Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/103

 the fore state-rooms of a Cunard liner for New York which was to call that day, they went with other passengers and their luggage in the tender which conveys between the town and the steamships which, as a rule, lie off the mouth of the harbour near Roche’s Point. There was an interval of about an hour between the arrival of the Queenstown tender and the departure of the steamship for the western ocean, and Lesbia was much interested in being shown over the great vessel, with its spacious saloons and cabins, long corridors and vast engines, and in walking up and down the long parade of deck open to passengers from stem to stern. But the inexorable moment of parting came, a bell was rung for visitors to quit, and after reiterated promises between the two girls to write often, our heroine went down the side after her uncle, and waved farewell as the great ship pounded forth on her outward way and the tender bore them back toward the quays of Queenstown.

The separation proved more of a wrench than Lesbia had anticipated. To say that they had been to each other as two sisters would be a common-place quite beside the mark; rather should they be likened to lovers in a state of society toward which the race is painfully struggling, but which it has not yet reached or even approached, a state in which the merely sensual nature will be depressed and the spiritual raised, or at any rate the lower will be brought into such complete harmony with the higher, that theologians of the future, so far from warning mankind against fleshly lusts as warring against the soul, will, on the contrary, strive rather to indicate the method whereby the flesh may most effectually be made the purified and ennobled soul’s instrument.

Even while the great ship ploughed the broad Atlantic swell, leaving their little vessel to return across the calm basin, Lesbia felt that she had passed through the first act of her youthful life, and that greater issues were now to