“I should like to.” He smiled protectingly into the impassive expectant eyes; even in the throes he was the lordly male. Moreover, pride had shaken him into a temporary possession of his senses. “What do you think of our scenery?” he asked Miss Morton.
“It’s real pretty.”
“Pretty? Beautiful, I should call it.”
“Yes, I guess beautiful suits it better.” If he had applied to it erudite and foreign adjectives she would have assented as amiably.
“Fess is a crank,” advised Mamie. “You mustn’t mind anything he raves over. You’ll be the next thing, I suppose—he’ll find it quite a relief after so much brain work.” Mamie was an admirer and disciple of Christina, besides possessing a quick and observing eye of her own. She had a long, investigating nose, and no beauty whatever; but with the boys, whom she treated villanously, she was the most popular girl in the district.
“Have you read much?” asked Fessenden of his divinity, ignoring Mamie.
“Oh yes.”
“What? Shakespeare? History? Biographies?”
“I guess so. I always forget people’s names that write things.”
And even then the rosy halo swirled unrent. Fessenden returned home and viciously punctured his trees. At supper he was so incoherent that Christina arose and felt his pulse. He passed the greater part of the night wandering in the woods. During the ensuing fortnight he spent every evening at the Hunters’. Several times the girls came to the sugar shanty where he was boiling, and he rowed them home in the dusk. He lived aloft with the gods and the goddesses, one of whom was Grace, who gradually assumed heroic proportions. It mattered not that every interview betrayed her paucity the more pitifully; it mattered not that he never once struck fire in that meagre breast, that never once did her brain respond to the confidences, the ambitions, the aspirations he poured into her puzzled and ofttimes weary ear. He no longer loved Grace, little as he realized that world-old fact; he loved the ideal it was her limited destiny to quicken in his imagination. The great forces rushing through his veins and thumping in his brain had nothing in common with mere facts and girls. They were having their first innings, and not even grateful to the cause. Nothing in the vagaries of nature is more inexplicable than nine-tenths of what, for want of a better name, is called love. It is a wanton waste of good energy and a lamentable waste of spiritual forces; for the passion moves the victim to all sorts of unselfish impulses, exalted emotion, and even religion, all of which, in the reaction when delusion is over, are finely scorned. That love which is composed of an instinct for companionship, and a complete honesty of emotions, and is lacking in sentimentalism and the tragic note, delays its arrival, to people of ardent imagination, until so late that they must have much richness of nature and large recuperative powers to dismiss into the past the memory of all they have spent. The theory that the blind passion of youth springs from the relentless instinct of reproduction is true only in part, for some of the maddest passions are inspired by anæmic and useless women, and the earth has its full measure of sickly children. If Nature has any well-defined plan she has as yet hesitated to reveal it, and it is probable that she is still amusing herself in her laboratory. Most love would appear to be a momentary fever of the imagination to which the body responds, and the soul, always struggling for utterance, tries its wings, flies a little span, and flatters the brain: when a man is in love then is he most pleased with himself; he never imagined that for heights and depths, within an apparently trite exterior, he was so remarkable a being; and until the wave recedes he bestows a like approval on the chance object who, in the prettiness of her hour, or by some trick of manner, bulged his ego into grander proportions.