The Dixons; A Story of American Life Through Three Generations

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1921. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XII CROSSED WIRES EVERY human being carries within his breast potential desires and impulses that under sufficient outside pressure or incitement may break out, like crossed electric wires, into sudden flame. The result may be only a brief flare that dies down again and leaves him and his surroundings and relations but little changed or it may be a conflagration in whose track remains almost nothing of what had been a definite character, a settled life. To the onlookers such an outburst is often inexplicable, so flat is its contradiction of what they know of the individual's character. Sometimes he may be surprised himself by the sudden bubbling up, from those dark and hidden deeps of the human heart where run the black streams of the common heredity from a thousand generations of evil-doers, of greedy cravings and fierce impulses which he would have thought foreign to his nature. But they rise up within him and unless he is strong against their onslaught they bend him to their will. More often the individual has consciously progressed toward the possibility of such an explosion by the motive power of thoughts, feelings and desires that, confined within his own breast and known to him alone, have steadily carried him in that direction. Then, because he has known of the growth of these inner forces, the final outburst seems to him logical, inevitable. But to others, unaware of the developments that have been taking place within him, it is beyond explanation. Morris Dixon, making his way with his mother through the crowded rooms of the White House, was fast approaching just such a point of crossed wires whose flare-up would change his whole life and would influence through him, in unending succession, lives, events, history. The reserve, the dignity, the s...