Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/228

220 "And, Saltren, a word with you in the smoking-room if you can spare me the time."

"I am at your service, my lord."

Lord Lamerton had been so excited by the article he had read that he was in a humour to find fault; and, as Viola says,

Such moods did not last long; he was the slowest of men to be roused, and when angry, the most placable; but an injustice angered him, and he had been unjustly treated in the article in that morning's paper.

There must be deep in our souls, some original sense of justice, for there is nothing so maddens a man and sweeps him in angry fever beyond the control of reason, as a sense of injustice done, not only to himself, but to another. It is the violation of this ineradicable sense of justice which provokes to the commission of the grossest injustice, for it blinds the eyes to all extenuations and qualifying circumstances. It is an expansive and explosive gas that lies latent in every breast—in the most pure and crystalline, an infinite blessing to the world, but often infinitely mischievous. It is the moral dynamite in our composition.

There is a hot well in Iceland called Strokr which bubbles and steams far below the surface, the most innocuous, apparently, of hot springs, and one that is even beneficial. But if a clod of turf be thrown down the gullet, Strokr holds his breath for a moment and is then resolved into a raging geyser, a volcano of scalding steam and water. I once let a flannel-shirt down by a fishing-line, thinking to wash it in the cauldron of Strokr, and Strokr resented the insult, and blew my shirt to threads, so that I never recovered of it—no, not a button. It is so with men, they are all Strokrs, with a fund of warmth in their hearts,