It was due to her influence, therefore, that his life achieved the
twofold development which left him normal in the middle years; the
fresh pursuing scholar still but a man practically welded to the
people among whom he lived--receiving their best and giving his
best.
But we cannot send our hearts out to play at large among our kind,
without their coming to choose sooner or later playfellows to be
loved more than the rest.
Two intimacies entered into the life of Professor Hardage. The
first of these had been formed many years before with Judge Ravenel
Morris. They had discovered each other by drifting as lonely men
do in the world; each being without family ties, each loving
literature, each having empty hours. The bond between them had
strengthened, until it had become to each a bond of strength
indeed, mighty and uplifting.
The other intimacy was one of those for which human speech will
never, perhaps, be called upon to body forth its describing word.
In the psychology of feeling there are states which we gladly
choose to leave unlanguaged. Vast and deep-sounding as is the
orchestra of words, there are scores which we never fling upon such
instruments--realities that lie outside the possibility and the
desirability of utterance as there are rays of the sun that fall
outside the visible spectrum of solar light.
What description can be given in words of that bond between two,
when the woman stands near the foot of the upward slope of life,
and the man is already passing down on the sunset side, with
lengthening afternoon shadows on the gray of his temples--between
them the cold separating peaks of a generation?
Such a generation of toiling years separated Professor Hardage from
Isabel Conyers.
Pages:
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128