thinker

Hissensuality has all drifted intosexual vanity, delight for being the candletothemoths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity† His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationshipsöthe lack of a sterner kind of humour which would show him the dreariness of his farce and the total absence of proportion and inadequateness in some of his ideasöall these defects came largely from the flippant and worthless self- complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women.

—Webb, (Martha) Beatrice ne¤  e Potter