CHAPTER XI
ET DEAM VIDIMUS
TO spring full-grown into the water to learn to swim, to mount full-grown into saddle to learn to ride, to leap for the first time into love, with the set convictions of experience and the brain of a skeptic—that is an experience which gives a man some moments of terror, lest he drown himself or be trampled before his heart begins to beat with the joy of the unimagined. Carron, in the days of his mother's authority, had known none of the adolescent fancies. Without sentiment, late in developing, he had had small experience of women until his youth flung him into the plains. There he had known them—a few—owners of small properties, of hotels, of larger properties, of mines; or girls he had danced with only in the heated balls. Their eyes had been keen and a little hard from continual defensive looking on the world. Their shrewd brains continually were pitted against man's in his arena; or did he venture toward theirs, it was a battle, and the thing was to get the better of him. Materialist, romanticist that he was, expecting of woman all things he
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