I don't see but what one Irish girl is about
as confinin' as seven children, I'm sure."
With which despairing remark, Miss Hitty put on her shawl and calash and
departed; while Content filled her teakettle and prepared for supper.
But while the kettle boiled, she sat down by the window, and thought
about Miss Hitty's news. Her first feeling was one of surprise at
herself, a sort of sad surprise, to feel how entirely the love that once
threatened to wreck her life had died out of it. Hard, indeed, it is to
believe that love can ever die! The young girl clings passionately even
to her grief, and rejects as an insult the idea that such deep regret
can become less in all a lifetime,--that love, immortal, vital,
all-pervading, can perish from its prime, and flutter away into dust
like the dead leaves of a rose. Yet is it not the less true. Time, cold
reason, bitter experience, all poison its life-springs; respect, esteem,
admiration, all turn away from a point that offers no foothold for their
clinging; and she who weeps to-day tears hot as life-blood ten years
hereafter may look with cool distaste at the past passion she has calmly
weighed and measured, and thank God that her wish failed and her
hope was cut down. Yet there is a certain price to pay for all such
experience, to such a heart as sat in the quieted bosom of Content. Had
it been possible for her to love again, she would have felt the change
in her nature far less; but with the stream, the fountain also had
dried, and she was conscious that an aridness, unpleasant and unnatural,
threatened to desolate her soul, and her conflict with this had been the
hardest battle of all.
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