Love
itself is without degrees--it is perfect--but when shall it see
the perfect object? It does see it, and it does not see it, in
every beloved being. Beverley found his mind turning, as on a
pivot, round and round upon the thought that Alice might be
impossible to him. The mystery of her life seemed to force her
below the line of his aristocratic vision, so that he could not
fairly consider her, and yet with all his heart he loved her.
Alice, on the other hand, had her bookish ideal to reckon with,
despite the fact that she daily dashed it contemptuously down. She
was different from Adrienne Bourcier, who bewailed the absence of
her un-tamable lover; she wished that Beverley had not, as she
somehow viewed it, weakly surrendered to Hamilton. His apparently
complacent acceptance of idle captivity did not comport with her
dream of knighthood and heroism. She had been all the time half
expecting him to do something that would stamp him a hero.
Counter protests of this sort are never sufficiently vigorous to
take a fall out of Love; they merely serve to worry his temper by
lightly hindering his feet. And it is surprising how Love does
delight himself with being entangled.
Both Beverley and Alice day by day felt the cord tightening which
drew their hearts together--each acknowledged it secretly, but
strove not to evince it openly.
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