Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/303
to do him justice, did not feel this. But he felt something else keenly. It was being borne in upon him that he ached for sympathy; that so far he had only been half a creature; that he must have the completion of himself. What has been already said about Miss Amy Travis ought to be sufficient to show that he was frightfully over-sanguine, indeed utterly mistaken, in imagining that in her he would find his other soul side. This girl would never in her then condition penetrate further than the eyes and the heart of a man. She was pretty and her manner was attractive. But good as these two attributes undoubtedly are, they go but a short way in the formation of that marriage of true minds that is of all unions the most perfect and enduring on God's earth.
He talked to her about Ibsen, rallying her gently upon her enthusiasm, for one whom he, in company with many of his countrymen, called brain-sick. Nevertheless he spent some hours of each night reading him up in Norsk, so that in the daytime he could compare vexed passages with Miss Amy and, if it might be, explain to her items that had puzzled her, or rather that had puzzled wiser heads in London, Miss Amy having read in the newspapers concerning these disputed lines and appropriated unto herself the bewilderments they expressed. It was significant of the girl's mind that they never discussed Ibsen's theories or ethics. Amy Travis deduced nothing from what she read, and had therefor nothing to say upon such topics. But Hjorth did not detect this. Indeed, he would have been shocked had the girl started the subject of say heredity with him, or of the rights of men to suicide, or of other weighty matters shut out from the consideration of women. Had the girl overstepped by half an inch the limits his inherited convictions set for her, he, the deacon, who was to be a priest, would have been repulsed instantly. Yet hecraved