Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/41

Rh strange thing for her to do. She reviewed her whole life; first as the eldest daughter in the poor minister's household; then as the unknown teacher in the great city; now the successfull [sic] instructress, highly esteemed, sought after by people of culture conscious of influence and power, having in a great measure realized her early dreams. But the early dreams had been succeeded by later ones no less vivid, no less alluring. Margaret Warren had in her nature a vein of intense ambition. It was not a vulgar craving for power as power; it was rather that a consciousness of power craved room, craved action. Her studies, her reading, had opened to her new worlds, and made life seem to her more and more a vista upon which she had as yet barely entered.

Her æsthetic sense was fast developing into a passion which must have food; beauty in little things, beauty in great things, beauty perpetually she was learning to demand. A verse of Keats could so stimulate her, so lift her into delight, that she would find jarring and offense in things which her practical good sense told her were as true, as harmonious in their way as the color and rhythm of Keats's peerless lines. She recalled herself constantly; she reproached herself constantly; she said sternly to herself many a time, "Dignity and truth are the same in all ages. This Wilhelm here is great; and Annette, and the children, they are representative. Socrates knew no more than