_Laurie._ A dangerous object to the traveller's eye, methinks!
_Aglauron._ Not to mine! The picture had been so; but, seeing her
now, I felt that the glorious promise of her youthful prime had
failed. She had missed her course; and the beauty, whose charm to the
imagination had been that it seemed invincible, was now subdued and
mixed with earth.
_Laurie._ I can never comprehend the cruelty in your way of
viewing human beings, Aglauron. To err, to suffer, is their lot; all
who have feeling and energy of character must share it; and I could
not endure a woman who at six-and-twenty bore no trace of the past.
_Aglauron._ Such women and such men are the companions of
everyday life. But the angels of our thoughts are those moulds of pure
beauty which must break with a fall. The common air must not touch
them, for they make their own atmosphere. I admit that such are not
for the tenderness of daily life; their influence must be high,
distant, starlike, to be pure.
Such was this woman to me before I knew her; one whose splendid beauty
drew on my thoughts to their future home. In knowing her, I lost the
happiness I had enjoyed in knowing what she should have been.
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