He might pretend to
laugh at it, and repeat to himself that his Egeria had been but a very
superficial person, fervent in the reading of the daily novel and
possibly not even worldly wise; he did not miss her any the less for
that. A little sympathy and much patience in listening will go far to
make a woman of small gifts indispensable even to a man of superior
talent, especially when he thinks himself misunderstood in his ordinary
surroundings. The sympathy passes for intelligence and the patience for
assent and encouragement--a touch of the hand, and there is friendship,
a tear, a sigh, and devotion stands upon the stage, bearing in her arms
an infant love who learns to walk his part at the first suspicion of a
kiss.
Orsino did not imagine that he had exhausted the world's capabilities of
happiness. The age of Byronism, as it used to be called, is over.
Possibly tragedies are more real and frequent in our day than when the
century was young; at all events those which take place seem to draw a
new element of horror from those undefinable, mechanical, prosaic,
psuedo-scientific conditions which make our lives so different from
those of our fathers.
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