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There are noises that we do not understand, mysterious winds passing overhead, and rambling in the great galleries, tree-trunks grinding against each other, undefinable stirs and uneasinesses. The shapes of those who pass into the dimness are outlined in monstrous proportions. The spectres, seated about in the glare of the fire, talk about appearances and presentiments and religion.
She tried to divert her mind by busying herself about the library, dusting his favorite books, tidying his papers, but constantly came back the thoughts that filled her with uneasiness, a vague, undefinable alarm. Was he all right? At last the great day arrived. A Western Union telegram announced that the Adriatic would dock at 2 o'clock.
Rene, indeed, had a distinction about him that compensated for want of beauty, and Charles had a good-natured, easy, indolent look and gracious smile that gave him an undefinable air of royalty. Rene's daughters were both very lovely, but their beauty came from the other side of the house, with the blood of Charles the Great, through their mother, the heiress of Lorraine.
Things had gone so well since, and there seemed nothing easier than to forget that unwonted outbreak of womanly passion. Clarissa heard the approaching marriage discussed with a strange feeling, a nameless undefinable regret. It seemed to her that George Fairfax was the only person in her small world who really understood her, the only man who could have been her friend and counsellor.
"What is God?" she asks; "where is he? what is his extent? what are his wishes? what his powers? what his promises?" and here, in the light of analysis, all the divinities of heaven, earth, and hell are reduced to an incorporeal, insensible, immovable, incomprehensible, undefinable I-know-not-what; in short, to a negation of all the attributes of existence.
On this we sat down. There was no resistance no reasoning process no calculation of advantages and chances, such as is too often mingled with the noble passion of love. We felt nothing of this nothing but that undefinable impulse which had entered our hearts, and to whose mystical power neither of us dreamed of offering opposition. Delay and duty were alike forgotten.
In the atmosphere there lingered, despite the open windows, the faint undefinable odor common to old houses in which years of frugal and self-denying living have set their mark, an odor vaguely compounded of clean linen and old woodwork, hot soapsuds and ammonia. The children's old books were preserved in old walnut cases, nothing had been renewed, recarpeted, repapered for many years.
Fear will deter from acknowledged crimes, and self-interest will bribe to laborious services: but it is the peculiar glory, and the very characteristic, of this more generous passion, to shew itself in ten thousand little and undefinable acts of sedulous attention, which love alone can pay, and of which, when paid, love alone can estimate the value.
Out of such a boyhood there came as what else could come? a manhood all imperfect, clothed with gloom, haunted by horror, and familiar with undefinable terrors which have weighed upon my heart until I have cried to myself that it would break until I have almost prayed that it would break and thereby free me from the bondage of my pitiless master, Woe!
The conversation continued on generalities. By one of those mysterious unknown and undefinable faculties, Mademoiselle Cormon found in her brain, under the pressure of her desire to be agreeable, all the phrases and opinions of the Chevalier de Valois. It was like a duel in which the devil himself pointed the pistol. Never was any adversary better aimed at.
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