Love did not consist for me in one particular symptom, look, or
confession, in any one external circumstance against which I could have
fortified myself. It was an invisible miasma diffused in the
surrounding atmosphere; it was in the air and light, in the expiring
season, in my lonely life, in the mysterious proximity of another
equally isolated existence; it was in the long excursions which took me
from her and made me feel the more forcibly the unconscious attraction
which recalled me; in her white dress, seen at a distance through the
mountain firs; in her dark hair loosened by the wind on the lake; in
the light at her window, in the slight creaking of the wooden floor
under her tread, in the rustling of her pen on the paper when she
wrote, in the very silence of those long autumnal evenings which she
spent in reading, writing, or in thought within a few paces of me; and
lastly, it was in the fascination of her fantastic beauty, too much
seen though scarcely beheld, and which, when I closed my eyes, I still
saw through the wall, as though it had been transparent.
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