Explore "The Inquisitor" by Hugh Walpole on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No man thinks himself a villain. There is no melodrama about Stephen Furze: only thus far has he the right trappings for melodrama--that his voice is gentle and his movements quiet. There is a stillness where he is, a stillness so profound that violent spirits like Lampiron are compelled to break it.
Furze's own view of himself was that he was a man of justice, who hated untidiness. This passion for BARENESS was a growing passion. There was dust in his own room because he allowed no one to touch anything there, but for the rest there was a shining bareness everywhere. A scrap of paper on the floor was to himself a personal insult. As he bent his long legs to pick it up, a rage bubbled in him. How DARE it lie there? He had the acquisitiveness that leads to sitting naked in a naked room--a cell, at last perhaps, padded, for he could not feel so surely a possessor of great fortune as when there was no detail before his eyes to insist on his limitations.