Damaris still sat
upright, her hands clasped, her hair hanging in a cloud about her to
below the waist. The light was low and the shadow cast by the bed-curtain
covered her. But, through it, he could still distinguish the startled
anxiety of her great eyes as she pondered, trying to seize and hold some
memory which escaped her. And he felt sick at heart, assured it could be
but a matter of time before she remembered; convinced now, moreover, what
she would, to his shame and sorrow, remember in the end.
The purity in which he delighted, and to which he so frequently and
almost superstitiously had turned for refreshment and the safeguarding of
all the finest instincts of his own very complex nature, would, although
she remembered, remain essentially intact. But, even so, the surface of
it must be, as he apprehended, henceforth in some sort dimmed, and that
by the breath of his own long ago misdoing. The revelation of passion and
of sex, being practically and thus intimately forced home on her, the
transparent innocence of childhood must inevitably pass away from her;
and, through that same passing she would consciously go forward,
embracing the privileges and the manifold burdens, the physical and
emotional needs and aspirations of a grown woman.
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