I recognized as chiefly
due to this man's influence the sceptical and sneering view which
just now had filled my mental vision in regard to all life's better
purposes. And it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was
looking at Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream,
and at the noble earthliness of Zenobia's character, and even at
Priscilla, whose impalpable grace lay so singularly between disease
and beauty. The essential charm of each had vanished. There are
some spheres the contact with which inevitably degrades the high,
debases the pure, deforms the beautiful. It must be a mind of
uncommon strength, and little impressibility, that can permit itself
the habit of such intercourse, and not be permanently deteriorated;
and yet the Professor's tone represented that of worldly society at
large, where a cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual
aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous. I detested this kind of
man; and all the more because a part of my own nature showed itself
responsive to him.
Voices were now approaching through the region of the wood which lay
in the vicinity of my tree. Soon I caught glimpses of two figures--a
woman and a man--Zenobia and the stranger--earnestly talking together
as they advanced.
Zenobia had a rich though varying color. It was, most of the while,
a flame, and anon a sudden paleness. Her eyes glowed, so that their
light sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle
from some bright object on the ground.
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