Lord of the happy earth! Lord of the sun and our senses. He who comes to
us first in Love's name, and bids us rejoice and be glad; not he who would
have us mourn.
CHAPTER X.
After the experiences of that early morning's walk Evadne did not go to
bed so late; she got up early and went to church. The agreeable working of
her intellectual faculties during the early part of her absorbing
self-education had kept her senses in abeyance; but when the discipline of
all regular routine was relaxed, they were set free to get the upper hand
if they would, and now they had begun to have their way--a delicate,
dreamy way, of a surety, but it was a sensuous way nevertheless, and not
at all a spiritual way, as her mother maintained it to be, because of the
church-going. Sometimes sense, sometimes intellect, is the first to awake
in us--supposing we are dowered with an intellect; but pain, which is the
perfecting of our nature, must precede the soul's awakening and for Evadne
at that age, with her limited personal knowledge of life and scant
experience of every form of human emotion which involves suffering, such
an awakening was impossible. The first feeling of a girl as happily
situated, healthy-minded, and physically strong as she was is bound to be
pleasurable; and had she been a young man at this time she would not
improbably have sought to heighten and vary her sensations by adding
greater quantities of alcohol to her daily diet; she would have grown
coarse of skin by eating more than she could assimilate; she would have
smelt strongly enough of tobacco, as a rule, to try the endurance of a
barmaid; she would have been anxious about the fit of coats, fastidious as
to the choice of ties, quite impossible in the matter of trousers, and
prone to regard her own image in the glass caressingly. She would have
considered that every petticoat held a divinity, or every woman had her
price according to the direction in which nature had limited her powers of
perception with a view to the final making of her into a sentimental or a
vicious fool. When she should have been hard at work she would have stayed
in bed in the morning flattering her imagination with visions of the
peerless beauties who would all adore her, and the proud place she would
conquer in the world; and she would have gone girl-stalking in
earnest--_probably_--had she been a young man. But being as she was,
she got up early and went to church. It was the one way she had of
expressing the silent joy of her being, and of intensifying it. She
practised an extreme ritual at this time, and found in it the most
complete form of expression for her mood possible. And in those early
morning walks when she brushed the dew-bespangled cobwebs from the gorse,
and startled the twittering birds from their morning meal--in the
caressing of healthy odours, the uplifting of all sweet natural sounds,
the soothing of the great sea-voice, the sense of infinity in the level
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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