With the advent of the new passion all
his dormant faculties start into life, and the seeming simpleton
becomes the bright and intelligent lover. The case of Number Five is as
different from that of Cymon as it could well be. All her faculties are
wide awake, but one emotional side of her nature has never been called
into active exercise. Why has she never been in love with any one of her
suitors? Because she liked too many of them. Do you happen to remember a
poem printed among these papers, entitled “I Like You and I Love You”?
No one of the poems which have been placed in the urn,--that is, in the
silver sugar-bowl,--has had any name attached to it; but you could guess
pretty nearly who was the author of some of them, certainly of the one
just, referred to. Number Five was attracted to the Tutor from the first
time he spoke to her. She dreamed about him that night, and nothing
idealizes and renders fascinating one in whom we have already an
interest like dreaming of him or of her. Many a calm suitor has been
made passionate by a dream; many a passionate lover has been made wild
and half beside himself by a dream; and now and then an infatuated
but hapless lover, waking from a dream of bliss to a cold reality of
wretchedness, has helped himself to eternity before he was summoned to
the table.
Since Number Five had dreamed about the Tutor, he had been more in her
waking thoughts than she was willing to acknowledge. These thoughts
were vague, it is true,--emotions, perhaps, rather than worded trains of
ideas; but she was conscious of a pleasing excitement as his name or
his image floated across her consciousness; she sometimes sighed as
she looked over the last passage they had read from the same book, and
sometimes when they were together they were silent too long,--too long!
What were they thinking of?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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