It was that weight which presses
there when we are alone with those with whom we are not strangers,
but with whom we are not completely at home, and she actually found
herself impatient and half-desirous of solitude. This must be
criminal or disease, she thought to herself, and she forcibly
recalled Frank's virtues. She was so far successful that when they
parted and he kissed her, she was more than usually caressing, and
her ardent embrace, at least for the moment, relieved that unpleasant
sensation in the region of the heart. When he had gone she reasoned
with herself. What a miserable counterfeit of love, she argued, is
mere intellectual sympathy, a sympathy based on books! What did
Miranda know about Ferdinand's 'views' on this or that subject? Love
is something independent of 'views.' It is an attraction which has
always been held to be inexplicable, but whatever it may be it is not
'views.' She was becoming a little weary, she thought, of what was
called 'culture.' These creatures whom we know through Shakespeare
and Goethe are ghostly. What have we to do with them? It is idle
work to read or even to talk fine things about them. It ends in
nothing. What we really have to go through and that which goes
through it are interesting, but not circumstances and character
impossible to us. When Frank spoke of his business, which he
understood, he was wise, and some observations which he made the
other day, on the management of his workpeople, would have been
thought original if they had been printed.
Pages:
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67