After that she could not sleep. She got up, lit her candle, and took a book at random from her shelves. It was her well-worn, girlish Globe Shakespeare, one of the books she had surreptitiously procured when the family Bowdler was included in the category of formulas against which she revolted. She took it back to bed with her and commenced reading where it had chanced to open. The first words that met her eye seemed like a voice from the other world:
Doth grossly clothe it in, we cannot hear it.
They followed so closely on the track of her own shuddering thought that she could read no more. She blew out her candle, and remained awake, staring into the darkness, until the gray dawn filtered through the blinds, and she fell asleep.
Nor was Kent more restful. He had battled with his love, and with a strong man's will had brought it under subjection, making it minister to his happiness in spite of torturing longings instead of allowing it to darken his life. It had awakened him to a sense of a world of beautiful things, given him a deeper understanding and a wider sympathy than he had before. For him truly might it be said that to love her was a liberal education. It gave him the key to the knowledge and appreciation of women, drew him from his seclusion into the general society he had formerly avoided. A feminine conclusion which he would once have pooh-poohed as weak and illogical struck him now with its intuitive subtlety and delicacy of point. He learned that what the essentially feminine mind lacks in breadth it gains in fineness, and he was amazed to discover what a sensitive touch upon life is possessed by a cultivated woman. And mingled with this new charm was another of an esoteric kind. No woman he met had all the fascinations of Clytie, but every woman seemed to possess one of them. He confided this once in a roundabout way to Wither, who laughed, and told him he was growing too susceptible and would find himself married one of these days. But Kent shook his head. “I could only find a Clytie among them by marrying the whole sex and making an extract of it,” he said with conviction. For not only did the higher qualities of woman's nature manifest themselves to him, but the minor graces of manner and appearance appealed to that side of his aesthetic temperament that had hitherto been under a cloud. It occurred to him then that he had been living with half his faculties. Accordingly he felt a peculiar satisfaction in his new powers of perception.