PART III
DISENCHANTMENT
CHAPTER I
A DISCONSOLATE LOVER AND A PAIR OF BLUE EYES
With that strange hunger of youth for the agony of experience, Trent allowed the news of Laura's engagement to plunge him into an imaginary despondency which was quite as vivid as any reality of suffering. For a week he persistently refused his meals, and he was even seized with a kind of moral indignation when his perfectly healthy appetite asserted itself at irregular hours. To eat with a broken heart appeared to him an act of positive brutality; and yet he was aware that, in spite of the sting of his wounded pride, the tragic ending of his first romance produced not the slightest effect upon his physical enjoyment. It was an instance where a purely ideal sentiment struggled against a perfectly normal constitution.
"You could never have cared for me, of course I always knew that," he remarked one day to Laura, "but I can't help wishing that you hadn't fallen in love with anybody else."
From the bright remoteness of her happiness she smiled down upon him. "But doesn't such a wish as that strike you as rather selfish?"
"I don't care—I want you back again just as you used to be—and now," he added bitterly, "you've even given up your writing."
"I shall never write again," she answered, quietly, without regret. It was a truth which she felt only intuitively at the time, for her reason as yet had hardly taken account of a fact that was perfectly evident to the subtler perceptions of her feeling. She would never write again—her art had been only the exotic flowering of a luxuriant imagination and she had lost value as a creative energy while she had gained in experience as a human soul.