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Updated: July 27, 2025
Annie had been sitting by herself on the front piazza and allowing herself a perfect feast in future air-castles. She could see from where she sat, the lights from the windows of the Edes' house, and she heard Wilbur's voice, and now and then his laugh. Margaret's voice, she never heard at all.
For she was startled to find how wildly she had been indulging in building air-castles. Few, if any, even of those she had spent her life among, knew Jacinth Mildmay thoroughly, or had any suspicion of the impressionableness, the almost fantastic imagination, hidden under her quiet, almost cold exterior. But to some extent she knew herself better than is often the case at her age.
In many respects, you will find the real house far less satisfactory and more perplexing than the creation of your fancy. Air-castles have some splendid qualities.
Some air-castles he built so often that he seemed to fairly dwell in them; some dreams he dreamed so often that he went about always with them in his eyes. One fancy which specially commended itself to him was the one that he was rich, that he owned half the town, that in some manner Doctor Prescott's and Simon Basset's acres had passed into his possession, and he could give them away.
With heroic self-control, he set himself to meet her problems, even going so far as to encourage her spirit of independence and to help her build air-castles that at present were her only refuge from despair. "Just think of all the wonderful things I can do if I succeed," she said. "Papa Claude need never take another pupil, and Myrna can go to college, and Cass and Fan Loomis can get married."
He conveyed her to her humble home, and bade her farewell, with a thankful consciousness that he had done no irretrievable injury to her future prospects. The remembrance of her would soon be to him as the recollection of last year's butterflies. With her, the wound was deep. In the solitude of her chamber she wept in bitterness of heart over her ruined air-castles.
Here he not only found the keenest interest and sympathy in his air-castles of invention, but also was given permission to use the cellar of the house as his workshop. For the next three years this cellar was his favorite retreat. He littered it with tuning-forks, magnets, batteries, coils of wire, tin trumpets, and cigar-boxes.
It was a sad come-down from his old air-castles for her and for himself, he still the landlord of a shabby little inn, and Jeanne, stout and middle-aged, sitting again behind the bar as she had done fifteen years before. It was pretty hard.
One right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation at some injustice or depravity, rubbing elbows with us on this solid Earth, how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles and dim-melting ghosts and shadows! None such ever came.
It was late before they ceased building their air-castles and retired to their rooms. But Robert's brain was excited, and he could not sleep. The events of the day had been enough to shake a stronger man. There had been the revelation of the morning, the strange sights which he had witnessed in the laboratory, and the immense secret which had been confided to his keeping.
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