He only longed for the time when he could take Etta freely into his confidence and engage her interest in the object of his ambition--namely, to make the huge Osterno estate into that lump of leaven which might in time leaven the whole of the empire.
That a man is capable of sustaining two absorbing interests at once is a matter of every-day illustration.

Are we not surrounded by men who do their work well in life, and love their wives well at home, without allowing the one to interfere with the other?
That women are capable of the same seems exceedingly probable.

But we are a race of sheep who run after each other, guided for the moment by a catchword which will not bear investigation, or an erroneous deduction set in alliterative verse which clings to the mind and sways it.

Thus we all think that woman's whole existence is, and is only capable of, love, because a poet, in the trickiness of his trade, once said so.
Now, Paul held a different opinion.

He thought that Etta could manage to love him well, as she said she did, and yet take an interest in that which was in reality the object of his life.