The Pride of Eve by Warwick Deeping

Being an individualist, a man who had always depended upon himself, Canterton had very little of the social sensitiveness that looks cautiously to the right and to the left before taking a certain path. All his grown life, from his University days onwards, he had been dealing with big problems, birth, growth, decay, the eternal sacrament of sex, the beauty of earth's flowering. His vision went deep and far. His life had been so full of the fascination of his work that he had never been much of a social animal, as the social animal is understood in a country community. He observed trifles that were stupendously significant in the world of growth, but he had no mind for the social trifles round him. Had he had less brawn, less virility, less humour, it is possible that he would have been nothing more than an erudite fool, one of those pathetic figures, respected for its knowledge and pitied for its sappiness.

Canterton could convince men, and this was because he had long ago become a conviction to himself. It was not a self-conscious conviction, and that was why it had such mastery. It never occurred to him to think about the discretions and the formalities of life. If a thing seemed good to do, he did it; if it seemed bad, he never gave it a second thought. His men believed in him with an instinctive faith that would not suffer contradiction, and had Canterton touched tar, they would have sworn that the tar was the better for it, and Canterton's hands clean. He was so big, so direct, so just, so ready to smile and see the humour of everything. And he was as clean-minded as his child Lynette, and no more conscious than she was of the little meannesses and dishonourable curiosities that make most men and nearly all women hypocrites.