Ideala | Page 9

high opinion of
her own judgment and power to decide. A little more self-esteem would
have been good for her; she was too diffident, "I have not come across
people on whose knowledge I could rely," she told me. "I have been
obliged to study alone, and to form my opinions for myself out of such
scraps of information as I have had the capacity to acquire from reading
and observation. I am, therefore, always prepared to find myself
mistaken, even when I am surest about a thing--for
What am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry!
In practice, too, she frequently, albeit unconsciously, diverged from her
theories to some considerable extent; as on one occasion, when, after
talking long and earnestly of the sin of selfishness, she absently picked
up a paper I had just cut with intent to enjoy myself, took it away with
her to the drawing-room, and sat on it for the rest of the morning--as I
afterwards heard.

CHAPTER III.
Ideala held that dignity and calm are essential in a woman, but, like the
rest of the world, she found it hard to attain to her own standard of
excellence. Her bursts of enthusiasm were followed by fits of
depression, and these again by periods of indifference, when it was
hard to rouse her to interest in anything. She always said, and was

probably right, that want of proper discipline in childhood was the
reason of this variableness, which she deplored, but could neither
combat nor conceal. Temperament must also have had something to do
with it. Her nervous system was too highly strung, she was too
sensitive, too emotional, too intense. She reflected phases of feeling
with which she was brought into contact as a lake reflects the sky above
it, and the bird that skims across it, and the boats that rest upon its
breast; yet, like the lake's, her own nature remained unchanged; it
might be darkened by shadows, and lashed by tempests till it raged, but
the pure element showed divinely even in its wrath, and the passion of
it was expended always to some good end.
But even her love of the beautiful was carried to excess. It was a
passion with her which would, in a sturdier age, have been considered a
vice. She delighted in the scent of flowers, the song of the thrushes in
the spring; colour, and beautiful forms. Doubtless the emotion they
caused her was pure enough, and it was natural that, highly bred,
cultivated, and refined as she was, she should feel these delicate,
sensuous pleasures in a greater degree than lower natures do. There was
danger, however, in the over-education of the senses, which made their
ready response inevitable, but neither limited the subjects, nor
regulated the degree, to which they should respond. But it would be
hard in any case to say where cultivation of love for the beautiful
should end, and to determine the exact point at which the result ceases
to be intellectual and begins to be sensual.
I have sat and watched Ideala lolling at an open window in the summer.
The house stood on a hill, a river wound through the valley below, and
beyond the river--the land sloped up again, green and dotted with trees,
to a range of low hills, crested with a fringe of wood.
"Do you know what there is beyond those hills?" Ideala asked me once,
abruptly. "I don't know; but I love to believe that the sea is there, and
that the sun is sinking into it now. Sometimes I fancy I can hear it
murmur."
And then followed a long silence. And the scent of mignonette and
roses blew in upon her, and the twilight deepened, and I saw her grow

pale with pleasure when the nightingale began to sing--and then I stole
away and never was missed. She would lie in a long chair for hours like
that, scarcely moving, and never speaking. At first I used to wonder
what she thought about; but afterwards I knew that at such times she
did not think, she only felt.
I have some pictures of her as she was then, dressed in a gown of some
quaint blue and white Japanese material, with her white throat bare--I
was just going to catalogue her charms, but it seems indelicate to
describe a woman, point by point, like a horse that is for sale. I have
some other pictures of her, too, as she appeared to me one hot summer
when I was painting a picture by the river, and she used to come down
the towing-path to watch me work, and sit beside me on the grass for
hours together, talking,