It is hard for a man of middle age, with a cool brain and tranquillized passions, to retrace the history of his youth. There is much that he must smile over--much, too, which is irksome for him to dwell upon. Many experiences which in their freshness seemed holy and sacred, in after years, stripped of their disguise of false sentiment and the aureole with which they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely loathsome--just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high romanticism--silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders, balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. This skeleton framework of the illusion, these well-worn contrivances, tarnished gold lace and mock splendors, disenchant us sadly, and what we took for
Horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle: answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying,
is now discovered to be a cheap-trumpet imitation of the enchanted notes we dreamed of hearing.
After Miss Lenox returned from the Point she was, as I have said, a little pensive: this little shadow upon the splendor of her beauty lent a subtlety and charm to her manner. If there had been a fault in her loveliness before, it was that it remained always equal: the same light seemed always to play over face and hair, the liquid clearness of her eyes was always undimmed, and there was a trifle of over-robustness about the rounded contours of her figure. In spite of all her beauty, it had at times been hard for me to realize that she was a woman to give herself thoroughly to love. I had already had many dreams of her, yet never one where I thought she could have given me the infinite softness of a caressing touch or feel the motherly quality which lies at the bottom of every true woman's love for man. Now the splendor of her eyes was veiled, her smile was half melancholy, her voice less clear and ringing.
When a man loves a woman, and her mood changes and softens, he reads but one meaning in her tenderness; and it was not long before I had begun fully to believe that there was hope for me. There seemed to be no one to meddle in my wooing. True, Judge Talbot came constantly to the house to see Miss Lenox, and lacked none of the signs by which we read a man's errand in his demeanor; but I did not fear any rivalry from him. Youth, at any rate, is something in itself, independent of other advantages: no wonder it vaunts itself and believes in its own power. That Georgy would think for an instant of giving herself to this man did not seriously occur to me. His face was like the face of thousands of successful men whom we see daily in the great marts of the world. His forehead was broad but low, his eyes inclined to smallness and set closely together, his brows shaggy and overhanging: his cheeks were heavy, and the fleshy formation of his mouth and chin denoted both cruelty and sensuality. He was a wealthy man: such men are always rich. He had the reputation of holding an iron grip over everything he claimed, and never letting it go. He had been married in early life, and now had sons and daughters past the age of the girl upon whom he was eagerly pressing his suit.