Love stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Scotland -- Fiction
“To take them myself! Moreover it won’t be any harm my being present
in case the Colonel gets on the rampage. It will restrain him some.
Now you go and lie down, dear. Don’t say anything--except your
prayers--in case you feel you must say something. But sleep will be
your best help in this pretty tough proposition. I’ll go and get a
hustle on that Dutch landlord. He’s got to find an automobile and a
chauffeur, and a pilot if necessary, for me too!”
CHAPTER XIX.
DECLARATION OF WAR
Joy Ogilvie was so tired out that her body lay like a log all night.
How her mind was occupied she only knew afterwards. For the memory of
dreams is an unconscious memory at the time; it is only when there is
opportunity of comparison with actualities that dreams can be
re-produced. Then, as at first, the dreams are real--as they are
forever whilst memory lasts. Indeed regarding dreams and actualities,
one might almost appeal to scientific analogy; and in comparing the
world of imagination--which is the kingdom of dreams--with the
material world, might adduce the utterance of Sir Oliver Lodge in
comparing the density of aether with that of matter in the modern
scientific view: “Matter is turning out to be a filmy thing in
comparison with aether.”
This might well serve as a scientific comparison. Nay more, it might
well be an induction. The analogies of nature are so marvellously
constant, as exemplified by the higher discoveries in physics, that we
might easily wander farther than in taking the inner world of Thought
as compared with the outer world of Physical Being, as an analogy to
the Seen and Unseen worlds.
In the meantime we may take it that Joy’s dreams that night were in
some way reflective of the events of the day. No girl of healthy
emotional power could fail to be influenced by such a sequence of
experiences of passion and fear as she had gone through. The realized
hoping of love, the quick-answering abandonment of expressed passion;
long, long minutes of the bliss of communion with that other
soul--minutes whose sweetness or whose length could not be computed
until the leisure of thought gave opportunity. Unconscious cerebration
goes on unceasingly; and be sure that with such data as she had in her
mind, the workings of imagination were quick and by no means cold.
Again she lived the moments of responsive passion; but so lived them
that she had advanced further on the road to completed passion when
the unconsciousness to physical surroundings began to disappear and on
the senses the actualities began to consciously impress themselves.
The dawn, stealing in between the chinks of the folded shutters, made
strange lines on the floor without piercing through the walls of
sleep. The myriad sounds of waking life from distant field and
surrounding street brought no message to the closed eyes of weariness.
The sun rose, and rose, and rose; and still she lay there unmoving.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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