"I didn't say any harm of her," he hastened to reply. "I spoke of Reynolds: he is very much in love. You do not blame him for thinking a great deal of her—I don't blame him at all. I think it is deuced clever of him, don't you know."
She rose as if to go away.
"Come, now, turn about is fair: you made me sit down again when I got up," he said, catching her hand and gently pulling her down beside him.
What further was said between them has never been gathered from the sweet wind that bore their fragmentary murmurings away among the old trees and down the silvery windings of the river. I presume that, no matter how much the circumstances of courtship may differ, true love, in the hey-day of youth, or in the vigorous prime of life, has certain constant quantities by which it may readily be known; and one of these is so sweet that, to one not personally interested, it narrowly misses being entirely too sweet for deliberate discussion. John Ruskin has, I believe, more than suggested an amendment to the ordinary methods of love-making, but lovers seem inclined to follow the old, familiar rose-scented plan, no matter how silly it may appear to superannuated philosophers and art critics.
CHAPTER XIII.
AT THE RUIN.
Reynolds had been shut away from society for so long a time that he had returned, in a degree, to the susceptibility and receptivity of extreme youth. We grow like what we contemplate, is a very trite truth, and he had absorbed much of the outright simplicity of the mountaineers, without losing any of the character he had long ago formed. Self-knowledge may be very valuable, but self-study does not tend always toward happiness. One might almost venture to say that, in a vast majority of cases, serious self-analysis amounts to remorse if nothing worse. Moreover, one usually chooses solitude in which to erect one's furnace and laboratory of self-criticism, where one may make the heat as high and protracted as one pleases. The result is usually a mass of unsightly slag instead of the fine and precious metal one has hoped to turn out. Hence it is that a hermit returning to the world after years of seclusion and self-delusion finds it a paradise when he had expected to see it a hell. Men and women are so much purer and stronger and nobler than he had pictured them, and all the ways of human social life are so much sweeter and fresher than his diseased brain had remembered them to be, that he sloughs his crust, like a serpent, and comes out a new man.
The doctrine that evil experiences are ever of value, or rather that a baptism in sin ever worked a positive good to the recipient, is too dangerous to be received; but it sometimes appears that there is an annealing influence exerted on character by the intense heat of uncontrollable passions, tempering it at last to the highest degree of sensitiveness and susceptibility. Reynolds was aware, in a vague way, of the change so rapidly going on within him. It was as if his nature were putting forth a tremendous spurt of power with which to eject from its tissue the evil of the old life. What a mystery there is in remorse and repentance and reform! But how much greater the mystery of evil, that terrible, invisible acid, combining with all the bases of human nature and disintegrating every crystal of beauty! How shall the stream of a life, once defiled, be purified? The simplest reagent will disclose the presence of sin, but what process will eliminate it?
The Hand that made the mirror must remove the spots of tarnish.
Love is always the gateway of a new life. When its purple mists and its wafts of heavenly perfumes come upon its victim his whole nature feels as if the ultimate sources of impulse had been cleansed, sweetened and electrified. New needs, new aspirations, fresh hopes and the dewy vigor of morning leap into the heart. Ah, then how bitter is the memory of misdeeds! Just then if Satan would get behind and forever disappear, what a relief! What a joy if all the past could be wiped out, as with a sponge, and existence be left to date from the advent of love!