'What do you admire? You have hardly looked at him.'
'I saw a very good review of him. I will look that review up, by the
way, before I come down again. Mr Maurice was talking about it.'
Madge had a desire to say something, but she did not know what to
say, a burden lay upon her chest. It was that weight which presses
there when we are alone with those with whom we are not strangers,
but with whom we are not completely at home, and she actually found
herself impatient and half-desirous of solitude. This must be
criminal or disease, she thought to herself, and she forcibly
recalled Frank's virtues. She was so far successful that when they
parted and he kissed her, she was more than usually caressing, and
her ardent embrace, at least for the moment, relieved that unpleasant
sensation in the region of the heart. When he had gone she reasoned
with herself. What a miserable counterfeit of love, she argued, is
mere intellectual sympathy, a sympathy based on books! What did
Miranda know about Ferdinand's 'views' on this or that subject? Love
is something independent of 'views.' It is an attraction which has
always been held to be inexplicable, but whatever it may be it is not
'views.' She was becoming a little weary, she thought, of what was
called 'culture.' These creatures whom we know through Shakespeare
and Goethe are ghostly. What have we to do with them? It is idle
work to read or even to talk fine things about them. It ends in
nothing. What we really have to go through and that which goes
through it are interesting, but not circumstances and character
impossible to us. When Frank spoke of his business, which he
understood, he was wise, and some observations which he made the
other day, on the management of his workpeople, would have been
thought original if they had been printed. The true artist knows
that his hero must be a character shaping events and shaped by them,
and not a babbler about literature. Frank, also, was so susceptible.
He liked to hear her read to him, and her enthusiasm would soon be
his. Moreover, how gifted he was, unconsciously, with all that makes
a man admirable, with courage, with perfect unselfishness! How
handsome he was, and then his passion for her! She had read
something of passion, but she never knew till now what the white
intensity of its flame in a man could be. She was committed, too,
happily committed; it was an engagement.
Thus, whenever doubt obtruded itself, she poured a self-raised tide
over it and concealed it. Alas! it could not be washed away; it was
a little sharp rock based beneath the ocean's depths, and when the
water ran low its dark point reappeared. She was more successful,
however, than many women would have been, for, although her interest
in ideas was deep, there was fire in her blood, and Frank's arm
around her made the world well nigh disappear; her surrender was
entire, and if Sinai had thundered in her ears she would not have
heard. She was destitute of that power, which her sister possessed,
of surveying herself from a distance. On the contrary, her emotion
enveloped her, and the safeguard of reflection on it was impossible
to her.