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He was both too self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
You might observe in the countenances of the various idlers a more earnest expression than usual. They talked in large knots and groups, as if they sought by numbers to divide the half-painful, half-pleasurable anxiety which belonged to the subject on which they conversed: it was a subject of life and death.
Between that group of personages whom we may call his characters of passion and that group made up of his characters of intelligence, lie certain figures of peculiar interest, by birth and inheritance children of the East, and by culture partakers, in a greater or a less degree, of the characteristics of the West a Djabal, with his Oriental heart entangled by Prankish tricks of sophistry; a Luria, whose Moorish passion is enthralled by the fascination of Florentine intellect, and who can make a return upon himself with a half-painful western self-consciousness.
"I knew /you/ would feel this," exclaimed Lady Florence, with a heightened colour. "Did you?" said Maltravers, rather interested as well as surprised. "I scarcely imagined it possible that you would deign to divine secrets so insignificant." "You did not do me justice, then," returned Lady Florence, with an arch yet half-painful smile; "for but I was about to be impertinent." "Nay, say on."
Passion's marvellous spell still held him, he was still throbbing with a half-painful ecstasy of her nearness, of the touch of her hand, the magic of her voice. For the first time he was in love. In love with the most exquisite, the most wonderful of God's divine creatures.
"I think it would be better if I tried to show you how the attack was made. Is the old set of Indian chessmen still in the drawer?" "I believe so. It must be twenty years since they were taken out. It's strange you should remember them." A stirring of half-painful emotions troubled Blake. He loved the old house and all that it contained and had a deep-seated pride in the Challoner traditions.
It was to me a matter of half-painful interest to see what vital importance they attached to a supply of this stimulant to see how much more they leaned upon its strength and comfort than upon food.
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