Her answers were short, modest, faltering; but
each one of them suggestive; and Tom soon found that he had met with
a mind which contained all the elements of poetry, and needed only
education to develop them.
"What a blue stocking, pre-Raphaelite seventh-heavenarian she would
have been, if she had had the misfortune to be born in that station of
life!" But where a clever man is talking to a beautiful woman, talk he
will, and must, for the mere sake of showing off, though she be but
a village schoolmistress; and Tom soon found himself, with a secret
sneer at his own vanity, displaying before her all the much finer
things that he had seen in his travels; and as he talked, she
answered, with quiet expressions of wonder, sympathy, regret at her
own narrow sphere of experience, till, as if the truth was not enough,
he found himself running to the very edge of exaggeration, and a
little over it, in the enjoyment of calling out her passion for the
marvellous, especially when called out in honour of himself.
And she, simple creature, drank it all in as sparkling wine, and only
dreaded lest the stream should cease. Adventures with noble savages
in palm-fringed coral-islands, with greedy robbers amid the fragrant
hills of Greece, with fierce Indians beneath the snow-peaks of the Far
West, with coward Mexicans among tunals of cactus and agave, beneath
the burning tropic sun--What a man he was! Where had he not been? and
what had he not seen? And how he had been preserved--for her? And his
image seemed to her utterly beautiful and glorious, clothed as it
was in the beauty and glory of all that he had seen, and done, and
suffered.
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