"It is only by holding firmly to an ideal that we rise, step by step, beyond our lower selves."
Beyond "Manon Lescaut" to "Faith Conquers Fear" this might mean.
"And ideals we must have," she pursued. Then rising, her little air of guide and counsellor touched with a smile: "But I must not preach too much, must I?"
It was comforting to dwell on the ludicrous aspects of this mentorship, for, when my thoughts led me to a contemplation of Miss Jones's ideals, I felt my position to be meanly hypocritical, if not "base." Manon was almost finished. Ah! it was superb!—but even my joy in Manon rankled and had lost its savour. Manon was there under false pretences, her presence a subtle insult to Miss Jones. Miss Jones in her flaming gown took on symbolical meanings. An unconscious martyr wearing, did she but know it, the veritable robe of Nessus! A sense of protectorship, tender in its self-reproach, grew upon me—a longing for atonement. I had sacrificed Miss Jones to my masterpiece, and its beauty was baleful, vampire-like.
It was indeed a small thing to take Miss Jones's homilies humbly. Indeed, for this humility I could claim no element of expiation, for I really liked to hear her; she looked so pretty when she talked. It was all so touching and so amusing.
I am not sure that she had read Dante, but if she had she no doubt saw herself something in the guise of a Beatrice stooping from heights of wisdom to support my straying, faltering footsteps. She brought me one day a feeble little volume of third-rate verse, with a page turned down at a passage she requested me to read. The badly constructed lines, their grandiloquent sentimentality, jarred on me; but in them I perceived a complimentary application that might imply much encouragement. Miss Jones evidently thought that I was rising step by step, and put this cordial to my lips. I thanked her very earnestly—feeling positively shrivelled—and then, turning from the subject with a haste I hoped she might impute to modesty—and indeed modesty of a certain humiliating kind did form part of it—I told her that Manon would only require another sitting after that day.
"Ah! is it finished, then?"
She went to look at it.
"Is my left eye as indistinct as that?" she asked, playfully. "Can't you see my eyelashes? That is impressionism, I suppose." I felt my forehead growing hot.
"The left eye is in shadow," I observed.