“The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea.”
‘Frank, how could you begin it and lay it down unfinished? Besides, those lines are some of the first; you _must_ remember—
“Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning.”’
‘No, I do not recollect, but I will learn them; learn them for your sake.’
‘I do not want you to learn them for my sake.’
She had taken off her hat and his hand strayed to her neck. Her head fell on his shoulder and she had forgotten his ignorance of _Œnone_. Presently she awoke from her delicious trance and they moved homewards in silence. Frank was a little uneasy.
‘What do you admire? You have hardly looked at him.’
‘I saw a very good review of him. I will look that review up, by the way, before I come down again. Mr Maurice was talking about it.’
Madge had a desire to say something, but she did not know what to say, a burden lay upon her chest. 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. The true artist knows that his hero must be a character shaping events and shaped by them, and not a babbler about literature. Frank, also, was so susceptible. He liked to hear her read to him, and her enthusiasm would soon be his. Moreover, how gifted he was, unconsciously, with all that makes a man admirable, with courage, with perfect unselfishness! How handsome he was, and then his passion for her! She had read something of passion, but she never knew till now what the white intensity of its flame in a man could be. She was committed, too, happily committed; it was an engagement.