Wood and Stone; A Romance (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY THE depths of Mr. Romer's mind, as he paced up and down the Leonian pavement under the east front of his house on one of the early days of this propitious June, were seething with predatory projects. The last of the independent quarries on the Hill had just fallen into his hands after a legal process of more than usual chicanery, conducted in person by the invaluable Mr. Lickwit. He was now occupied in pushing through Parliament a bill for the reduction of railway freight charges, so that the expense of carrying his stone to its various destinations might be materially reduced. But it was not only of financial power that he thought as the smell of the roses from the sun-baked walls floated in upon him across the garden. The man's commercial preoccupations had not by any means, as so often happens, led to the atrophy of his more personal instincts. His erotic appetite, for instance, remained as insatiable as ever. Age did not dull, nor finance wither, that primordial craving. The aphrodisiac instincts in Mortimer Romer were, however, much less simple than might be supposed. In this hyper-sensual region he had more claim to artistic subtlety than his enemies realized. He rarely allowed himself the direct expansion of frankand downright lasciviousness. His little pleasures were indirect, elaborate, far-fetched. He afforded really the interesting spectacle of one whose mind was normal, energetic, dynamic; but whose senses were slow, complicated, fastidious. He was a formidable for ward-marching machine, with a heart of elaborate perversity. He was a thick- skinned philistine with the sensuality of a sybarite. I do not mean to imply that there was any lack of rapacity in the senses of Mr. Romer. His senses were indeed unfathomable i...