“You seem to be mightily in love with her, sir,” he said, with a sensation of heart-sickness, and more than ever resolved not to mention Grace by name.
“Oh no—I am not that, Winterborne; people living insulated, as I do by the solitude of this place, get charged with emotive fluid like a Leyden-jar with electric, for want of some conductor at hand to disperse it. Human love is a subjective thing—the essence itself of man, as that great thinker Spinoza the philosopher says—ipsa hominis essentia—it is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against any suitable object in the line of our vision, just as the rainbow iris is projected against an oak, ash, or elm tree indifferently. So that if any other young lady had appeared instead of the one who did appear, I should have felt just the same interest in her, and have quoted precisely the same lines from Shelley about her, as about this one I saw. Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!”
“Well, it is what we call being in love down in these parts, whether or no,” said Winterborne.
“You are right enough if you admit that I am in love with something in my own head, and no thing in itself outside it at all.”
“Is it part of a country doctor’s duties to learn that view of things, may I ask, sir?” said Winterborne, adopting the Socratic εἰρωνεία with such well-assumed simplicity that Fitzpiers answered, readily,
“Oh no. The real truth is, Winterborne, that medical practice in places like this is a very rule-of-thumb matter; a bottle of bitter stuff for this and that old woman—the bitterer the better—compounded from a few simple stereotyped prescriptions; occasional attendance at births, where mere presence is almost sufficient, so healthy and strong are the people; and a lance for an abscess now and then. Investigation and experiment cannot be carried on without more appliances than one has here—though I have attempted it a little.”
Giles did not enter into this view of the case; what he had been struck with was the curious parallelism between Mr. Fitzpiers’s manner and Grace’s, as shown by the fact of both of them straying into a subject of discourse so engrossing to themselves that it made them forget it was foreign to him.
Nothing further passed between himself and the doctor in relation to Grace till they were on their way back. They had stopped at a way-side inn for a glass of brandy and cider hot, and when they were again in motion, Fitzpiers, possibly a little warmed by the liquor, resumed the subject by saying, “I should like very much to know who that young lady was.”
“What difference can it make, if she’s only the tree your rainbow falls on?”
“Ha! ha! True.”