. . .
His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings.
Never in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be
fooled and won and competed for and fought over. So that it was
Amanda he wanted to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated
and ruled his senses only to fling him into this intolerable pit of
shame and jealous fury. But the forces that were driving him home
now were the forces below the level of reason and ideas, organic
forces compounded of hate and desire, profound aboriginal urgencies.
He thought, indeed, very little as he lay in his berth or sulked on
deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless invasion of exasperating
images that ever and again would so wring him that his muscles would
tighten and his hands clench or he would find himself restraining a
snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.
Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole
world. She filled the skies. She bent over him and mocked him.
She became a mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the sin of
the world.
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