She
looked far back into a past already dim and remembered that she had told
Joe many times how she loved him with all her heart. But the words were
spoken before she knew that she possessed a heart at all. Yet Joe then
formed no inconsiderable figure in life. She had looked forward to marriage
with him as a comfortable and sufficient background for present existence;
she had viewed Joe as a handsome, solid figure--a man well thought of, one
who would give her a home with bigger rooms and better furniture in it than
most fishermen's daughters might reasonably hope for. But this new blinding
light was more than the memory of Joe could face uninjured. He shriveled
and shrank in it. Like St. Michael's Mount, seen afar, through curtains of
rain, Joe had once bulked large, towering, even grand, but under noonday
sun the great mass dwindles as a whole though every detail becomes more
apparent; and so with poor Joe Noy. Removed to a distance of a thousand
miles though he was, Joan had never known him better, never realized the
height, breadth, depth of him so acutely as now she did. The former
ignorance in such a case had been bliss indeed, for whereunto her present
acquired wisdom might point even she dared not consider. Any other girl
must have remained sufficiently alive to the enormous disparity every way
between herself and the artist; and Joan grasped the difference, but from
the wrong point of view.
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