Did Olive ask herself whether, for so many months, her
companion had been only the most unconscious and most successful of
humbugs? Here again I must plead a certain incompetence to give an
answer. Positive it is that she spared herself none of the inductions of
a reverie that seemed to dry up the mists and ambiguities of life. These
hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least,
when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of
things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw
them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its
false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded
geography. They understand as Olive understood, but it is probable that
they rarely suffer as she suffered. The sense of regret for her baffled
calculations burned within her like a fire, and the splendour of the
vision over which the curtain of mourning now was dropped brought to her
eyes slow, still tears, tears that came one by one, neither easing her
nerves nor lightening her load of pain. She thought of her innumerable
talks with Verena, of the pledges they had exchanged, of their earnest
studies, their faithful work, their certain reward, the winter nights
under the lamp, when they thrilled with previsions as just and a passion
as high as had ever found shelter in a pair of human hearts. The pity of
it, the misery of such a fall after such a flight, could express itself
only, as the poor girl prolonged the vague pauses of her unnoticed
ramble, in a low, inarticulate murmur of anguish.
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