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Realities, by the Author of 'azeth the Egyptian'.
Realities by the Author of 'azeth the Egyptian' Author:Eliza Lynn Linton General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1851 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V. The manager of the theatre to whom Miss Kemble introduced Clara, was a naturally kind-hearted, but capricious and violent man. He had led a life of self-indulgence mingled with much mental exertion, and had gone through the further hardening process of signal success in his official career. He had thus grown to consider himself so superior to the rest of mankind that, had he not been physically humane, he would have been always intolerably tyrannical. As it was, where his affections were not concerned, he was overbearing, cruel, and unfeeling, in the same proportion as he was kind and gentle when actuated by fancy or desire. He was a dangerous enemy and an uncertain friend; for he was so easily offended, and he required such unlimited obedience from allwith whom he had any kind of connexion, that few people could attain to that degree of self- denial which his tyranny demanded. Yet, as a friend or lover, no tenderness was too excessive, no generosity too great for him to show. This sounds a paradoxical character; but a physiologist could explain it, and prove its credibility. Mr. Vasty Vaughan -- the great V. V. as he was sometimes called -- was no longer young. He was rather more than forty years of age: just dreaming of baldness and contemplating a few gray hairs. But he was youthful in feeling, and of an elastic temperament: and these two characteristics soften down the asperities of bare heads and silver locks. Agreeable, gentlemanlike, a systematic roue, and a thorough-going atheist sceptical of all virtue and all goodness -- he was a dangerous person to become the arbiter of a young ...« less