Hitherto she had not seemed to me to belong at all to that
company that praises God with sweet looks, as Thomas Hood describes Ruth
as doing. What was wanting I had found it difficult to define. Her soul
was asleep. She was dreaming a child's dreams, instead of seeing a woman's
realities--realities that awake the swift play of feature, as the wind of
God arouses the expression of a still landscape. So there seemed after all
a gulf between her and me. She did not see what I saw, feel what I felt,
seek what I sought. Occasionally even, the delicate young girl, pure and
bright as the snow that hung on the boughs around me, would shock the
wizened old bachelor with her worldliness--a worldliness that lay only in
the use of current worldly phrases of selfish contentment, or selfish
care. Ah! how little do young beauties understand of the pitiful emotions
which they sometimes rouse in the breasts of men whom they suppose to be
absorbed in admiration of them! But for faith that these girls are God's
work and only half made yet, one would turn from them with sadness, almost
painful dislike, and take refuge with some noble-faced grandmother, or
withered old maid, whose features tell of sorrow and patience.
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