“Yes.”
Her words exactly expressed his feeling for literature. He felt as if they two had been climbing the same hill by different paths, and stood side by side for a moment looking up to the heights beyond that rose one above another,—where over the dark pine forests the glittering snow-peaks pierced the sky and the rivers of ice shone gloriously.
Kate came to tell them that Jenny was asleep, and they went up softly. Lawrence wrote out his directions for the night and came down, Stella accompanying him. At the door he paused a moment abstractedly.
“Don’t you think it’s a great loss for a person to miss the pleasure and appreciation of a noble art?” he asked, seriously.
She looked at him questioningly, but replied:
“Yes, it makes me very sorry sometimes; it is a great loss. But I reflect that there are a great many people who get on without it, and they seem quite contented and happy. I think those who have the advantage of the finer influences and delights should be very good and try to prevent the younger ones from growing up without caring for such things.”
“Yes, that is true,” he replied, and he went on with suppressed agitation: “But suppose one should grow up blind to all art and yet not contented or happy, without any true knowledge, or faith, or cultivation but the outward seeming, unsettled, unsatisfied, hungering for one knows not what, despising all that one has?”
He leaned back, and neither spoke for a moment. She turned either way with a shuddering movement.