s; there were separate lamps, also, on
two or three tables, and on marble brackets, adding their white
radiance to that of the chandelier. The furniture was exceedingly
rich. Fresh from our old farmhouse, with its homely board and benches
in the dining-room, and a few wicker chairs in the best parlor, it
struck me that here was the fulfilment of every fantasy of an
imagination revelling in various methods of costly self-indulgence and
splendid ease. Pictures, marbles, vases,--in brief, more shapes of
luxury than there could be any object in enumerating, except for an
auctioneer's advertisement,--and the whole repeated and doubled by the
reflection of a great mirror, which showed me Zenobia's proud figure,
likewise, and my own. It cost me, I acknowledge, a bitter sense of
shame, to perceive in myself a positive effort to bear up against the
effect which Zenobia sought to impose on me. I reasoned against her,
in my secret mind, and strove so to keep my footing. In the
gorgeousness with which she had surrounded herself,--in the redundance
of personal ornament, which the largeness of her physical nature and
the rich type of her beauty caused to seem so suitable,--I malevolently
beheld the true character of the woman, passionate, luxurious, lacking
simplicity, not deeply refined, incapable of pure and perfect taste.
But, the next instant, she was too powerful for all my opposing
struggles. I saw how fit it was that she should make herself as
gorgeous as she pleased, and should do a thousand things that would
have been ridiculous in the poor, thin, weakly characters of other
women. To this day, however, I hardly know whether I then beheld
Zenobia in her truest attitude, or whether that were the truer one in
which she had presented herself at Blithedale. In both, there was
something like the illusion which a great actress flings around her.

"Have you given up Blithedale forever?" I inquired.

"Why should you think so?" asked she.

"I cannot tell," answered I; "except that it appears all like a dream
that we were ever there together."

"It is not so to me," said Zenobia. "I should think it a poor and
meagre nature that is capable of but one set of forms, and must convert
all the past into a dream merely because the present happens to be
unlike it. Why should we be content with our homely life of a few
months past, to the exclusion of all other modes? It was good; but
there are other lives as good, or better.