Let me go; what a bother you
are. Good-bye."
And away she tripped, and he returned to his work, happier than he had
been for a week past.
His happiness, truly, was only on the surface. The old wound had been
salved--as what wound cannot be?--by woman's love and woman's wit
but it was not healed. The cause of his wrong doing, the vain,
self-indulgent spirit, was there still unchastened, and he was
destined, that very day, to find that he had still to bear the
punishment of it.
Now the reader must understand, that though one may laugh at Elsley
Vavasour, because it is more pleasant than scolding at him, yet have
Philistia and Fogeydom neither right nor reason to consider him a
despicable or merely ludicrous person, or to cry, "Ah, if he had been
as we are!"
Had he been merely ludicrous, Lucia would never have married him; and
he could only have been spoken of with indignation, or left utterly
out of the story, as a simply unpleasant figure, beyond the purposes
of a novel, though admissible now and then into tragedy. One cannot
heartily laugh at a man if one has not a lurking love for him, as one
really ought to have for Elsley. How much value is to be attached to
his mere power of imagination and fancy, and so forth, is a question;
but there was in him more than mere talent: there was, in thought at
least, virtue and magnanimity.
True, the best part of him, perhaps almost all the good part of him,
spent itself in words, and must be looked for, not in his life, but in
his books.
Pages:
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254