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"'Ideala, flower of heaven's own blue, with heart of gold, whose fibrous roots, softer, a thousandfold, than fairy tresses, strike to our souls and drink their purest essence; flower most sweet and bitter! thou canst not be torn away without the heart's blood flowing, without thy bruised stems sweating with scarlet tears. Ah! cursed flower, why didst thou grow within my soul?"
Ideala had been very still that evening, and I could not help thinking about her. Once or twice I had caught her looking at me intently. It seemed as if she had something to say, but when I went to speak to her she answered quite at random. I was much troubled about her, and something happened presently which did not tend to set my mind at rest.
"Because they are no better than other people," was the answer, "and when they get money they use it just as everybody else does, to strengthen their own position, and make a display with." "Ah, the terrible mistake it has been, this making a paid profession of the doing of good!" Ideala exclaimed.
A sudden deep flush spread over his face, smoothing out all the lines, as she had seen it do once before, and transforming him. "It is like walking on the edge of a precipice in the dark," he said in a low voice, and his grasp tightened as he spoke. There was something mesmeric in his touch that overpowered Ideala. She felt a change in herself at the moment, and she was never the same woman again.
My wife is sorry that she has not been able to call. She is not equal to such a long drive. But she desired me to explain and apologise; and she has sent you some flowers and fruit which she begs you will accept. Have you some of your work ready for me this time? I have asked my friend Ideala to give you her opinion, which is really worth having, and she says she will with pleasure.
"I always suspect that there is something more wrong than usual when she adopts this playful tone and childlike simplicity of taste." "It must be trying to have a friend who believes so little in one as you do in Ideala," I answered. "Oh, how exasperating you are!" Claudia exclaimed. "You know what I mean quite well enough." Later, Ideala wrote: "You are anxious about my health.
"You will have sacrificed others, not yourself. He is all the world to you, Ideala; the loss would be nothing to the gain" she hid her face in her hands "and what is required of you is self-sacrifice. And surely it would be happier in the end for you to give him up now, than to live to feel yourself a millstone round his neck." "I do not understand you," she said, looking up quickly.
"I wish you would send me a basket of snails packed up in lettuce leaves. I don't know why, but I can find none here, and I cannot hear of one ever having been seen in the county. But please do not send them unless you are quite sure you can spare them." "Ideala is trying to hide herself behind these pretty trivialities," Claudia said.
"I think an ideal of marriage should be fixed by law, and lectures given in all the colleges to teach it," Ideala went on; "and a standard of excellence ought to be set up for people to attain to before they could be allowed to marry. They should be obliged to pass examinations on the subject, and fit themselves for the perfect state by a perfect life.
She was standing on the hearth at the time, and as he spoke he laid his hand upon her shoulder caressingly, but she could not bear it. Her powers of endurance were at an end, and for the first time she shrank from him openly. "How you do loathe me, Ideala," he exclaimed. "Yes, I loathe you," she answered. And then, in a sudden burst of rage, he raised his hand and struck her.
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