“A great soul draws and is drawn with a more fierce intensity than any small one. By every inch we grow in intellectual height our love strikes down its roots deeper, and spreads out its arms wider. It is for love’s sake yet more than for any other that we look for that new time.”
She had leaned her head against the stones, and watched with her sad, soft eyes the retreating bird. “Then when that time comes,” she said lowly, “when love is no more bought or sold, when it is not a means of making bread, when each woman’s life is filled with earnest, independent labour, then love will come to her, a strange, sudden sweetness breaking in upon her earnest work; not sought for, but found. Then, but not now—”
Waldo waited for her to finish the sentence, but she seemed to have forgotten him.
“Lyndall,” he said, putting his hand upon her—she started—“if you think that that new time will be so great, so good, you who speak so easily—”
She interrupted him.
“Speak! speak!” she said, “the difficulty is not to speak; the difficulty is to keep silence.”
“But why do you not try to bring that time?” he said with pitiful simplicity. “When you speak I believe all you say; other people would listen to you also.”
“I am not so sure of that,” she said with a smile.
Then over the small face came the weary look it had worn last night as it watched the shadow in the corner, Ah, so weary!
“I, Waldo, I?” she said. “I will do nothing good for myself, nothing for the world, till some one wakes me. I am asleep, swathed, shut up in self; till I have been delivered I will deliver no one.”