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Intellectually, at least, there was no thought of his she could not share and appreciate; and her sense of humor and her feminine perversities would always delight him. If only there were depths beneath. The longings of the spirit are always formless, vaguely worded, a little shamefaced.
He had convinced his own mind that the old methods were obsolete; that to hold India by maintaining standing armies in the several provinces, and to take no account of the feelings, the traditions, the longings, the aspirations, of the children of the soil, of all the races in the world the most inclined to poetry and sentiment, and attached by the strongest ties that can appeal to mankind to the traditions of their fathers would be impossible.
I have noticed with some pain, or should I say amusement? perhaps that word would be the better I have noticed, I say, that her life is one of complete aimlessness, and that, therefore, she is tempted to think too much about herself. She is also tempted to have longings for well, for temptation. Ah, she is a woman and temptation is in the way of women.
As William James, with his unerring discernment, wrote twenty-five years ago: "The reason for craving alcohol is that it is an unaesthetic, even in moderate quantities. Dull lives are vivified by it, a fleeting anesthesia of unhappy memories and longings is effected, and for the moment life seems worth living.
They went to work on it that afternoon, first building a bright fire in the great fire-place, and throwing open all the windows to let the sunshine pour in. How strange it seemed; how happy, and yet how sad! Ernestine coming home! Not dead nor lost, but coming home, feeble and helpless! Where had she been all these long, weary months? and had any of their heart-aches and longings reached her?
Then there are hidden impulses and desires and secret longings of which we can only with the greatest difficulty take account. They influence our conscious thought in the most bewildering fashion. Many of these unconscious influences appear to originate in our very early years.
So she sat down on the chair, with a lute in her hand, and sang thereto the following verses: Have done with your disdain and leave to make me rue; For, by your life, my heart to you was ever true! Have ruth on one distraught, the bondslave of your love, Sorry and sick and full of longings ever new.
The old Janet would be cast off with the old raiment; the new suit would announce to herself and to the world a Janet in whom were released all those longings hitherto disguised and suppressed, and now become insupportable!
Often before she had been moved by similar vague memories or longings, whatever they were. They had come to trouble her girlhood at Montgomery, when the snow whitened the campus and the wind sang in the trees. She was grateful that the minister had turned his back.
When we said that the purple wind-flowers the anemone patens "looked as if the winds had made them," we thought much more of the fact that they were wind-born than that they were beautiful: we clapped our hands in sudden joy over the soft radiance of the rainbow, but its enchantment lay in our half belief that a pot of gold was to be found at its farther end; we yielded to a soft melancholy when we heard the whippoorwill in the early twilight, but while he aroused in us vague longings of which we spoke solemnly, we felt no beauty in his call.
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