It flashed across Gildea’s mind as she finished speaking that there was a great difference between the manner of his talk with this girl and with that bright intelligent girl in Melbourne. He perceived the difference, and the greatness of the difference, but not much farther. It was many years, and in point of spiritual time many ages, since Gildea had been blind to the fact that another nature was influencing and being influenced by his own with the force of fatality. It is the distinguishing mark of the moderns that they are not blind in this respect. None of Shakspere’s men, not even the intellectual Hamlet, get beyond a suspicion that Fate is playing upon them. The chief cause of Hamlet’s delay lies in this suspicion and his antagonism to it: the others submit blindly, and only recognise fatality when the “wheel has come full circle,” but the process of fatality is all unknown to them, not even a mystery. Miss Medwin too was in the same state as Gildea but even deeper in it. She spoke to him as she had never spoken to anyone else in her life, as to a comrade, without leaning, without supporting, with complete simplicity. The spell that compels a mutual truthfulness is the perception that you understand and are understood.
“I see,” he said, “that you complain of your age because its senses are deranged, and idlers like me because the gifts that it assigns to the doers, as opposed to the thinkers, are not gold but tinsel.”
“No, no,” she said, “I do not complain of my age! If I complained of anything, it would be of myself who am unfit for my age. And I do not think that the gifts of our actions are tinsel.”
“Perhaps you are right, and the fault is mine because my senses are deranged?”
“There is great room for action now, as it seems to me. If a man appeared to-morrow with the secret of attraction in him—the secret that Napoleon had or Byron—he would control us as much as they did. They are ours too, these men.”
“But we think too much? we can describe everything, and do nothing?”
“I do not know,” she said, “I have no opinion!”
“Alice,” said Mrs. Medwin.
“Yes, aunt,” answered Miss Medwin.
“Will you please make the tea?” she said.