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Updated: June 5, 2025
I must be open with you: tell me you are not in love with my cousin Lufa, and I will bid you good-night" "I am so much in love with her, that I dare not think what may come of it," replied Walter. "Then for God's sake tell her, and have done with it! Anything will be better than going on like this. I will not say what Lufa is; indeed I don't know what name would at all fit her!
"Lady Lufa, if a woman's shadow came out of her mirror, and went about the world pretending to be herself and deceiving the eyes of men, that figure thus walking the world and stealing hearts, would be you. Would to God I were such an exorcist as could lay that ghost of you! as could say, 'Go back, forsake your seeming, false image of the true, the lovely Lufa that God made!
Lady Lufa was his universe and everything in it a small universe and scantily furnished for a human soul, had she been the prime of women! He scarcely thought of his home now, or of the father who made it home. As to God, it is hardly a question whether he had ever thought of Him.
There is more than the intellect concerned in talk; there is more at its root than fact or logic or lying. When the scene changed to the drawing-room, Lufa played tolerably and sung well, delighting Walter. She asked and received his permission to sing "my song," as she called it, and pleased him with it more than ever.
It had its intellectual trouble too the impossibility of bringing together the long-cherished idea of Lufa, and the reality of Lufa revealed by herself; the two stared at each other in mortal irreconcilement. Now also he had no book to occupy him with pleasant labor. It had passed from him into the dark; the thought of it was painful, almost loathesome to him.
You do put your name to what you write?" said Lady Lufa. "Not always," replied Walter. "I think the song must have been yours!" Walter had, just then, for the first time published a thing of his own. That it should have arrested the eye of this lovely creature! He acknowledged that he had printed a trifle in "The Observatory." "I was charmed with it!" said the girl, the word charmingly drawled.
In the evening he was not so bright as before. Lufa saw it and was troubled. She feared he doubted the success of her poem. She led the way, and found he avoided talking about it. She feared he was not so well pleased with it as he had said. Walter asked if he might not read from it in the drawing-room. She would not consent. "None there are of our sort!" she said.
"Oh, then, you have read the book?" spoke her cousin at length. "No; but ain't those extracts enough? Don't they speak for themselves for their silliness and sentimentality?" "How would you like of a book of yours judged by scraps chopped off anywhere, Lufa! or chosen for the look they would have in the humorous frame of the critic's remarks! It is less than fair!
"It feels just like a spring morning. The wind changed in the night. You won't mind a little mud will you?" In common phrase, but with a foolish look of adoring gratitude, Walter accepted the invitation. "How handsome he is!" thought Lufa; for Walter's countenance was not only handsome but expressive.
"It is not of the least consequence how you speak of me now, Lady Lufa: I have had the good though painful fortune to learn your real feelings, and prefer the truth to the most agreeable deception. Your worst opinion of me I could have borne and loved you still; but there is nothing of you, no appearance of anything even, left to love!
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