Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/771

1868.] I am beginning to understand her. Having been given the keynote almost miraculously at the outset, I can trace the inner harmony of all her words and actions. This chronic hopelessness has not come, as I at first supposed, from any one event or cause. She has known no great sorrow; her heart is strangely fresh, I had almost said dormant, for a woman of her life and years; I do not believe the grand passion has ever touched her, and she is far too high and proud for mere flirtations; I have no haunting shade of a lover, dead or living, to perpetually strive against. I think it is the gradual dying out of delusions, which has reduced her to this mere acceptancy of existence. She must have begun life full of beautiful dreams, and hopes, and enthusiasms—she has seen them extinguished one by one, until she has lost the power to believe in their worth or possible fulfilment. She is always secretly reverting to those days when she could believe and hope, brooding over their memory, counting them as lost treasures. As I knew from the first, a woman with a Past. She is vainly striving to exist upon it; but her life contains no really satisfying element, and she is actually dying out from spiritual inanition. She is always looking backward. My God, shall I ever be able to make her look forward! If He will grant me that prayer He may take away all other success, and I shall still hold myself His richly favored child.

Sunday.—It is two weeks since I have written down any of my inner life. But this Sunday morning finds me so much fuller of love to woman than to God, so much more intent upon the highest of earth than of Heaven, that I choose to write of her rather than to take my part with the church-goers. And yet I can scarcely call it the less sacred occupation, for even to think of her is to me like a holy service.

I have seen her three times lately; and, by some chance, we have always fallen into serious argument on the gravest subjects, upon which we both hold very fixed opinions. We almost always differ. And yet it is singular, that though we think apart, we invariably feel together. Our brains work in opposite directions; but in questions of honor, of emotion or sentiment, in everything superior to mere intellect, our instincts are identical. I am conscious, though, that the expression of my ideas and beliefs often shocks and repels her. It is far more painful to me than to her, and yet I cannot act otherwise. I want to stand as clearly before her as I stand before my God. I think it would kill me to lose her, but I know it would kill me ever to look in her face and read there that I had won her upon false pretences. Perhaps I have grown a little morbid on the subject; for sometimes, when I fear I have run rather roughly against some romantic, time-honored idea which I think it quite natural she should hold, my words find a happier reception than I expect. The other night John quoted King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in connection with something at the present day. "I cannot perceive the application," I said; "the only chivalry I have any faith in for this the year of our Lord 1867, is to pay your debts, to face your social current at need, to vote up to your conscience, and to remember your poor neighbor." I had spoken almost involuntarily, and the next second glanced nervously at her to catch the effect I feared my sentence would have. I fully expected to see her flame up with the entire "Idyls of the King" upon her lips. I thought she would rise into superb indignation at what would strike her as rudely stripping that word, so beloved of women, of its halo of beauty and glory. I found instead that she was looking intently at me, with a singular glow, which was light, not color, in her face. "Yes," she answered,