The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great LoveGlaspell, Susan
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The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love
Glaspell, Susan
Artists -- Fiction; Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Love stories; Married people -- Fiction; Scientists -- Fiction
She and Karl had loved it from the very first: in those days when they
were upon the sea, those supreme days of uncomprehended happiness. They
sat in the twilight then and watched day withdraw and night spread itself
over the waters. They loved the mystery of it, for it was one with the
mystery of their love; they loved it for reasons to be told only in great
silences, knowing unreasoningly, that they were most close together then.
And after that they came to love the twilight for the things it
bequeathed them. "Don't you remember," he would say, "we left it just as
the sun was setting. Aren't you glad we can remember it so?" It was as if
their love could take unto itself most readily that which came to it in
the mystic hour of closing day.
And when they returned, during that first year of joy in their work, they
loved the hour of transition as an hour of rest. Their day's work was
done; in the evening they would study or read or in some way occupy
themselves, but because they had worked all through the day they could
rest for a short time in the twilight. And they would tell of what they
had done; of what they hoped to do; if there had been discouragements
they would tell of them, and with the telling they would draw away. In
the light of closing day the future's picture was unblurred. They loved
their hour then as true workers love it; it was good to sink with the day
to the half lights of rest and peace.
Now it was all different, but they clung to their love for it still.
Through the heart of the day, during those hours which from his early
boyhood had been to him working hours, this removal from life brought to
the man a poignancy of realisation which beat with undiminishing force
against the wall of his endurance. It was when he finished his breakfast
and the day's work would naturally begin that it came home to him the
hardest. They would go into the library, and Ernestine would read to
him--how she delved into the whole storehouse of literature for things to
hold him best--and how great her joy when she found something to make the
day pass a little less hard than was the day's wont! He would listen to
her, loving her voice, and trying to bring his mind to what she read, but
all the while his thoughts reaching out to what he would be doing if his
life as worker were not blotted out. The call of his work tormented him
all through the day, and the twilight was the time most bearable because
it was an hour which had never been filled with the things of his work.
In that short hour he sometimes, in slight measure found, if not peace,
cessation from struggle. "This is what I would be doing now," he told
himself, and with that, when the day had not drawn too heavily upon him,
he could rest a little, perhaps, in some rare moments, almost forget.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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