art.
'There,' she cried, 'you feel the very footfall of my life. It only
moves for you; it is yours. But is it even mine? It is mine indeed to
offer you, as I might take the coin from my neck, as I might break a live
branch from a tree, and give it you. And yet not mine! I dwell, or I
think I dwell (if I exist at all), somewhere apart, an impotent prisoner,
and carried about and deafened by a mob that I disown. This capsule,
such as throbs against the sides of animals, knows you at a touch for its
master; ay, it loves you! But my soul, does my soul? I think not; I
know not, fearing to ask. Yet when you spoke to me your words were of
the soul; it is of the soul that you ask--it is only from the soul that
you would take me.'

'Olalla,' I said, 'the soul and the body are one, and mostly so in love.
What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the soul
cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they come together at God's signal;
and the lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the footstool and
foundation of the highest.'

'Have you,' she said, 'seen the portraits in the house of my fathers?
Have you looked at my mother or at Felipe? Have your eyes never rested
on that picture that hangs by your bed? She who sat for it died ages
ago; and she did evil in her life. But, look-again: there is my hand to
the least line, there are my eyes and my hair. What is mine, then, and
what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of mine (which you love, and
for the sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me) not a gesture
that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look from my eyes, no,
not even now when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to others?
Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men have
heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears. The
hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me, they
guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but reinform features and
attributes that have long been laid aside from evil in the quiet of the
grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me? The girl
who does not know and cannot answer for the least portion of herself? or
the stream of which she is a transitory eddy, the tree of which she is
the passing fruit? The race exists; it is old, it is ever young, it
carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon it, like waves upon the
sea, individual succeeds to individual, moc