As quick as he could wink.”
Yours—ULSWATER.
CHAPTER XIX—DR. ULSWATER'S NARRATIVE CONTINUES: THE MYSTERY OF GEORGIANA AND DELORES
Samoa. March.
IN respect to incisive logic, decision, and force, I have sometimes thought that Susannah resembles Mrs. Ulswater. The characters of both, in contact with my temperament, produce a harmony, thrilling but agreeable. But then my temperament is a kettle drum. I have sometimes thought that on a temperament more lute-like, the impact of Susannah might produce—shall I say?—surprise. On the temperament of Sadler,—melancholy and yet buoyant, intricate and yet simple,—the impact of Susannah seems to produce sometimes extraordinary jubilation, sometimes a condition quite the reverse. He calls her “a melojous circus,” a phrase implying jubilation.
He is a man of moods, a contrast to the consistent placidity of Ram Nad, the Occident to the Orient. Are they then supersignificant types of that new world and that old? One of them turns to life's mystery a bold but troubled face, and covers with a jocular and careless manner a soul unreconciled. The toil and restless wandering of individuals, the surging migration of races, the incessant change called progress, are all but the symptoms of his feverish discomfort, his cosmic ill adjustment? And the other, the Ram Nads, the old-world type, meek, timid, tricky, placid, has it found at least, out of its age-long thoughts, how to make its truckling peace with the mystery? C'est un grand peut-être. Meanwhile the education of Susannah is the principal enterprise of Mrs. Ulswater, Sadler, and me, to say nothing of Ram Nad.
It was my habit to read aloud from the poets, the divine Shelley, the noble Tennyson, the golden Keats. Susannah's opinion of these poets was, on the whole, scornful.