Have you seen a plant, scathed by frost, that has made a strong and
successful effort to live, and still in its struggling existence bears
the mark of the early blight on leaf and blossom?
Such was the impression made on my mind by Bertie La Vigne after three
years of separation, and yet she had grown into majestic stature and
into comparative beauty since we parted at Beauseincourt.
Tall, slender, straight as a young palm-tree, with exquisite
extremities, and a face of aristocratic if not Grecian proportions,
there still was wanting in her step, her eye, her smile, that wonderful
_abandon_ that had formed her chief charm in her earlier years.
She had been crystallized, so to speak, by some strange process of
suffering, into a cold and dull propriety, never infringed on save at
times when she found herself alone with me, and when the old
frolic-spirit would for a little time possess her. It was not dead, but
sleeping.
"And what, my dear Bertie," I said, one day, when Mr. Mortimer had
departed, and she came to throw herself down on the sofa in my chamber
and _rest_, "what has reconciled you to the old Parrot, as you used to
call our sublime Shakespeare?"
"Sublime! I shall think you affected, Miriam, if you apply that word
again to that old commonplace. If he were sublime, do you suppose all
the world would read him or go to see his plays? Do reserve that epithet
for Milton, Dante, Tasso, Schiller, and the like inaccessibilities.
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