She is enchanted with people from whom I run away. Is
it companionship, do you think, for me to look on while she walks a coranto
or tosses shuttlecocks with De Malfort? Roxalana is as much my companion
when I admire her on the stage from my seat in the pit. There are times
when my wife seems no nearer to me than a beautiful picture. If I sit in a
corner, and listen to her pretty babble about the last fan she bought at
the Middle Exchange, or the last witless comedy she saw at the King's
Theatre, is that companionship, think you? I may be charmed to-day--as I
was charmed ten years ago--with the silvery sweetness of her voice, with
the graceful turn of her head, the white roundness of her throat. At least
I am constant. There is no change in her or in me. We are just as near and
just as far apart as when the priest joined our hands at St. Eustache. And
it must be so to the end, I suppose; and I think the fault is in me. I am
out of joint with the world I live in. I cannot set myself in tune with
their new music. I look back, and remember, and regret; yet hardly know why
I remember or what I regret."
Again a silence, briefer than the last, and he went on:--
"Do you think it strange that I talk so freely--to you--who are scarce more
than a child, less learned than Henriette in worldly knowledge? It is a
comfort sometimes to talk of one's self; of what one has missed as well as
of what one has.
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