"I sometimes wish I might live it over again."
"There are, after all, no pleasures in the world like those."
You thought you had learned to have language at command; you never thought, after so many years' schooling of the world, that your pliant tongue would play you truant. Yet now you are silent.
The moon steals silvery into the light flakes of cloud, and the air is soft as May. The cottage is in sight. Again you risk utterance:--
"I have very kind friends;"--the very is emphasized.
"Oh, I believe it!"--with great earnestness.
"Good night, Clarence;"--very kindly; and she draws her hand coyly, and half tremulously, from your somewhat fevered grasp.
You stroll away dreamily, watching the moon,--running over your fragmentary life,--half moody, half pleased, half hopeful.
You come back stealthily, and with a heart throbbing with a certain wild sense of shame, to watch the light gleaming in the cottage. You linger in the shadows of the trees until you catch a glimpse of her figure gliding past the window. You bear the image home with you. You are silent on your return. You retire early, but you do not sleep early.
----If you were only as you were: if it were not too late! If Madge could only love you, as you know she will and must love one manly heart, there would be a world of joy opening before you. But it is too late!
You draw out Nelly to speak of Madge: Nelly is very prudent. "Madge is a dear girl," she says. Does Nelly even distrust you? It is a sad thing to be too much a man of the world!
You go back again to noisy, ambitious life: you try to drown old memories in its blaze and its vanities. Your lot seems cast beyond all change, and you task yourself with its noisy fulfilment. But amid the silence and the toil of your office-hours, a strange desire broods over your spirit,--a desire for more of manliness,--that manliness which feels itself a protector of loving and trustful innocence.
You look around upon the faces in which you have smiled unmeaning smiles: there is nothing there to feed your dawning desires. You meet with those ready to court you by flattering your vanity, by retailing the praises of what you may do well, by odious familiarity, by brazen proffer of friendship, but you see in it only the emptiness and the vanity which you have studied to enjoy.