Page:The council of seven.djvu/344



The letter of the Colossus was characteristic. Such cordial simplicity was so like him. In a keen and swift recoil of feeling which cut like a knife, Helen recalled the man as he had always seemed to her. It was a case, if ever there was one, of multiple personality. To her Saul Hartz had appeared a man whose kindliness, charm, generosity it would have been hard to exaggerate. There might have been motive behind it all, but so far as Helen was concerned personally there was no reason to think so. He liked her because he liked her. The human beings for whom the Colossus had a regard were not many, but certainly she was among the chosen few admitted to the sunny side of a nature complex, enigmatic, subtle beyond analysis.

Helen now did not doubt that in sum the Colossus was a bad man; a creature of abnormal powers of mind who owed the workaday world of men and things a grudge for having been born into it. He was a natural enemy, who at the call of a perverted genius was ready to under-pin civilization, that crazy structure, the