Suddenly I stood still, unable to
move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to
take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession
of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish hair, who
appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was
looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles.
Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know, and indeed
have never since learned how to reduce to its objective elements any
strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough 'power of
observation' to isolate the sense of their colour, for a long time
afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes
would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her complexion
was fair; so much so that, perhaps, if her eyes had not been quite so
black--which was what struck one most forcibly on first meeting her--I
should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their imagined
blue.
I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger
from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out,
petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture,
bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the
body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and
father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by making
me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously appealing look,
whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to see, to know me.
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