She heard but heeded not; she knew more than enough already.
“With that cry there burst the grandest heart that ever beat for mankind. Who can wonder that sixty generations of men have worshipped him as a God!”
Mary rose, and, descending from the Argo, took his arm. She needed its support.
Just before reaching the piazza, she stopped suddenly, and, wheeling in front of him, fixed her gaze upon his face. A gaze long, wistful, pitiful-tender. As though a mother learned by heart the features of her boy just going forth to battle, not knowing what may happen.
She tried to answer the smile that greeted this burst of feminine impulse; but the soulful eyes were swimming with tears.
The Pythia was a woman—and Cassandra—
CHAPTER LVI.
I picture thee to my fancy, my Ah Yung Whack, popping thine almond eyes out of all almond shape. No? Then thou hast not read my last chapter. Couldst not? Ah, but thou must. I felt that it would be so much Choctaw to thee. Still, thou must read it; for in that chapter I strike the key-note of this, my Symphonic Monograph.
I know it is Choctaw to thee; nay, Comanche; but I rejoice, rather, in that; for it gives me a pretext for writing an entire chapter for thine enlightenment. Nor exclusively for thine; for I would make matters clear for the contemporary reader, who will, I trust (or else alas for my poor publishers!),—who will, I trust, outnumber thee.
This, then, is my case. I have thrown upon my canvas a young person who has had the misfortune to fall in love with a man of whom she may be fairly said to know nothing. (Her feminine intuitions cannot, of course, pass muster as knowledge with us Bushwhackers and philosophers.) And this young person, so far as is made to appear, is anxious to know but one thing in regard to her lover. Had she been a good sensible girl, with no nonsense about her, it might have been supposed that she would have been curious to know whether he were rich. Then, being but just turned of eighteen, who could have blamed her if she had wondered whether he were of a jealous temper, and likely to put an end to her dancing with other men? Again; many women have a pardonable ambition to shine in the eyes of their friends; and was he, if rich, generous as well? And was she likely to dazzle Alice with her diamonds, perhaps, or beam upon Lucy from a handsome equipage? He had shown, too, some fondness for field sports, and would he—ah, would he (harrowing thought to every truly feminine bosom)—would he bring her into the country, there to drag out a weary, dreary life, and shoppinglessly vegetate? Nay, was this splendid creature (as is too often the case with splendid creatures), was he, perhaps, a slave to creature comforts? Would he be an exacting critic of her housekeeping? Might not muddy coffee exacerbate even an heroic soul? Could it be that a roast not done to a turn might corrugate that admirable brow?