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Left without fortune, without protection, in this joyless abode, life presented a gloomy prospect before them; yet, how were they to enter a world in which they would feel themselves total strangers, and of the ways of which they were wholly ignorant?
"A strange question truly. My heart is not the tool of my will." "Beulah, do you intend to spend your life solitary and joyless, cut off, as you are here, from society, and dependent on books and music for sympathy? Why will you not marry Reginald and make his home happy?" "Eugene, I have told you before that I could not accept him, and told you why.
He died in that prison, and within those dingy smoke-blackened walls my childhood was spent a joyless childhood, without a hope, without a dream, haunted perpetually by the dark phantom, Poverty.
If his manner was cold as a bleak autumn, hers was icy as a severe winter; only now and then, when she was very tired of her joyless existence, her untutored womanhood asserted itself, and she betrayed the real state of her feelings betrayed herself as she had done on her last night at Forêtdechêne, when she and Valentine had looked down at the lighted windows shining dimly through the purple of the summer night.
What did it amount to? Amusement with no pleasure in it, gaiety without gladness, joyless festivity, fevered dreams empty of all delight, firewood or ashes on the hearth without a spark of flame in them. When he raised his head, he found himself alone, all the billiard players had gone.
He told himself that a very tragical thing had befallen him; that this broken engagement was the ruin of his life and the end of his youth, and that he must live on an old and joyless man, wise with the knowledge that comes to decrepitude and despair; he imagined a certain look for himself, a gait, a name, that would express this; but all the same he was aware of having got out of something.
The repentant philosopher placed his hand on her lovely head, and lifted a tress of her soft hair. "Ah, child, child, you know little about it! What! will you sacrifice these glorious tresses to a hard and joyless course of study? For none can study Euclid with me with hair like this."
Many, too, who had originally no such craving gradually acquire it: sometimes by mere social influence, which makes excessive drinking the habit of their circle; more frequently through depression or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless, joyless surroundings of sordid poverty.
If material wealth is her sole object she will harden into the thing she seeks and add but another joyless barbarian to a modern world congratulating itself that barbarism is a thing of the past, and yet presenting the spectacle of a mammon worship such as has never been seen before.
This was chiefly because of the stingy, well-to-do relations, whose goodwill she had to secure in order that he might not have an utterly joyless youth.
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