Томас Харди (Гарди)
A Pair of Blue Eyes
‘Well, perhaps not. Though it is hardly a virtue.’
‘Oh yes, in battle! Nelson’s bravery lay in his vanity.’
‘Indeed! Then so did his death.’
Oh no, no! For it is written in the book of the prophet Shakespeare —
“Fear and be slain? no worse can come to fight;
And fight and die, is death destroying death!”
And down they sat, and the contest began, Elfride having the first move. The game progressed. Elfride’s heart beat so violently that she could not sit still. Her dread was lest he should hear it. And he did discover it at last – some flowers upon the table being set throbbing by its pulsations.
‘I think we had better give over,’ said Knight, looking at her gently. ‘It is too much for you, I know. Let us write down the position, and finish another time.’
‘No, please not,’ she implored. ‘I should not rest if I did not know the result at once. It is your move.’
Ten minutes passed.
She started up suddenly. ‘I know what you are doing?’ she cried, an angry colour upon her cheeks, and her eyes indignant. ‘You were thinking of letting me win to please me!’
‘I don’t mind owning that I was,’ Knight responded phlegmatically, and appearing all the more so by contrast with her own turmoil.
‘But you must not! I won’t have it.’
‘Very well.’
‘No, that will not do; I insist that you promise not to do any such absurd thing. It is insulting me!’
‘Very well, madam. I won’t do any such absurd thing. You shall not win.’
‘That is to be proved!’ she returned proudly; and the play went on.
Nothing is now heard but the ticking of a quaint old timepiece on the summit of a bookcase. Ten minutes pass; he captures her knight; she takes his knight, and looks a very Rhadamanthus.
More minutes tick away; she takes his pawn and has the advantage, showing her sense of it rather prominently.
Five minutes more: he takes her bishop: she brings things even by taking his knight.
Three minutes: she looks bold, and takes his queen: he looks placid, and takes hers.
Eight or ten minutes pass: he takes a pawn; she utters a little pooh! but not the ghost of a pawn can she take in retaliation.
Ten minutes pass: he takes another pawn and says, ‘Check!’ She flushes, extricates herself by capturing his bishop, and looks triumphant. He immediately takes her bishop: she looks surprised.
Five minutes longer: she makes a dash and takes his only remaining bishop; he replies by taking her only remaining knight.
Two minutes: he gives check; her mind is now in a painful state of tension, and she shades her face with her hand.
Yet a few minutes more: he takes her rook and checks again. She literally trembles now lest an artful surprise she has in store for him shall be anticipated by the artful surprise he evidently has in store for her.
Five minutes: ‘Checkmate in two moves!’ exclaims Elfride.
‘If you can,’ says Knight.
‘Oh, I have miscalculated; that is cruel!’
‘Checkmate,’ says Knight; and the victory is won.
Elfride arose and turned away without letting him see her face. Once in the hall she ran upstairs and into her room, and flung herself down upon her bed, weeping bitterly.
‘Where is Elfride?’ said her father at luncheon.
Knight listened anxiously for the answer. He had been hoping to see her again before this time.
‘She isn’t well, sir,’ was the reply.
Mrs. Swancourt rose and left the room, going upstairs to Elfride’s apartment.
At the door was Unity, who occupied in the new establishment a position between young lady’s maid and middle-housemaid.
‘She is sound asleep, ma’am,’ Unity whispered.
Mrs. Swancourt opened the door. Elfride was lying full-dressed on the bed, her face hot and red, her arms thrown abroad. At intervals of a minute she tossed restlessly from side to side, and indistinctly moaned words used in the game of chess.
Mrs. Swancourt had a turn for doctoring, and felt her pulse. It was twanging like a harp-string, at the rate of nearly a hundred and fifty a minute. Softly moving the sleeping girl to a little less cramped position, she went downstairs again.
‘She is asleep now,’ said Mrs. Swancourt. ‘She does not seem very well. Cousin Knight, what were you thinking of? her tender brain won’t bear cudgelling like your great head. You should have strictly forbidden her to play again.’
In truth, the essayist’s experience of the nature of young women was far less extensive than his abstract knowledge of them led himself and others to believe. He could pack them into sentences like a workman, but practically was nowhere.
‘I am indeed sorry,’ said Knight, feeling even more than he expressed. ‘But surely, the young lady knows best what is good for her!’
‘Bless you, that’s just what she doesn’t know. She never thinks of such things, does she, Christopher? Her father and I have to command her and keep her in order, as you would a child. She will say things worthy of a French epigrammatist, and act like a robin in a greenhouse. But I think we will send for Dr. Granson – there can be no harm.’
A man was straightway despatched on horseback to Castle Boterel, and the gentleman known as Dr. Granson came in the course of the afternoon. He pronounced her nervous system to be in a decided state of disorder; forwarded some soothing draught, and gave orders that on no account whatever was she to play chess again.
The next morning Knight, much vexed with himself, waited with a curiously compounded feeling for her entry to breakfast. The women servants came in to prayers at irregular intervals, and as each entered, he could not, to save his life, avoid turning his head with the hope that she might be Elfride. Mr. Swancourt began reading without waiting for her. Then somebody glided in noiselessly; Knight softly glanced up: it was only the little kitchen-maid. Knight thought reading prayers a bore.
He went out alone, and for almost the first time failed to recognize that holding converse with Nature’s charms was not solitude. On nearing the house again he perceived his young friend crossing a slope by a path which ran into the one he was following in the angle of the field. Here they met. Elfride was at once exultant and abashed: coming into his presence had upon her the effect of entering a cathedral.
Knight had his note-book in his hand, and had, in fact, been in the very act of writing therein when they came in view of each other. He left off in the midst of a sentence, and proceeded to inquire warmly concerning her state of health. She said she was perfectly well, and indeed had never looked better. Her health was as inconsequent as her actions. Her lips were red, WITHOUT the polish that cherries have, and their redness margined with the white skin in a clearly defined line, which had nothing of jagged confusion in it. Altogether she stood as the last person in the world to be knocked over by a game of chess, because too ephemeral-looking to play one.
‘Are you taking notes?’ she inquired with an alacrity plainly arising less from interest in the subject than from a wish to divert his thoughts from herself.
‘Yes; I was making an entry. And with your permission I will complete it.’ Knight then stood still and wrote. Elfride remained beside him a moment, and afterwards walked on.
‘I should like to see all the secrets that are in that book,’ she gaily flung back to him over her shoulder.
‘I don’t think you would find much to interest you.’
‘I know I should.’
‘Then of course I have no more to say.’
‘But I would ask this question first. Is it a book of mere facts concerning journeys and expenditure, and so on, or a book of thoughts?’
‘Well, to tell the truth, it is not exactly either. It consists for the most part of jottings for articles and essays, disjointed and disconnected, of no possible interest to anybody but myself.’
‘It contains, I suppose, your developed thoughts in embryo?’
‘Yes.’
‘If they are interesting when enlarged to the size of an article, what must they be in their concentrated form? Pure rectified spirit, above proof; before it is lowered to be fit for human consumption: “words that burn” indeed.’
‘Rather like a balloon before it is inflated: flabby, shapeless, dead. You could hardly read them.’
‘May I try?’ she said coaxingly. ‘I wrote my poor romance in that way – I mean in bits, out of doors – and I should like to see whether your way of entering things is the same as mine.’
‘Really, that’s rather an awkward request. I suppose I can hardly refuse now you have asked so directly; but – ’
‘You think me ill-mannered in asking. But does not this justify me – your writing in my presence, Mr. Knight? If I had lighted upon your book by chance, it would have been different; but you stand before me, and say, “Excuse me,” without caring whether I do or not, and write on, and then tell me they are not private facts but public ideas.’
‘Very well, Miss Swancourt. If you really must see, the consequences be upon your own head. Remember, my advice to you is to leave my book alone.’
‘But with that caution I have your permission?’
‘Yes.’
She hesitated a moment, looked at his hand containing the book, then laughed, and saying, ‘I must see it,’ withdrew it from his fingers.
Knight rambled on towards the house, leaving her standing in the path turning over the leaves. By the time he had reached the wicket-gate he saw that she had moved, and waited till she came up.
Elfride had closed the note-book, and was carrying it disdainfully by the corner between her finger and thumb; her face wore a nettled look. She silently extended the volume towards him, raising her eyes no higher than her hand was lifted.
‘Take it,’ said Elfride quickly. ‘I don’t want to read it.’
‘Could you understand it?’ said Knight.
‘As far as I looked. But I didn’t care to read much.’
‘Why, Miss Swancourt?’
‘Only because I didn’t wish to – that’s all.’
‘I warned you that you might not.’
‘Yes, but I never supposed you would have put me there.’
‘Your name is not mentioned once within the four corners.’
‘Not my name – I know that.’
‘Nor your description, nor anything by which anybody would recognize you.’
‘Except myself. For what is this?’ she exclaimed, taking it from him and opening a page. ‘August 7. That’s the day before yesterday. But I won’t read it,’ Elfride said, closing the book again with pretty hauteur. ‘Why should I? I had no business to ask to see your book, and it serves me right.’
Knight hardly recollected what he had written, and turned over the book to see. He came to this:
‘Aug. 7. Girl gets into her teens, and her self-consciousness is born. After a certain interval passed in infantine helplessness it begins to act. Simple, young, and inexperienced at first. Persons of observation can tell to a nicety how old this consciousness is by the skill it has acquired in the art necessary to its success – the art of hiding itself. Generally begins career by actions which are popularly termed showing-off. Method adopted depends in each case upon the disposition, rank, residence, of the young lady attempting it. Town-bred girl will utter some moral paradox on fast men, or love. Country miss adopts the more material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or making your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. (MEM. On Endelstow Tower.)
‘An innocent vanity is of course the origin of these displays. “Look at me,” say these youthful beginners in womanly artifice, without reflecting whether or not it be to their advantage to show so very much of themselves. (Amplify and correct for paper on Artless Arts.)’
‘Yes, I remember now,’ said Knight. ‘The notes were certainly suggested by your manoeuvre on the church tower. But you must not think too much of such random observations,’ he continued encouragingly, as he noticed her injured looks. ‘A mere fancy passing through my head assumes a factitious importance to you, because it has been made permanent by being written down. All mankind think thoughts as bad as those of people they most love on earth, but such thoughts never getting embodied on paper, it becomes assumed that they never existed. I daresay that you yourself have thought some disagreeable thing or other of me, which would seem just as bad as this if written. I challenge you, now, to tell me.’
‘The worst thing I have thought of you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I must not.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I thought you were rather round-shouldered.’
Knight looked slightly redder.
‘And that there was a little bald spot on the top of your head.’
‘Heh-heh! Two ineradicable defects,’ said Knight, there being a faint ghastliness discernible in his laugh. ‘They are much worse in a lady’s eye than being thought self-conscious, I suppose.’
‘Ah, that’s very fine,’ she said, too inexperienced to perceive her hit, and hence not quite disposed to forgive his notes. ‘You alluded to me in that entry as if I were such a child, too. Everybody does that. I cannot understand it. I am quite a woman, you know. How old do you think I am?’
‘How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.’
‘You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do you like best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older than they are?’
‘Off-hand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.’
So it was not Elfride’s class.
‘But it is well known,’ she said eagerly, and there was something touching in the artless anxiety to be thought much of which she revealed by her words, ‘that the slower a nature is to develop, the richer the nature. Youths and girls who are men and women before they come of age are nobodies by the time that backward people have shown their full compass.’
‘Yes,’ said Knight thoughtfully. ‘There is really something in that remark. But at the risk of offence I must remind you that you there take it for granted that the woman behind her time at a given age has not reached the end of her tether. Her backwardness may be not because she is slow to develop, but because she soon exhausted her capacity for developing.’
Elfride looked disappointed. By this time they were indoors. Mrs. Swancourt, to whom match-making by any honest means was meat and drink, had now a little scheme of that nature concerning this pair. The morning-room, in which they both expected to find her, was empty; the old lady having, for the above reason, vacated it by the second door as they entered by the first.
Knight went to the chimney-piece, and carelessly surveyed two portraits on ivory.
‘Though these pink ladies had very rudimentary features, judging by what I see here,’ he observed, ‘they had unquestionably beautiful heads of hair.’
‘Yes; and that is everything,’ said Elfride, possibly conscious of her own, possibly not.
‘Not everything; though a great deal, certainly.’
‘Which colour do you like best?’ she ventured to ask.
‘More depends on its abundance than on its colour.’
‘Abundances being equal, may I inquire your favourite colour?’
‘Dark.’
‘I mean for women,’ she said, with the minutest fall of countenance, and a hope that she had been misunderstood.
‘So do I,’ Knight replied.
It was impossible for any man not to know the colour of Elfride’s hair. In women who wear it plainly such a feature may be overlooked by men not given to ocular intentness. But hers was always in the way. You saw her hair as far as you could see her sex, and knew that it was the palest brown. She knew instantly that Knight, being perfectly aware of this, had an independent standard of admiration in the matter.
Elfride was thoroughly vexed. She could not but be struck with the honesty of his opinions, and the worst of it was, that the more they went against her, the more she respected them. And now, like a reckless gambler, she hazarded her last and best treasure. Her eyes: they were her all now.
‘What coloured eyes do you like best, Mr. Knight?’ she said slowly.
‘Honestly, or as a compliment?’
‘Of course honestly; I don’t want anybody’s compliment!’
And yet Elfride knew otherwise: that a compliment or word of approval from that man then would have been like a well to a famished Arab.
‘I prefer hazel,’ he said serenely.
She had played and lost again.
Chapter XIX
‘Love was in the next degree.’
Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which, by judicious touches of epigrammatic flattery, obliterate a woman’s recollection of the speaker’s abstract opinions. So no more was said by either on the subject of hair, eyes, or development. Elfride’s mind had been impregnated with sentiments of her own smallness to an uncomfortable degree of distinctness, and her discomfort was visible in her face. The whole tendency of the conversation latterly had been to quietly but surely disparage her; and she was fain to take Stephen into favour in self-defence. He would not have been so unloving, she said, as to admire an idiosyncrasy and features different from her own. True, Stephen had declared he loved her: Mr. Knight had never done anything of the sort. Somehow this did not mend matters, and the sensation of her smallness in Knight’s eyes still remained. Had the position been reversed – had Stephen loved her in spite of a differing taste, and had Knight been indifferent in spite of her resemblance to his ideal, it would have engendered far happier thoughts. As matters stood, Stephen’s admiration might have its root in a blindness the result of passion. Perhaps any keen man’s judgment was condemnatory of her.
During the remainder of Saturday they were more or less thrown with their seniors, and no conversation arose which was exclusively their own. When Elfride was in bed that night her thoughts recurred to the same subject. At one moment she insisted that it was ill-natured of him to speak so decisively as he had done; the next, that it was sterling honesty.
‘Ah, what a poor nobody I am!’ she said, sighing. ‘People like him, who go about the great world, don’t care in the least what I am like either in mood or feature.’
Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a woman’s mind in this manner, is half way to her heart; the distance between those two stations is proverbially short.
‘And are you really going away this week?’ said Mrs. Swancourt to Knight on the following evening, which was Sunday.
They were all leisurely climbing the hill to the church, where a last service was now to be held at the rather exceptional time of evening instead of in the afternoon, previous to the demolition of the ruinous portions.
‘I am intending to cross to Cork from Bristol,’ returned Knight; ‘and then I go on to Dublin.’
‘Return this way, and stay a little longer with us,’ said the vicar. ‘A week is nothing. We have hardly been able to realize your presence yet. I remember a story which – ’
The vicar suddenly stopped. He had forgotten it was Sunday, and would probably have gone on in his week-day mode of thought had not a turn in the breeze blown the skirt of his college gown within the range of his vision, and so reminded him. He at once diverted the current of his narrative with the dexterity the occasion demanded.
‘The story of the Levite who journeyed to Bethlehem-judah, from which I took my text the Sunday before last, is quite to the point,’ he continued, with the pronunciation of a man who, far from having intended to tell a week-day story a moment earlier, had thought of nothing but Sabbath matters for several weeks. ‘What did he gain after all by his restlessness? Had he remained in the city of the Jebusites, and not been so anxious for Gibeah, none of his troubles would have arisen.’
‘But he had wasted five days already,’ said Knight, closing his eyes to the vicar’s commendable diversion. ‘His fault lay in beginning the tarrying system originally.’
‘True, true; my illustration fails.’
‘But not the hospitality which prompted the story.’
‘So you are to come just the same,’ urged Mrs. Swancourt, for she had seen an almost imperceptible fall of countenance in her stepdaughter at Knight’s announcement.
Knight half promised to call on his return journey; but the uncertainty with which he spoke was quite enough to fill Elfride with a regretful interest in all he did during the few remaining hours. The curate having already officiated twice that day in the two churches, Mr. Swancourt had undertaken the whole of the evening service, and Knight read the lessons for him. The sun streamed across from the dilapidated west window, and lighted all the assembled worshippers with a golden glow, Knight as he read being illuminated by the same mellow lustre. Elfride at the organ regarded him with a throbbing sadness of mood which was fed by a sense of being far removed from his sphere. As he went deliberately through the chapter appointed – a portion of the history of Elijah – and ascended that magnificent climax of the wind, the earthquake, the fire, and the still small voice, his deep tones echoed past with such apparent disregard of her existence, that his presence inspired her with a forlorn sense of unapproachableness, which his absence would hardly have been able to cause.
At the same time, turning her face for a moment to catch the glory of the dying sun as it fell on his form, her eyes were arrested by the shape and aspect of a woman in the west gallery. It was the bleak barren countenance of the widow Jethway, whom Elfride had not seen much of since the morning of her return with Stephen Smith. Possessing the smallest of competencies, this unhappy woman appeared to spend her life in journeyings between Endelstow Churchyard and that of a village near Southampton, where her father and mother were laid.
She had not attended the service here for a considerable time, and she now seemed to have a reason for her choice of seat. From the gallery window the tomb of her son was plainly visible – standing as the nearest object in a prospect which was closed outwardly by the changeless horizon of the sea.
The streaming rays, too, flooded her face, now bent towards Elfride with a hard and bitter expression that the solemnity of the place raised to a tragic dignity it did not intrinsically possess. The girl resumed her normal attitude with an added disquiet.
Elfride’s emotion was cumulative, and after a while would assert itself on a sudden. A slight touch was enough to set it free – a poem, a sunset, a cunningly contrived chord of music, a vague imagining, being the usual accidents of its exhibition. The longing for Knight’s respect, which was leading up to an incipient yearning for his love, made the present conjuncture a sufficient one. Whilst kneeling down previous to leaving, when the sunny streaks had gone upward to the roof, and the lower part of the church was in soft shadow, she could not help thinking of Coleridge’s morbid poem ‘The Three Graves,’ and shuddering as she wondered if Mrs. Jethway were cursing her, she wept as if her heart would break.
They came out of church just as the sun went down, leaving the landscape like a platform from which an eloquent speaker has retired, and nothing remains for the audience to do but to rise and go home. Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt went off in the carriage, Knight and Elfride preferring to walk, as the skilful old matchmaker had imagined. They descended the hill together.
‘I liked your reading, Mr. Knight,’ Elfride presently found herself saying. ‘You read better than papa.’
‘I will praise anybody that will praise me. You played excellently, Miss Swancourt, and very correctly.’
‘Correctly – yes.’
‘It must be a great pleasure to you to take an active part in the service.’
‘I want to be able to play with more feeling. But I have not a good selection of music, sacred or secular. I wish I had a nice little music-library – well chosen, and that the only new pieces sent me were those of genuine merit.’
‘I am glad to hear such a wish from you. It is extraordinary how many women have no honest love of music as an end and not as a means, even leaving out those who have nothing in them. They mostly like it for its accessories. I have never met a woman who loves music as do ten or a dozen men I know.’
‘How would you draw the line between women with something and women with nothing in them?’
‘Well,’ said Knight, reflecting a moment, ‘I mean by nothing in them those who don’t care about anything solid. This is an instance: I knew a man who had a young friend in whom he was much interested; in fact, they were going to be married. She was seemingly poetical, and he offered her a choice of two editions of the British poets, which she pretended to want badly. He said, “Which of them would you like best for me to send?” She said, “A pair of the prettiest earrings in Bond Street, if you don’t mind, would be nicer than either.” Now I call her a girl with not much in her but vanity; and so do you, I daresay.’
‘Oh yes,’ replied Elfride with an effort.
Happening to catch a glimpse of her face as she was speaking, and noticing that her attempt at heartiness was a miserable failure, he appeared to have misgivings.
‘You, Miss Swancourt, would not, under such circumstances, have preferred the nicknacks?’
‘No, I don’t think I should, indeed,’ she stammered.
‘I’ll put it to you,’ said the inflexible Knight. ‘Which will you have of these two things of about equal value – the well-chosen little library of the best music you spoke of – bound in morocco, walnut case, lock and key – or a pair of the very prettiest earrings in Bond Street windows?’
‘Of course the music,’ Elfride replied with forced earnestness.
‘You are quite certain?’ he said emphatically.
‘Quite,’ she faltered; ‘if I could for certain buy the earrings afterwards.’
Knight, somewhat blamably, keenly enjoyed sparring with the palpitating mobile creature, whose excitable nature made any such thing a species of cruelty.
He looked at her rather oddly, and said, ‘Fie!’
‘Forgive me,’ she said, laughing a little, a little frightened, and blushing very deeply.
‘Ah, Miss Elfie, why didn’t you say at first, as any firm woman would have said, I am as bad as she, and shall choose the same?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Elfride wofully, and with a distressful smile.
‘I thought you were exceptionally musical?’
‘So I am, I think. But the test is so severe – quite painful.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Music doesn’t do any real good, or rather – ’
‘That IS a thing to say, Miss Swancourt! Why, what – ’
‘You don’t understand! you don’t understand!’
‘Why, what conceivable use is there in jimcrack jewellery?’
‘No, no, no, no!’ she cried petulantly; ‘I didn’t mean what you think. I like the music best, only I like – ’
‘Earrings better – own it!’ he said in a teasing tone. ‘Well, I think I should have had the moral courage to own it at once, without pretending to an elevation I could not reach.’
Like the French soldiery, Elfride was not brave when on the defensive. So it was almost with tears in her eyes that she answered desperately:
‘My meaning is, that I like earrings best just now, because I lost one of my prettiest pair last year, and papa said he would not buy any more, or allow me to myself, because I was careless; and now I wish I had some like them – that’s what my meaning is – indeed it is, Mr. Knight.’
‘I am afraid I have been very harsh and rude,’ said Knight, with a look of regret at seeing how disturbed she was. ‘But seriously, if women only knew how they ruin their good looks by such appurtenances, I am sure they would never want them.’
‘They were lovely, and became me so!’
‘Not if they were like the ordinary hideous things women stuff their ears with nowadays – like the governor of a steam-engine, or a pair of scales, or gold gibbets and chains, and artists’ palettes, and compensation pendulums, and Heaven knows what besides.’
‘No; they were not one of those things. So pretty – like this,’ she said with eager animation. And she drew with the point of her parasol an enlarged view of one of the lamented darlings, to a scale that would have suited a giantess half-a-mile high.
‘Yes, very pretty – very,’ said Knight dryly. ‘How did you come to lose such a precious pair of articles?’
‘I only lost one – nobody ever loses both at the same time.’
She made this remark with embarrassment, and a nervous movement of the fingers. Seeing that the loss occurred whilst Stephen Smith was attempting to kiss her for the first time on the cliff, her confusion was hardly to be wondered at. The question had been awkward, and received no direct answer.
Knight seemed not to notice her manner.
‘Oh, nobody ever loses both – I see. And certainly the fact that it was a case of loss takes away all odour of vanity from your choice.’
‘As I never know whether you are in earnest, I don’t now,’ she said, looking up inquiringly at the hairy face of the oracle. And coming gallantly to her own rescue, ‘If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways – not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.’
‘An adroit distinction. Well, they are certainly the more objectionable of the two,’ said Knight.
‘Is vanity a mortal or a venial sin? You know what life is: tell me.’
‘I am very far from knowing what life is. A just conception of life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through it.’
‘Will the fact of a woman being fond of jewellery be likely to make her life, in its higher sense, a failure?’
‘Nobody’s life is altogether a failure.’
‘Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly selected and commonplace,’ she said impatiently. ‘Because I utter commonplace words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace thoughts. My poor stock of words are like a limited number of rough moulds I have to cast all my materials in, good and bad; and the novelty or delicacy of the substance is often lost in the coarse triteness of the form.’
‘Very well; I’ll believe that ingenious representation. As to the subject in hand – lives which are failures – you need not trouble yourself. Anybody’s life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the difference is, that the last chapter is wanting in the story. If a man of power tries to do a great deed, and just falls short of it by an accident not his fault, up to that time his history had as much in it as that of a great man who has done his great deed. It is whimsical of the world to hold that particulars of how a lad went to school and so on should be as an interesting romance or as nothing to them, precisely in proportion to his after renown.’
