"If you care for me--if I can be every thing to you"--Cornelia's voice
was broken and tossed upon the uncontrolled waves of fighting emotions,
and she could give little care to the form and manner of her speech.
"I love you--of course I love you!--what else is there for me to do? But
I've been all this time trying to find out what love was. I thought I
loved Sophie, you know."
Bressant's strange words and altered manner dismayed Cornelia. What was
the matter with him? She could not get it out of her head that some
awful event must have happened, but she knew not how to frame inquiries.
Bressant continued--a determined levity in his tone was yet occasionally
broken down by a stroke of feeling terribly real: "I was a great fool--you should have told me; you knew more about it
than I did. It was my self-conceit--I thought nothing was too good for
me. When I saw you I thought you were the flower of the world, so I
wanted you. Well--you are--the flower of the world!"
"He does love me!" said Cornelia to herself, and she knew a momentary
pang of bliss which no consideration of honor or rectitude had power to
dull or diminish.
"But, afterward," he went on, his voice lowering for an instant, "I saw
an angel--something above all the flowers of this world--and I was fool
enough to imagine she would suit me better still. You never thought so,
did you, Cornelia?" he added, with a half laugh; "well--you should have
told me!"
How he dragged her up and down, and struck her where she was most
defenseless! Did he do it on purpose, or unconsciously?
"I mistook worship for love--that was the trouble, I fancy. Luckily, I
found out in time it won't do to love what is highest--it can only make
one mad. Love what you can understand--that's the way! See how wise I've
become."
Bressant's laugh affected Cornelia like a deadly drug. Her speech was
fettered, and she moved without her own will or guidance.
"I found out--just in time--that I needed more body and less soul--less
goodness and--more Cornelia!" he concluded, epigrammatically.
So this was her position. It could hardly be more humiliating. Yet how
could she rebel? for was not the yoke of her own manufacture? Indeed,
had she been put to it, she might have found it a difficult matter to
distinguish between the actual relation now subsisting between Bressant
and herself, and that which she had been, for months past, striving to
effect. He had met her half-way, that was all.
But surely it was only during this absence that this idea of abandoning
Sophie, and turning to herself, had occurred to him. Half as a question,
half as an exclamation, the words found their way through Cornelia's
twitching lips-"What has happened to you since you went away?"