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X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE 181
Caroline and Elise pitied me a little, and did not like to say she had also laughed at the contents.
208. The old people, meanwhile, saw little harm in all this. Mr. Domecq, who was extremely good-natured, and a good judge of character, rather liked me, because he saw that I was good-natured also, and had some seedling brains, which would come up in time: in the interests of the business he was perfectly ready to give me any of his daughters I liked, who could also be got to like me, but considered that the time was not come to talk of such things. My father was entirely of the same mind, besides being pleased at my getting a story printed in Friendship’s Offering, glad that I saw something of girls with good manners, and in hopes that if I wrote poetry about them, it might be as good as the Hours of Idleness.1 My mother, who looked upon the idea of my marrying a Roman Catholic as too monstrous to be possible in the decrees of Heaven, and too preposterous to be even guarded against on earth, was rather annoyed at the whole business, as she would have been if one of her chimneys had begun smoking,-but had not the slightest notion her house was on fire. She saw more, however, than my father, into the depth of the feeling, but did not, in her motherly tenderness, like to grieve me by any serious check to it. She hoped, when the Domecqs went back to Paris, we might see no more of them, and that Adèle’s influence and memory would pass away-with next winter’s snow.
209. Under these indulgent circumstances,-bitterly ashamed of the figure I had made, but yet not a whit dashed back out of my daily swelling foam of furious conceit, supported as it was by real depth of feeling, and (note it well, good reader) by a true and glorious sense of the newly revealed miracle of human love, in its exaltation of the physical beauty of the world I had till then sought by its own light alone,-I set myself in that my
1 [For Ruskin’s verses of 1836 to Adèle, see Vol. II. pp. xxi., 16-18, 461, 463, 465, 467.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
