He tried to return to his work, but found himself once more possessed
by the demon of unrest and impatience. The spiritual wave that
had been lifting him higher and higher was changing its character
and becoming a smoothly gliding current. It was so irresistible
that he never thought of resisting. "Why should he resist?" he
asked himself. Circumstances had interested him in this rare Undine
before she received a woman's soul; circumstances had entangled
his life and hers in what had almost been an awful tragedy; and
now circumstances, or something far beyond, were swiftly developing
before his eyes a spiritual loveliness that was the counterpart
of her outward beauty, and he assured himself that it would be the
greatest folly of his life to lose a trace of the exquisite process
that he might be privileged to see. What artist or poet has not
pictured himself the fair face of Eve as God first breathed into
her perfect clay the breath of life, or has not, in imagination,
seen the closed eyes opening in surprise and intelligence or kindling
with the light of love? And yet the change in Ida Mayhew seemed
to Van Berg far more wonderful and interesting; and to his fancy
if, instead of lying in the beauty of her breathless, statuesque
preparation for life, Eve had been possessed by a legion
of distorting imps, she would have been the type of the maiden he
first had recognized.
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