She liked to watch his long, strong, narrow body cut the surface
of the transparent lake with no loss of energy in splashing or
display--as easy and swift as a fish. She began to fear she had
made a mistake in selecting a place for her school for a husband,
"He's in his element--this wilderness," thought she, "not mine.
I'll take him back with everything still to be done."
And, worst of all, she found herself losing her sense of
proportion, her respect for her fashionable idols. Those vast
woods, that infinite summer sky--they were giving her a new and
far from practical point of view--especially upon the petty
trickeries and posturings of the ludicrously self-important human
specks that crawl about upon the earth and hastily begin to act
queer and absurd as soon as they come in sight of each other. She
found herself rapidly developing that latent "sentimentality"
which her grandmother had so often rebuked and warned her against
--which Lucia had insisted was her real self. Her imagination beat
the bars of the cage of convention in which she had imprisoned it,
and cried out for free, large, natural emotions--those that make
the blood leap and the flesh tingle, that put music in the voice
and softness in the glance and the intense joy of life in the
heart.
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