We each
thought a great deal more than we said, but after all, maybe it was
well as it stood. What could he ever be to me more than an old
friend--twice my age--and maybe I was too precipitate and
presumptuous. How did I know he thought of me in any other light than
the child he had always known me? I stood up with this impediment
thrown voluntarily in the way, and took off my street apparel. In a
quarter of an hour later dinner was served, and I went down cheerfully
to the dining-room.
CHAPTER VIII.
To age and experience, I doubt not that this period of my life seems
childish and aimless. There is something in a pair of spectacles,
astride the wrinkled noses of maturity, that makes the world of
sentiment seem a mere nursery where growing boys and girls amuse
themselves carelessly before stepping into their manhood or womanhood.
Can it be that this glowing love of which poets sing, is, after all,
survived by such a short, uncertain thing as a human life? When we are
young it is so easy to believe our love will last unto the very end,
and this conviction darts a golden sunbeam across the unborn years: a
sunbeam in which our heaviest sorrows become dancing motes, a sunbeam
which spans the full interval allotted us between this world and the
next. But it is only rational to fear that some of those huge, black
shadows which are ever flitting through the "corridors of time" will
cross our sunbeam when we least expect it, and yet this is a warning
we will not hear, until a personal experience teaches it to our hearts
in sorrowful accents.
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