Chapter XXVIII

“She looks well,” said he, somewhat absently.
“She looks well!” cried I, half-way nettled now;
Should Edith be abused, forsooth, to show
What brutes men are who lose their trust! “She looks—
For what then do you take her? for a frame,
An empty effigy of human shape,
Like what a shopman hangs his gowns upon?—
Her soul is what I spoke of,—of her soul.”

“Her soul?” he said; “may be; but I, may be,
Have never seen it.”
“How?—this too!” I thought,
“A slight is it?—or triumph that he vaunts?”

He caught my feeling from my fever’d mien,
And words confused and few; and, warming then,
Made answer: “Norman, if I loved you less,
I more might love, and more might spare myself.
The thing my sister wrote, I deemed her whim;
Could not conceive it true, yet can it be?—
I swear, it staggers half one’s faith to find
A man, devoted to the aims you claim,
So little circumspect.”
What meant he now?
Could he believe that I had form’d a plan
To woo his Edith, knowing she was his?—
And could my sleepless nights, my troubled heart,
My prayerful deeds, my nature that he knew,
Be so misjudged, without some fault in him?—
“So little circumspect in what?” I ask’d.

And then with words that could but anger me,
“In what but choice of company?” he said;
“No more you think of study, duty, church,
But waste the whole day long with one like this!—
Nay, check me not. I understand my words.—
This actress, though right artless in her way,
This actress here, would play”—
“With me!” I cried;
“This ‘actress!’” and I know not what I said;
But yet recall what kept him forcing in,
“You err!”—“You do me wrong!”—“You know her not!”—
Wild words, the which he ended, saying then:
“Not such am I as you profess to be;
But had you common-sense, no piety,
You might perceive a farce, if not a fault:
A broad church yours will be then, when your mate,
Attracting toward the stage by charms you lack,
Will draw the sinner, while you draw the saint.”