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If he made any mistake it was when ever and again his fatigue got the
better of his immediate attention, and the habit of the public meeting
carried him away. Then he drew himself up--through all their interview
both men stood--and looked away from Redwood, and began to fence and
justify. Once even he said "Gentlemen!"
Quietly, expandingly, he began to talk....
There were moments when Redwood ceased even to feel himself an
interlocutor, when he became the mere auditor of a monologue. He became
the privileged spectator of an extraordinary phenomenon. He perceived
something almost like a specific difference between himself and this
being whose beautiful voice enveloped him, who was talking, talking.
This mind before him was so powerful and so limited. From its driving
energy, its personal weight, its invincible oblivion to certain things,
there sprang up in Redwood's mind the most grotesque and strange of
images. Instead of an antagonist who was a fellow-creature, a man one
could hold morally responsible, and to whom one could address
reasonable appeals, he saw Caterham as something, something like a
monstrous rhinoceros, as it were, a civilised rhinoceros begotten of the
jungle of democratic affairs, a monster of irresistible onset and
invincible resistance. In all the crashing conflicts of that tangle he
was supreme. And beyond? This man was a being supremely adapted to make
his way through multitudes of men. For him there was no fault so
important as self-contradiction, no science so significant as the
reconciliation of "interests." Economic realities, topographical
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