She was beautifully, buoyantly
normal, with a happy, expansive, enjoying nature, glad in the sunlight,
brave in the shadow, optimistically looking forward to blithe years of
life and love with Mike and her friends, and not feeling the necessity
of being anxious about her soul, or any other world but this. She was
not shallow; but she merely realised life more through her intelligence
than through her feelings. To have become a Baptist would have offended
her intelligence, without bringing any satisfaction to spiritual
instincts not, in any event, clamorous.
As for Henry, it was not only activity of intelligence, but activity of
spirituality, that made it impossible for him to embrace any such narrow
creed as that proposed to him; and, for the present, that spiritual
activity found ample scope for itself in poetry.
Dot's, however, was an intermediate case. With an intelligence active
too, she united a spirituality torturingly intense, but for which she
had no such natural creative outlet as Henry. With her loss of the old
creed,--in discarding which these three sisters had followed the lead of
their brother with a curious instinctiveness, almost, it would seem,
independent of reasoning,--her spirituality had been left somewhat
bleakly houseless, and she had often longed for some compromise by which
she could reconcile her intelligence to the acceptance of some
established home of faith, whose kindly enclosing walls should be more
genially habitable to the soul than the cold, star-lit spaces which
Henry declared to be sufficient temple.
Pages:
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129