True, Helen supposed she could think--like other people, because the
thoughts of other people had passed through her in tolerable plenty,
leaving many a phantom conclusion behind; but this was THEIR
thinking, not hers. She had thought no more than was necessary now
and then to the persuasion that she saw what a sentence meant, after
which, her acceptance or rejection of what was contained in it,
never more than lukewarm, depended solely upon its relation to what
she had somehow or other, she could seldom have told how, come to
regard as the proper style of opinion to hold upon things in
general.
The social matrix which up to this time had ministered to her
development, had some relations with Mayfair, it is true, but scanty
ones indeed with the universe; so that her present condition was
like that of the common bees, every one of which Nature fits for a
queen, but its nurses, prevent from growing one by providing for it
a cell too narrow for the unrolling of royalty, and supplying it
with food not potent enough for the nurture of the ideal--with this
difference, however, that the cramped and stinted thing comes out,
if no queen, then a working bee, and Helen, who might be both, was
neither yet.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25