United States or British Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Why not, pray? She's a young woman still what many people would call young," Mrs. Memorall interjected, with a parenthetic glance at the mirror. "Why not accept the inevitable and begin over again? All the King's horses and all the King's men won't bring Rendle to life-and besides, she didn't marry him when she had the chance." Danyers winced slightly at this rude fingering of his idol.
Danyers afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of her she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph to the most privileged and from Mrs.
At first he was merely one more grain of frankincense on the altar of her insatiable divinity; but gradually a more personal note crept into their intercourse. If she still liked him only because he appreciated Rendle, she at least perceptibly distinguished him from the herd of Rendle's appreciators. Her attitude toward the great man's memory struck Danyers as perfect.
The rush of Anglo-Saxon travel had not set toward the lakes, and with the exception of an Italian family or two, and a hump-backed youth with an abbe, Danyers and the lady had the marble halls of the Villa d'Este to themselves. When he returned from his morning ramble among the hills he saw her sitting at one of the little tables at the edge of the lake.
"But then you are young," she concluded gently, "and one could not wish you, as yet, the experience that a fuller understanding would imply." She stayed a month at Villa d'Este, and Danyers was with her daily. She showed an unaffected pleasure in his society; a pleasure so obviously founded on their common veneration of Rendle, that the young man could enjoy it without fear of fatuity.
She had thrown a black lace scarf over her head, and in this sombre setting her face seemed thin and unhappy. He remembered afterwards that her eyes, as they met his, expressed not so much sorrow as profound discontent. To his surprise she stepped toward him with a detaining gesture. "Mr. Lewis Danyers, I believe?" He bowed. "I am Mrs. Anerton.
Anerton's mind was like some fertile garden wherein, inevitably, Rendle's imagination had rooted itself and flowered. Danyers began to see how many threads of his complex mental tissue the poet had owed to the blending of her temperament with his; in a certain sense Silvia had herself created the Sonnets to Silvia.
How she had divined him; lifted and disentangled his groping ambitions; laid the awakening touch on his spirit with her creative Let there be light! It was his last day with her, and he was feeling very hopeless and happy. "You ought to write a book about him," she went on gently. Danyers started; he was beginning to dislike Rendle's way of walking in unannounced.
To be the custodian of Rendle's inner self, the door, as it were, to the sanctuary, had at first seemed to Danyers so comprehensive a privilege that he had the sense, as his friendship with Mrs. Anerton advanced, of forcing his way into a life already crowded. What room was there, among such towering memories, for so small an actuality as his? Quite suddenly, after this, he discovered that Mrs.
A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the woman who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful, tender, incomparable prose. Danyers never forgot the day when Mrs. Memorall happened to mention that she knew Mrs. Anerton. He had known Mrs.
Word Of The Day