Scared, discouraged on the threshold of
adolescence, plunged in moral misery of the bitterest kind, she had not
learned to read--not that sort of language.
If Anthony's love had been as egoistic as love generally is, it would
have been greater than the egoism of his vanity--or of his generosity, if
you like--and all this could not have happened. He would not have hit
upon that renunciation at which one does not know whether to grin or
shudder. It is true too that then his love would not have fastened
itself upon the unhappy daughter of de Barral. But it was a love born of
that rare pity which is not akin to contempt because rooted in an
overwhelmingly strong capacity for tenderness--the tenderness of the
fiery kind--the tenderness of silent solitary men, the voluntary,
passionate outcasts of their kind. At the time I am forced to think that
his vanity must have been enormous.
"What big eyes she has," he said to himself amazed. No wonder. She was
staring at him with all the might of her soul awakening slowly from a
poisoned sleep, in which it could only quiver with pain but could neither
expand nor move.
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