"But the joke is a little too heavy," thought I."If I were wise, Ishould get out of the scrape with all diligence, and then laugh at my companions for remaining in it."While thus musing, I heard with perfect distinctness, somewhere in the wood beneath, the peculiar laugh which I have described as one of the disagreeable characteristics of Professor Westervelt.It brought my thoughts back to our recent interview.I recognized as chiefly due to this man's influence the sceptical and sneering view which just now had filled my mental vision in regard to all life's better purposes.And it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking at Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream, and at the noble earthliness of Zenobia's character, and even at Priscilla, whose impalpable grace lay so singularly between disease and beauty.The essential charm of each had vanished.There are some spheres the contact with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure, deforms the beautiful.It must be a mind of uncommon strength, and little impressibility, that can permit itself the habit of such intercourse, and not be permanently deteriorated; and yet the Professor's tone represented that of worldly society at large, where a cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous.Idetested this kind of man; and all the more because a part of my own nature showed itself responsive to him.
Voices were now approaching through the region of the wood which lay in the vicinity of my tree.Soon I caught glimpses of two figures --a woman and a man--Zenobia and the stranger--earnestly talking together as they advanced.
Zenobia had a rich though varying color.It was, most of the while, a flame, and anon a sudden paleness.Her eyes glowed, so that their light sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle from some bright object on the ground.Her gestures were free, and strikingly impressive.The whole woman was alive with a passionate intensity, which I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty culminated.Any passion would have become her well; and passionate love, perhaps, the best of all.This was not love, but anger, largely intermixed with scorn.
Yet the idea strangely forced itself upon me, that there was a sort of familiarity between these two companions, necessarily the result of an intimate love,--on Zenobia's part, at least,--in days gone by, but which had prolonged itself into as intimate a hatred, for all futurity.As they passed among the trees, reckless as her movement was, she took good heed that even the hem of her garment should not brush against the stranger's person.I wondered whether there had always been a chasm, guarded so religiously, betwixt these two.
