d. She spoke now as much to her own soul as
to his perceptions. "Once--or was it only that I thought I did? For
long weeks I struggled against deceiving Rube, and out of that I must
have drifted by slow degrees into deceiving myself. For, to-night,
even to-night, when I parted from Rube I thought it was you I loved,
not he! But the mists have lifted from my vision, and now, at this
moment--never fully until this moment--I see you both in your true
light; I weigh you understandingly, one against the other; I set your
self-seeking against his unselfishness, your improbity against his
high sense of honor. And how plainly I see it all! Just as if a moral
kaleidoscope were exhibiting by spiritual reflections, to the eyes of
my mind, the difference between one man and another, at an angle of
virtue which is the aliquot part of three hundred and sixty degrees of
real merit! Upon this disk of the imagination appears your own image;
and what are you doing? Passing me by as an unknown thing, a thing too
small to know in the presence of mighty magnates at a county picnic!
There is another manly form; what is he doing? Lifting me up from the
bare earth where the other's cruel slights have crushed me; feeding me
with his own hands; even then loving me. How different the pictures!
Shift the scene. Some one is crowning me: I am a queen before the
world. Whose hand has held a crown for me? Not yours--Rube's! You had
not the courage. He had. I love courage in a man. I love it better
than a handsome face or an oily tongue. A man without courage--what is
he? He isn't a man at all--not really. Jerome Devonhough," here she
turned her lovely face, grown so cold, and her exquisite eyes, grown
so scornful, full upon him, "were you the right sort of a man, would
you be here to-night? Will a man, false to his friend, be true to his
wife? I can trust Rube Rutland; can I trust you? No! For, even while
loving, I could not keep down a feeling of contempt. Beginning with
respect for Rube, that sentiment of respect has ripened into
love--real love--not the wild, senseless, mad, unreasoning passion of
an untutored girl, which eats into its own vitals, and drains its own
lees,--as mine for you,--but that deeper, better, higher, more
enduring, and well-nigh perfect affection of the full-lived woman, who
out of deep suffering has emerged into an enlightened conception of
her own nature's needs, her own heart's craving for what is best,
truest, most God-lik