London could not think of a ne'er-do-well to equal
him in the memory of its oldest gossips - and all the time with
every penny, he was putting together this immense treasure - for
her. A dreamer writing a romance might imagine a thing like
this, but had it any equal in the realities of life?
She looked down at the chain of great jewels, and the fragment of
prickly shrub with its poppy-shaped yellow flower. They were
symbols, each, of an immense idealism, an immense conception of
sacrifice that lifted the actors in their dramas into gigantic
figures illumined with the halos of romance.
Until to-night it had been this ideal figure of Lord Eckhart that
the girl considered in this marriage. And to-night, suddenly,
the actual physical man had replaced it. And, alarmed, she had
drawn back. Perhaps it was the Teutonic blood in him - a
grandmother of a German house. And, yet, who could say, perhaps
this piece of consuming idealism was from that ancient extinct
Germany of Beethoven.
But the man and the ideal seemed distinct things having no
relation. She drew back from the one, and she stood on tip-toe,
with arms extended longingly toward the other.
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