“No, I did not hear it.”
“Oh, it is a very striking one, and won't take many words to tell. Shall I tell it?”
“Pray do,” said Alice, with her bright look of expectation.
He smiled sadly. Perhaps the story returned with an allegoric melancholy to his mind. With a sigh and a smile he continued—
“Childe Waylin fell in love with a phantom lady, and walked day and night along the fells—people thought in solitude, really lured on by the beautiful apparition, which, as his love increased, grew less frequent, more distant and fainter, until at last, in the despair of his wild pursuit, he threw himself over that terrible precipice, and so perished. I have faith in instinct—faith in passion, which is but a form of instinct. I am sure he did wisely.”
“I sha'n't dispute it; it is not a case likely to happen often. These phantom ladies seem to have given up practice of late years, or else people have become proof against their wiles, and neither follow, nor adore, nor lament them.”
“I don't think these phantom ladies are at all out of date,” said Mr. Longcluse.
“Well, men have grown wiser, at all events.”
“No wiser, no happier; in such a case there is no room for what the world calls wisdom. Passion is absolute, and as for happiness, that or despair hangs on the turn of a die.”
“I have made that shadow a little more purple—do you think it an improvement?”