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Updated: June 12, 2025
The awning was up; there was strong sun and pleasant wind: from hidden gardens they smelled the oleanders. Peter felt the faint stir of rehabilitation like the breath of passing presences.
On that point he was invulnerable; the abstract had no charm for him or meaning. He dealt only in realities and presences. A new element was infused into my solitude from this time. In this child I lived, breathed, and had my being, until later events startled my individuality once more into its old currents of existence.
She did not reason with herself hysterically of evil passions to be purified by asceticism, of mysterious iniquities to be washed out in her very life's blood; but the great principles of devotion and renunciation became soothing and exalting presences, before which the details of her daily task lost their toilsome or revolting aspect in a hallowed purpose.
Such presences are no more discernable by the multitude, than are the beautiful principles of life, which lie every day about us, but which though not seen by them, are none the less visible to the few. A new interest glowed in the young man's face; he felt that he had met a woman divested of the usual vanities of most of her sex.
So here, in the dark, alone with the haunting, uplifting presences of "admiration, hope, and love," Marcella vowed, within the limits of her personal scope and power, never to give up the struggle for a nobler human fellowship, the lifelong toil to understand, the passionate effort to bring honour and independence and joy to those who had them not. But not alone; only, not alone!
All through the winter, under The Pilot's guidance, she, with her father, the Old Timer, listening near, went over and over that story so old now to many, but ever becoming new, till a whole new world of mysterious Powers and Presences lay open to her imagination and became the home of great realities.
There, then, the man who had lost his memory sat motionless, and watched it all this astounding display of inner grace transformed into glory at last, that Royalty which since first the Fisherman took his seat in Holy Rome, had little by little, through reverse and success, forced its way outwards on the world the leaven hid in the meal till all was leavened. . . . And it seemed to him as he looked, as if, through the splendour of the midday sun, the glitter of that sea of air-craft through the pealing of the bells beneath and the shock of the guns and the shrill crying that filled the air there moved other Presences, too, in yet a third medium than those of air and earth; as if diffused throughout this material plane was a world of more than matter and mind, more than of sense and perception a world where all was reconciled and made at one this clash of flesh and spirit and that at last each answered to each, and spirit inspired flesh, and flesh expressed spirit.
If we have lived half a lifetime without having ever even seen a cuckoo, and know it only as a wandering voice, we are all the more delighted at the spectacle of its runaway flight as it hurries from wood to wood conscious of its crimes, and at the way in which it halts hawk-like in the wind, its long tail quivering, before it dares descend on a hill-side of fir-trees where avenging presences may lurk.
Men may affect to ignore this, and cannot afford indeed to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that have so considerably supplanted those misbegotten young miscreants known as office-boys, a vanishing race of human terror; yet there she is, all the same, in spite of her businesslike airs and her prosaic tasks, silently diffusing about her that eternal mystery which she can never lose, be her occupations never so masculine.
Contrasted with the confused movement and presences of a Fabian meeting, or the inexplicable enthusiasm behind the suffrage demand, with the speeches that were partly egotistical displays, partly artful manoeuvres, and partly incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated ends, compared with the comings and goings of audiences and supporters that were like the eddy-driven drift of paper in the street, this long, quiet, methodical chamber shone like a star seen through clouds.
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