Page 277 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

beside him forgetting to go down and then went down. Let
be! Let be!
Ten years from that wisdom of children to his folly. If
he sent her the verses? They would be read out at breakfast
amid the tapping of egg-shells. Folly indeed! Her brothers
would laugh and try to wrest the page from each other with
their strong hard fingers. The suave priest, her uncle, seated
in his arm-chair, would hold the page at arm’s length, read
it smiling and approve of the literary form.
No, no; that was folly. Even if he sent her the verses she
would not show them to others. No, no; she could not.
He began to feel that he had wronged her. A sense of her
innocence moved him almost to pity her, an innocence he
had never understood till he had come to the knowledge
of it through sin, an innocence which she too had not un-
derstood while she was innocent or before the strange
humiliation of her nature had first come upon her. Then
first her soul had begun to live as his soul had when he had
first sinned, and a tender compassion filled his heart as he
remembered her frail pallor and her eyes, humbled and sad-
dened by the dark shame of womanhood.
While his soul had passed from ecstasy to languor where
had she been? Might it be, in the mysterious ways of spir-
itual life, that her soul at those same moments had been
conscious of his homage? It might be.
A glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and
fulfilled all his body. Conscious of his desire she was wak-
ing from odorous sleep, the temptress of his villanelle. Her
eyes, dark and with a look of languor, were opening to his

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