The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 1Stevenson, Robert Louis
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The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 1
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Authors, Scottish -- 19th century -- Correspondence; Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894 -- Correspondence
The serjeant was very nice, and I got Tommy comfortably seated on a
bench, and spirited him up with good words and the scone with the
currants in it; and then, telling him I was just going out to look for
Mammy, I got my greatcoat and slipped away.
Poor little boy! he was not called for, I learn, until ten this morning.
This is very ill written, and I’ve missed half that was picturesque in
it; but to say truth, I am very tired and sleepy: it was two before I got
to bed. However, you see, I had my excitement.
* * * * *
_Monday_.—I have written nothing all morning; I cannot settle to it.
Yes—I _will_ though.
* * * * *
10.45.—And I did. I want to say something more to you about the three
women. I wonder so much why they should have been _women_, and halt
between two opinions in the matter. Sometimes I think it is because they
were made by a man for men; sometimes, again, I think there is an
abstract reason for it, and there is something more substantive about a
woman than ever there can be about a man. I can conceive a great
mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain-tops or in some
lost island in the pagan seas, and ask no more. Whereas if I hear of a
Hercules, I ask after Iole or Dejanira. I cannot think him a man without
women. But I can think of these three deep-breasted women, living out
all their days on remote hilltops, seeing the white dawn and the purple
even, and the world outspread before them for ever, and no more to them
for ever than a sight of the eyes, a hearing of the ears, a far-away
interest of the inflexible heart, not pausing, not pitying, but austere
with a holy austerity, rigid with a calm and passionless rigidity; and I
find them none the less women to the end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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