remember, and appetite shall have but one tooth remaining. Should their
minds perchance have been saturated by their first impressions and have
retained them, loving by the accountable light of reason, they may have
fair harvests, as in the early time; but that case is rare. In other
words, love is an affair of two, and is only for two that can be as
quick, as constant in intercommunication as are sun and earth, through
the cloud or face to face. They take their breath of life from one
another in signs of affection, proofs of faithfulness, incentives to
admiration. Thus it is with men and women in love's good season. But a
solitary soul dragging a log must make the log a God to rejoice in the
burden. That is not love.

Clara was the least fitted of all women to drag a log. Few girls would
be so rapid in exhausting capital. She was feminine indeed, but she
wanted comradeship, a living and frank exchange of the best in both,
with the deeper feelings untroubled. To be fixed at the mouth of a
mine, and to have to descend it daily, and not to discover great
opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in subterranean
sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she could grasp, only
the mystery of the inefficient tallow-light in those caverns of the
complacent-talking man: this appeared to her too extreme a probation
for two or three weeks. How of a lifetime of it!

She was compelled by her nature to hope, expect and believe that Sir
Willoughby would again be the man she had known when she accepted him.
Very singularly, to show her simple spirit at the time, she was unaware
of any physical coldness to him; she knew of nothing but her mind at
work, objecting to this and that, desiring changes. She did not dream
of being on the giddy ridge of the passive or negative sentiment of
love, where one step to the wrong side precipitates us into the state