"Indeed she will," Claudia answered, confidently. "Out of the depth of your profound ignorance of natural history do you speak, my brother. I dread the reaction, though. When it comes she will be overwhelmed with shame; but it will come. All this is only a phase. She is in a state of transition now. It is her pride that makes her nurse her grief, and will not let her give him up. She cannot bear to think that she, of all women in the world, should have been the victim of anything so trivial as a passing fancy. Not that it would have been a passing fancy if they had not been separated; but as it is—why, no fire can burn without fuel."
Claudia had evidently changed her mind, and she might be right; but my own fear was that her first impression would be justified, and that Ideala would never be able to take a healthy interest in anything again.
"I cannot care," was her constant complaint. "Nothing ever touches me either painfully or pleasurably. Nothing will ever make me glad again."
She said this one evening when she was sitting alone with Claudia and myself, and there was a long silence after she had finished speaking, during which she sat in a dejected attitude, her face buried in her hands.
All at once she looked up.
"It is very strange," she said, "but half that feeling seems to have gone with the expression of it."
"I think," Claudia decided, in her common-sense tone, "that you are nursing this unholy passion, Ideala. You are afraid to give it up lest there should be nothing left to you. Can you not free your mind from the trammels of it, and grasp something higher, better, and nobler? Can you not become mistress of yourself again, and enter on a larger life which shall be full of love—not the narrow, selfish passion you are cherishing for one, but that pure and holy love which only the best— and such women as you may always be of the best—can feel for all? If you could but get the fumes of this evil feeling out of yourself, you would see, as we see, what a common thing it is, and you would recognise, as we recognise, that your very expression of it is just such as is given to it by every hysterical man or woman that has ever experienced it. It is a physical condition caused by contact, and kept up by your own perverse pleasure in it—nothing more. Every one grows out of it in time, and any one with proper self-control could conquer it. You are wavering yourself. You see, now that you have crystallised the feeling into words, that it is a pitiful thing after all, that the object is not worth such an expenditure of strength—certainly not worth the sacrifice of your power to enjoy anything else. Such devotion to the memory of a dead husband has been thought grand by some, although for my part I can see nothing grand in any form of self- indulgence, whether it be the indulgence of sorrow or joy, which narrows our sphere of usefulness, and causes us to neglect the claims of those who love us upon our affection, and the claims of our fellow- creatures generally upon our consideration; but in your case it is simply——" Claudia paused for want of a word.
"You would say it is simply degrading," Ideala interposed. "I do not feel it so. I glory in it."
"I know," said Claudia, pitilessly. "You all do." And then she got up, and laid her hand on Ideala's shoulder. "It is time," she said, earnestly,
"It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye,
That old hysterical mock-disease should die."