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The Greater Inclination by Edith Wharton
page 17 of 202 (08%)
didn't seem to care whether he loved me or not. Between these wretched
days came others when our intellectual accord was so perfect that I forgot
everything else in the joy of feeling myself lifted up on the wings of his
thought. Sometimes, then, the heavens seemed to be opened....

* * * * *

All this time he was so dear a friend! He had the genius of friendship,
and he spent it all on me. Yes, you were right when you said that I have
had more than any other woman. _Il faut de l'adresse pour aimer_, Pascal
says; and I was so quiet, so cheerful, so frankly affectionate with him,
that in all those years I am almost sure I never bored him. Could I have
hoped as much if he had loved me?

You mustn't think of him, though, as having been tied to my skirts. He
came and went as he pleased, and so did his fancies. There was a girl once
(I am telling you everything), a lovely being who called his poetry "deep"
and gave him _Lucile_ on his birthday. He followed her to Switzerland one
summer, and all the time that he was dangling after her (a little too
conspicuously, I always thought, for a Great Man), he was writing to _me_
about his theory of vowel-combinations--or was it his experiments in
English hexameter? The letters were dated from the very places where I
knew they went and sat by waterfalls together and he thought out
adjectives for her hair. He talked to me about it quite frankly
afterwards. She was perfectly beautiful and it had been a pure delight to
watch her; but she _would_ talk, and her mind, he said, was "all elbows."
And yet, the next year, when her marriage was announced, he went away
alone, quite suddenly ... and it was just afterwards that he published
_Love's Viaticum_. Men are queer!

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