That was his character:  denial as a child had filled him with slow-accumulating rage; later discipline at school had found him utterly intractable.  Something deep and instinctive within him resisted every effort to make him a part of any social organization, however admirable; he never formed any personal bonds with humanity in particular.  He had grown into a solitary being within whom were immovably locked all the confidences, the spontaneous expressions of self, that bind men into a solidarity of common failings and hopes.  He never offered, nor, apparently, required, any marks of sympathy; as a fact, he rarely expressed anything except an occasional irrepressible scorn lashing out at individuals or acts that conspicuously displeased him.  This had occurred more than once at Myrtle Forge, when assemblymen or members of the Provincial Council had been seated at dinner.

It was after such a scene that his mother had witnessed perhaps his only attempt at self-explanation.  “I am sorry you were disturbed,” he had pronounced, after standing and regarding her for a silent, frowning space; “but for me there is something unendurable in men herding like cattle, protecting their fat with warning boards and fences.  I can’t manage the fiddling lies that keep up the whole silly pretence of the stuffy show.  If it gets much thicker,” he had threatened, waving vaguely toward the west, “I’ll go out to the Ohio, or the French forts.”

That this was not merely a passive but an active state of mind was amply expressed by his resolute movement toward Thomas Gilkan’s house.  He had, ordinarily, an unusual liking for the charcoal burners, and had spent many nights in their huts, built, like the charring stacks, of mud and branches.  But, organized by Dan Hesa into an opposition, a criticism of his choice of way, they offered an epitome of the conditions he derided and assailed.

His feeling for Fanny Gilkan was in the greater part understood, measured; there was a certain amount of inchoate, youthful response to her sheer physical well being, a vague blur of pleasant sensation at her proximity; but beyond that he felt no attraction except a careless admiration for her endurance and dexterity in the woods, a certain relief in the freedom of her companionship.  He had never considered her concretely as a possible source of physical pleasure.  He was not easily excited sexually, and had had few adventures with women; something of his contempt, his indifference, removed him from that, too.  His emotions were deep, vital; and hid beneath a shyness of habit that had grown into a suspicious reserve.  All bonds were irksome to him, and instinctively he avoided the greater with the lesser; instinctively he realized that the admission of cloying influences, of the entanglements of sex, would more definitely bind him than any generality of society.