Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/95

 of the long scar on his temple, marked there by a broken bottle in the midst of a youthful fight along the India Wharf. He, Michael O'Hara, without education save that which he had given himself, without money, without influence, had raised himself to this position before his thirty-sixth birthday. In the autumn he would be a candidate for Congress, certain of election in the back Irish districts. He, Michael O'Hara, was on his way to being one of the great men of New England, a country which had once been the tight little paradise of people like the Pentlands.

Only no one must ever suspect the depth of that great satisfaction.

Yes, he had a liking for this strange woman, who ought to have been his enemy and, oddly enough, was not. He liked the shrewd directness of her mind and the way she had of sitting there opposite him, turning him over and over while he talked, as if he had been a small bug under a microscope. She was finding out all about him; and he understood that, for it was a trick in which he, himself, was well-practised. It was by such methods that he had got ahead in the world. It puzzled him, too, that she should have come out of that Boston-Durham world and yet could be so utterly different from it. He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since. . . that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.