It was a bad passion at first. How would it
have shamed his father and mother had they heard of it! Its continuance
was even more pernicious, making him profligate and idle; introducing
him to light pleasures and companies; enfeebling him, morally and
physically; diverting him from the beautiful arts; weakening his
parental love; divorcing him from grand themes and thoughts. He could
never marry this woman. Their heart-strings must have been wrung by some
final parting; and now that she had been proved untrue, was it not most
unmanly that he should permit her to stand even in the threshold of his
mind? It was a good riddance, he said, pacing the floor in the
firelight; but just then he glanced into the great mirror, and stood
fixed to mark the pallor of his face. Say what he might, laugh as he
did, with a hollow sound, that absent girl had stirred the very
fountains of his feelings. Not learned, not beautiful, not anything to
anybody but him--there was yet the difference between her love and her
deceit, which made him content or wretched.
He felt this so keenly that he lifted his voice and cursed--himself,
her, society, mankind. Then he cried like a child, and called himself a
calf, and laughed bitterly, and cried again.
There was no sleep for him that night.
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