When
you spoke it seemed to me that I knew and could put into words the
wonderful verse-music which was battling upward to reach your brain.
They were, they were--I know them so well. I have known them always;
but I cannot--I cannot catch their meaning!" Suddenly she stepped
backward, dropped her hands, and colored painfully. "It is all purest
nonsense, of course," she said, in her ordinary tone and manner,
except for its painful embarrasment. "It is only your strong,
picturesque way of telling it which presented it as vividly to my mind
as if it were an experience of my own. I never so much as dreamed of
it before you began to speak."
Dartmouth did not answer her for a moment. His own mind was in
something of a tumult. In telling the story he had felt, not a
recurrence of its conditions, but a certain sense of their influence;
and the girl's manner and words were extraordinary. It could hardly
be possible, even in cold blood, to understand their meaning. She
was indisputably not acting. What she had said was very strange and
unconventional, but from whatever source the words had sprung, they
had not been uttered with the intention premeditated or spontaneous
of making an impression upon him.
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