"He's going back rather stunned and
bewildered; but it's something to have tasted the city, and its bitter
may turn to sweet on his palate, at last, till he finds himself longing
for the tumult that he abhors now. Poor fellow! one compassionate
cut-throat of a publisher even asked him to lunch, being struck, as we
are, with something fine in his face. I hope he's got somebody who
believes in him, at home. Otherwise he'd be more comfortable, for the
present, if he went over the railing there."
So the play of which they were both actors and spectators went on about
them. Like all passages of life, it seemed now a grotesque mystery, with
a bluntly enforced moral, now a farce of the broadest, now a latent
tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy. All the elements, indeed, of
either were at work there, and this was but one brief scene of the
immense complex drama which was to proceed so variously in such different
times and places, and to have its denouement only in eternity. The
contrasts were sharp: each group had its travesty in some other; the talk
of one seemed the rude burlesque, the bitter satire of the next; but of
all these parodies none was so terribly effective as the two women, who
sat in the midst of the company, yet were somehow distinct from the rest.
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