I shall die without finding in
any man the love which fills my heart, the poesy that I have in my
soul--"
She stopped, her arms pendant, her head lying back on the cushions,
her eyes, stupid with thought, fixed on a pattern of the carpet. The
pain of great minds has something grandiose and imposing about it; it
reveals a vast extent of soul which the thought of the spectator
extends still further. Such souls share the privileges of royalty
whose affections belong to a people and so affect a world.
"Why did you reject my--" said Calyste; but he could not end his
sentence. Camille's beautiful hand laid upon his eloquently
interrupted him.
"Nature changed her laws in granting me a dozen years of youth beyond
my due," she said. "I rejected your love from egotism. Sooner or later
the difference in our ages must have parted us. I am thirteen years
older than /he/, and even that is too much."
"You will be beautiful at sixty," cried Calyste, heroically.
"God grant it," she answered, smiling. "Besides, dear child, I /want/
to love. In spite of his cold heart, his lack of imagination, his
cowardly indifference, and the envy which consumes him, I believe
there is greatness behind those tatters; I hope to galvanize that
heart, to save him from himself, to attach him to me.
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