I reasoned against her, in my secret mind, and strove
so to keep my footing. In the gorgeousness with which she had
surrounded herself,--in the redundance of personal ornament, which
the largeness of her physical nature and the rich type of her beauty
caused to seem so suitable,--I malevolently beheld the true character
of the woman, passionate, luxurious, lacking simplicity, not deeply
refined, incapable of pure and perfect taste. But, the next instant,
she was too powerful for all my opposing struggles. I saw how fit it
was that she should make herself as gorgeous as she pleased, and
should do a thousand things that would have been ridiculous in the
poor, thin, weakly characters of other women. To this day, however,
I hardly know whether I then beheld Zenobia in her truest attitude,
or whether that were the truer one in which she had presented herself
at Blithedale. In both, there was something like the illusion which
a great actress flings around her.
"Have you given up Blithedale forever?" I inquired.
"Why should you think so?" asked she.
"I cannot tell," answered I; "except that it appears all like a dream
that we were ever there together."
"It is not so to me," said Zenobia. "I should think it a poor and
meagre nature that is capable of but one set of forms, and must
convert all the past into a dream merely because the present happens
to be unlike it. Why should we be content with our homely life of a
few months past, to the exclusion of all other modes? It was good;
but there are other lives as good, or better.
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