e soul and the body are one, and mostly so in love.
What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the soul
cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they come together at God's
signal; and the lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the
footstool and foundation of the highest."
"Have you," she said, "seen the portraits in the house of my fathers?
Have you looked at my mother or at Felipe? Have your eyes never rested
on that picture that hangs by your bed? She who sat for it died ages
ago; and she did evil in her life. But, look again: there is my hand to
the least line, there are my eyes and my hair. What is mine, then, and
what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of mine (which you love, and
for the sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me), not a
gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look from my
eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to
others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men
have heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears.
The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me, they
guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but re-inform features
and attributes that have long been laid aside from evil in the quiet of
the grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me? The girl
who does not know and cannot answer for the least portion of herself? or
the stream of which she is a transitory eddy, the tree of which she is
the passing fruit? The race exists; it is old, it is ever young, it
carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon it, like waves upon the
sea, individual succeeds to individual, mocked with a semblance of
self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul, but the soul
is in the race."
"You fret against the common law," I said. "You rebel against the voice
of God, which He has made so winning to convince, so imperious to
command. Hear it, and how it speaks between us! Your hand clings to
mine, your heart leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we
are compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of the earth
remembers its independent life and yearns to join us; we are drawn
together as the stars are turned about in space, or as the tides ebb and
flow; by things older and greater than we ourselves."
"Alas!" she said, "what can I say to you? My fathers, eight hundred
years ago, ruled all this province: they were wi
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