Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/267

Rh really was in spirit. She quite admitted that her own attitude was not a noble one. It would have been much finer to have taken Basil at his word, to have risen superior to this whole episode; it would also have been more sensible and more worldly—only it would have been quite false! Teresa had longings to be sensible and worldly, and longings to be noble. But more deeply than anything else, instinctively, she desired to be perfectly true to her own feeling; or rather she could not help being so. And her feeling was that Basil had carelessly broken something beautiful and beyond all price. It might not be beautiful from a high moral point of view; but it had been aesthetically beautiful. … Perhaps the barque of their happiness ought to have been capable of riding out such a storm calmly; perhaps it would have been better to have embarked in a craft of the ordinary pattern, with a thick, solid, institutional bottom. Only they had not done so. Their boat had been a racer, slender, carrying a press of sail free to all the winds of fate; and now, in the storm, one could not know how much damage had been done. … Teresa had a momentary vision of a derelict—mast and sails all gone by the board—rolling helplessly in the wash of the waves. …

She watched the green water leaping and foaming over the rocks, fresh from the snows above,