The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sacred And Profane Love , by E. Arnold Bennett

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Title: Sacred And Profane Love

Author: E. Arnold Bennett

Release Date: February 28, 2004 [eBook #11360]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE ***

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SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE

A NOVEL IN THREE EPISODES

BY ARNOLD BENNETT

1905

TO MY FRIEND EDEN PHILLPOTTS

THE NOVELIST FOR WHOM MAN AND NATURE ARE INSEPARABLE WITH PROFOUND
RESPECT FOR THE CLASSICAL DIGNITY OF HIS AIM AND EQUAL ADMIRATION
FOR THE AUSTERE SPLENDOUR OF HIS PERFORMANCE

CONTENTS

PART I

IN THE NIGHT

PART II

THREE HUMAN HEARTS

PART III

THE VICTORY

_'How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women of the
past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have opened for the
kiss, and who are dead! The kiss--it is immortal! It passes from lip to
lip, from century to century, from age to age. Men gather it, give it
back, and die.'_--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.

SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE

PART I

IN THE NIGHT

I

For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love--and by love I
mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the
soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to
the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of
my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in
amorous dreams.

I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the
piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to
conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me:
warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round
on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and
I asked myself: 'Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?' For
even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and
the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at
the room inquiringly