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Updated: May 4, 2025
She was a good deal older than Ideala, whom she loved as a mother loves a naughty child, for ever finding fault with her, but ready to be up in arms in a moment if any one else ventured to do likewise. I thought if all the passion in her were ever focussed on one object she would do something extravagant a prediction which Claudia, with good intent, rashly repeated to her once.
"But, Ideala, you are going to fail in a duty; you are going to fail in the most important duty of your life your duty to society." "I owe nothing to society," she answered, obstinately. "I have always admired you," I pursued, "for not letting your own experience warp your judgment. Oh, what a falling-off is here!
Claudia drew the wrap round her with dignity, and made no reply; then Ideala laughed and turned to me. "Certainly your friend," she said, alluding to a young sculptor who was staying with me, "can 'invest his portraits with artistic merit. Claudia's likeness in the Exhibition is capital, and the fame of it is being noised abroad with a vengeance.
It will be better for him to see you, and hear all the things I cannot tell him in my letter; and and if I must not see him myself it will be a comfort to see somebody who has. Do go. I shall be pained if you refuse." This decided me, and I went at once. It was a long journey, the same that Ideala herself had taken under such very different circumstances so short a time before.
If there were any good to be done by it, it would be different, of course; but, as it is, Ideala is simply sacrificing herself for nothing and worse, she is setting a bad example by showing men they need not mend their manners since wives will endure anything. It is immoral for a woman to live with such a husband. I don't understand Ideala's meekness; it amounts to weakness sometimes, I think.
It would not be missed by the wretched the happy we need not consider. I am speaking of art for art's sake, of course." "We need not trouble about that," said Ideala. "The works of art for art's sake, and style for style's sake, end on the shelf much respected, while their authors end in the asylum, the prison, and the premature grave.
"When the lady is not at the head of her house it is certainly vacuous," Ideala agreed, "like the lives of our own ladies when they are not forced to do anything. Why, at Scarborough this year they had to take to changing their dresses four times a day; so you can imagine how they languish for want of occupation."
"What a delightful place!" she said, when they came to the library. "And there is a whole row of books I want to consult. How I should like to come and read them." "Oh, pray do," he answered, "whenever you like. Ladies frequently do so. You have only to write and tell me when you wish to come, and I will see that you are properly attended to." "Thank you," Ideala rejoined.
I knew Ideala, and could understand her being over-persuaded. Something of the kind was what I had always feared for her. But, Lorrimer what sort of a man was he? I own that I was strongly prejudiced against him from the moment she pronounced his name, and all she had told me of him subsequently only confirmed the prejudice. "Why was he not there that day to receive you?" I asked at last.
"But, Ideala," Claudia protested, "what is the use of drawing degrading comparisons between ourselves and other nations? You gave great offence last night." "I said more than I intended," she answered; "I always do. It was Tourgenieff, was it not, who said that the age of talkers must precede the age of practical reformers? I seem to have been born in the age of talkers.
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