You try sadly to be cheerful; you smile oddly; your pride comes strongly
to your help, but yet helps you very little. It is not so much a broken
heart that you have to mourn over, as a broken dream. You seem to see in
a hundred ways, that had never occurred to you before, the marks of her
superior age. Above all it is manifest in the cool and unimpassioned
tone of her letter. Yet how kindly withal! It would be a relief to be
angry.
New visions come to you, wakened by the broken fancy which has just now
eluded your grasp. You will make yourself, if not old, at least gifted
with the force and dignity of age. You will be a man, and build no more
castles until you can people them with men! In an excess of pride you
even take umbrage at the sex; they can have little appreciation of that
engrossing tenderness of which you feel yourself to be capable. Love
shall henceforth be dead, and you will live boldly without it.
----Just so, when some dark, eastern cloud-bank shrouds for a morning
the sun of later August, we say in our shivering pride--the winter is
come early! But God manages the seasons better than we; and in a day, or
an hour perhaps, the cloud will pass, and the heavens glow again upon
our ungrateful heads.
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