Slight as she was, there was yet a gracefully
controlled strength in every movement. In his own mind, poor as it
necessarily was in comparisons, he compared her to a young doe he had once
startled from its resting-place. There was the same fragile beauty, the
same grace, the same high-strung energy. In nothing was she like the women
painted for him by his father's hand--things for idle, sensuous pleasure,
never for serious action.
Plunged in a happy confusion of thought, he had once more relapsed into
silence, from which she startled him with a question evidently connected
with their previous conversation.
"And so you have lived all your life in this lovely garden?" she said,
looking up at him with a grave wonder in her eyes.
"All my life," he answered.
"You have never seen anything of the world?"
"Never." He felt the pity in her tone, and added, with a shamefacedness
curiously in contrast with his former hauteur: "But I have read much."
"That is not the same thing," she returned. "No book could make you
understand how wonderful and beautiful things are."
He looked at her, and for a second time their eyes met.
"You are right," he said. "Hitherto I have thought myself all-wise. I have
studied hard, and I believed there was nothing I did not know. Now I see
that there are wonders in the world of which I have never even dreamed."
Her glance wavered beneath the undisguised admiration in his eyes and
voice.
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