"
"Yes," he said, "they were only symbols and I'd no notion what they
meant till they left off meaning it."
She looked from the manuscript to him. "You know in your heart you
_must_ be certain of yourself. And yet--I suspect the trouble with you
is that _your_ dream is divorced from reality."
He stared in amazement at the young girl who thus interpreted him to
herself. At this rate he saw no end to her powers of divination. There
were depths in his life where her innocence could not penetrate, but
she had seized on the essential. It had been as she had said. That
first draft was the work of the young scholar poet, the adorer of
classic form, the dreamer who found in his dreams escape from the
grossness of his own lower nature and from the brutalities of the
world he lived in. A great neo-classic drama was to be his protest
against modernity and actuality. Then came an interval of a year in
which he learnt many things that are not to be found in books, or
adequately expressed through neo-classic drama; and the thing was
finished and re-written at a time when, as she had said, something
had happened to him; when that same gross actual world was making its
claims felt through all his senses. And he was suffering now the deep
melancholy of perspicuous youth, unable to part with its dreams but
aware that its dreams are hopelessly divorced from reality. That was
so; but how on earth did she know it?
"It's hardly a divorce," he said, laughing.
Pages:
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225