Fearing to print in full the substance of his
speech on vice, its ownership and its significance, they had filled
their columns with talk of the man. The huge Scotch lawyer of the
Tenderloin was proclaimed as something new and startling in the grey
mass of the city's population. Then as in the brave days that followed
the man caught irresistibly the imagination of writing men, himself
dumb in written or spoken words except in the heat of an inspired
outburst when he expressed perfectly that pure brute force, the lust
for which sleeps in the souls of artists.
Unlike the men the beautifully gowned women at the reception had no
fear of McGregor. They saw in him something to be tamed and conquered
and they gathered in groups to engage him in talk and return the
inquiring stare in his eyes. They thought that with such an
unconquered soul about, life might take on new fervour and interest.
Like the women who sat playing with toothpicks in O'Toole's
restaurant, more than one of the women at Mrs. Ormsby's reception had
a half unconscious wish that such a man might be her lover.
One after another Margaret brought forward the men and women of her
world to couple their names with McGregor's and try to establish him
in the atmosphere of assurance and ease that pervaded the house and
the people.
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