‘You are wearied of the world very soon. Before you can know us, you leave us.’
‘I am not wearied of the world, for indeed, as you say, I know nothing of it. I am here by accident, as you were in the stoppage to-day. It will disperse, and then I shall get on.’
‘Lord Valentine tells me that you are going to realise my dream of dreams, that you are going to Jerusalem.’
‘Ah!’ said Tancred, kindling, ‘you too have felt that want?’
‘But I never can pardon myself for not having satisfied it,’ said Lady Bertie and Bellair in a mournful tone, and looking in his face with her beautiful dark eyes. ‘It is the mistake of my life, and now can never be remedied. But I have no energy. I ought, as a girl, when they opposed my purpose, to have taken up my palmer’s staff, and never have rested content till I had gathered my shell on the strand of Joppa.’
‘It is the right feeling’ said Tancred. ‘I am persuaded we ought all to go.’
‘But we remain here,’ said the lady, in a tone of suppressed and elegant anguish; ‘here, where we all complain of our hopeless lives; with not a thought beyond the passing hour, yet all bewailing its wearisome and insipid moments.’
‘Our lot is cast in a material age,’ said Tancred.
‘The spiritual can alone satisfy me,’ said Lady Bertie and Bellair.
‘Because you have a soul,’ continued Tancred, with animation, ‘still of a celestial hue. They are rare in the nineteenth century. Nobody now thinks about heaven. They never dream of angels. All their existence is concentrated in steamboats and railways.’