English fiction -- 19th century; Marriage -- Fiction
'She is a girl?' cried Lord Fleetwood, frowning over an utter revolution
of sentiment at the thought of the beautiful Gorgon being a girl; for,
rapid as he was to imagine, he had raised a solid fabric upon his
conception of Carinthia the woman, necessarily the woman--logically.
Who but the woman could look the Gorgon! He tried to explain it to be
impossible for a girl to wear the look: and his notion evidently was,
that it had come upon a beautiful face in some staring horror of a world
that had bitten the tender woman. She touched him sympathetically
through the pathos.
Woodseer flung out vociferously for the contrary. Who but a girl could
look the beautiful Gorgon! What other could seem an emanation of the
mountain solitude? A woman would instantly breathe the world on it to
destroy it. Hers would be the dramatic and not the poetic face. It
would shriek of man, wake the echoes with the tale of man, slaughter all.
quietude. But a girl's face has no story of poisonous intrusion. She
indeed may be cast in the terrors of Nature, and yet be sweet with
Nature, beautiful because she is purely of Nature. Woodseer did his best
to present his view irresistibly. Perhaps he was not clear; it was a
piece of skiamachy, difficult to render clear to the defeated.
Lord Fleetwood had nothing to say but 'Gorgon! a girl a Gorgon!' and it
struck Woodseer as intensely unreasonable, considering that he had seen
the girl whom, in his effort to portray her, he had likened to a
beautiful Gorgon. He recounted the scene of the meeting with her,
pictured it in effective colours, but his companion gave no response, nor
a nod. They ceased to converse, and when the young lord's hired carriage
drew up on the road, Woodseer required persuasion to accompany him. They
were both in their different stations young tyrants of the world, ready
to fight the world and one another for not having their immediate view of
it such as they wanted it. They agreed, however, not to sleep in the
city. Beds were to be had near the top of a mountain on the other side
of the Salza, their driver informed them, and vowing themselves to that
particular height, in a mutual disgust of the city, they waxed
friendlier, with a reserve.
Woodseer soon had experience that he was receiving exceptional treatment
from Lord Fleetwood, whose manservant was on the steps of the hotel in
Salzburg on the lookout for his master.
'Sir Meeson has been getting impatient, my lord,' said the man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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