"…my presence was to him only the absence of black morass and snarled vine and creeper to that man who had struggled through a swamp with nothing to guide or drive him – no hope, no light: only some incorrigibility of undefeat – and blundered at last and without warning onto dry solid ground and sun and air – if there could have been such thing as sun to him, if anyone or anything could have competed with the white glare of his madness. Yes, mad, yet not so mad. Because there is a practicality to viciousness: the thief, the liar, the murderer even, has faster rules than virtue ever has; why not madness to? If he was mad, it was only his compelling dream which was insane and not his methods: it was no madman who bargained and cajoled hard manual labor out of men like Jones; it was no madman who kept clear of the sheets and hoods and night-galloping horses with which men who were once his acquaintances even if not his friends discharged the canker suppuration of defeat; it was no madman’s plan or tactics which gained him at the lowest possible price the sole woman available to wive him, and by the one device which could have gained his point - not madman, no: since surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity - some spark, some crumb to leaven and redeem that articulated flesh, that speech sight hearing taste and being which we call human man."