, and Roderick was probably at first far from measuring the force that lay beneath his words.
"You are incredibly ungrateful," he said.

"You are talking arrogant nonsense.