"Our mother, Clarence."
The word and the thought dampen your ardor; the sweet watchfulness and gentle kindness of that parent for an instant make a sad contrast with the showy qualities you have been naming; and the spirit of that mother—called up by Nelly's words—seems to hang over you with an anxious love that subdues all your pride of passion.
But this passes; and now—half believing that Nelly's thoughts have run over the same ground with yours—you turn special pleader for your fancy. You argue for the beauty which you just now affirmed; you do your utmost to win over Nelly to some burst of admiration. Yet there she sits beside you, thoughtfully and half sadly, playing with the frail autumn flowers that grow at her side. What can she be thinking? You ask it by a look.
She smiles,—takes your hand, for she will not let you grow angry,—
"I was thinking, Clarence, whether this Laura Dalton would, after all, make a good wife,—such an one as you would love always?"
VII.
A Good Wife.
The thought of Nelly suggests new dreams that are little apt to find place in the rhapsodies of a youthful lover. The very epithet of a good wife mates tamely with the romantic fancies of a first passion. It is measuring the ideal by too practical a standard. It sweeps away all the delightful vagueness of a fairy dream of love, and reduces one to a dull and economic estimate of actual qualities. Passion lives above all analysis and estimate, and arrives at its conclusions by intuition.
Did Petrarch ever think if Laura would make a good wife; did Oswald ever think it of Corinne? Nay, did even the more practical Waverley ever think it of the impassioned Flora? Would it not weaken faith in their romantic passages, if you believed it? What have such vulgar, practical issues to do with that passion which sublimates the faculties, and makes the loving dreamer to live in an ideal sphere where nothing but goodness and brightness can come?