Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers — Volume 1 by Thomas De Quincey
page 23 of 234 (09%)
she been the wife of any man engaged in the duties of a profession, she
might have been summoned from the very first, and without the
possibility of any such gradual training, to the necessity of relying
almost singly upon her own courage and discretion. For the other
question, whether I did not depend too blindly and presumptuously upon
my good luck in not at least affording her my protection so long as
nothing occurred to make it impossible? I may reply, most truly, that
all my feelings ran naturally in the very opposite channel. So far from
confiding too much in my luck, in the present instance I was engaged in
a task of writing upon some points of business which could not admit of
further delay; but now, and at all times, I had a secret aversion to
seeing so gentle a creature thrown even for an hour upon her own
resources, though in situations which scarcely seemed to admit of any
occasion for taxing those resources; and often I have felt anger
towards myself for what appeared to be an irrational or effeminate
timidity, and have struggled with my own mind upon occasions like the
present, when I knew that I could not have acknowledged my tremors to a
friend without something like shame, and a fear to excite his ridicule.
No; if in anything I ran into excess, it was in this very point of
anxiety as to all that regarded my wife's security. Her good sense, her
prudence, her courage, (for courage she had in the midst of her
timidity,) her dignity of manner, the more impressive from the
childlike character of her countenance, all should have combined to
reassure me, and yet they did not. I was still anxious for her safety
to an irrational extent; and to sum up the whole in a most weighty line
of Shakspeare, I lived under the constant presence of a feeling which
only that great observer of human nature (so far as I am aware) has
ever noticed, viz., that merely the excess of my happiness made me
jealous of its ability to last, and in that extent less capable of
enjoying it; that in fact the prelibation of my tears, as a homage to
DigitalOcean Referral Badge