given
her always a cold, almost sexless quality. Her face betrayed a hundred
changing emotions: the youth, strength, and passion so severely
repressed in her own life came out, though still controlled, with full
and perfect harmony in her art. It was one of those consummate
revelations of temperament which, in silent or inactive lives, never
come till the last hours before death--when in one look or one utterance
all the time lost and all the long-concealed feelings take their
reparation from existence. But with those who may express their true
characters through the medium of some creative faculty, the illuminated
moment comes at a psychic crisis--not to enforce the irony of death but
to demonstrate and intensify the richness of humanity. The knowledge
which depends upon suffering, and, in a way, springs from it, is good,
yet it must always be incomplete. Happiness has its light also, and in
order to get the right explanation of any soul, or to understand the
eternal meaning of any situation, one must have had at least a few glad
hours, felt the ecstasy of thoughtless joy, drifted a little while with
the rushing, unhindered tide. As Robert, behind the _grille_, watched
the animated, beautiful girl who seemed to typify the very springtime of
the world, he felt he had peered too long at love and life through bars.
He would have to break them, get on the other side, and join in the
dazzling action. How unreal and far-away seemed all grief, remorse, or
anxiety from that brilliant scene! Brigit was laughing, singing,
dancing--fulfilling, surely enough, her real vocation. What! at
seventeen, was she to sit pale, silent, tearful, and alone? At his age,
was he to look on--with a dead heart and unseeing eyes, murmuring words
of tame submission to a contemptuous Fate? His whole nature rose up in
revolt, and the self he had once abdicated rushed back to him, howling
out taunts which were not the less bitter because they were false. Not
pausing to wonder whether the present were a profanation of the past, or
the past an insipid forecast of the present, he was conscious only that
a change--perhaps a terrible change--had taken place in his mind--a
change so sudden and so violent that it had paralysed every power of
analysis and reflection. Imaginative love--made up of renunciation and
spirituality, gave way to the fierce desire to live, to silence the
intolerable wisdom of the conscience, and learn folly for a space. He
was madly jea