“It ought to be.”
Alas and alas! that “ought to be;” what
depths of sorrowful meaning lie within that simple
phrase! How happy would be our lives, how grand
our actions, how pure our souls, if all could be with
us as it ought to be!
WE often form cordial intimacies in the confined society
of a country house, or a quiet watering-place, or
a small Continental town, which fade away into remote
acquaintanceship in the mighty vortex of London life,
neither party being to blame for the estrangement.
It was so with Leopold Travers and Kenelm Chillingly.
Travers, as we have seen, had felt a powerful charm
in the converse of the young stranger, so in contrast
with the routine of the rural companionships to which
his alert intellect had for many years circumscribed
its range. But on reappearing in London the
season before Kenelm again met him, he had renewed
old friendships with men of his own standing,—officers
in the regiment of which he had once been a popular
ornament, some of them still unmarried, a few of them
like himself widowed, others who had been his rivals
in fashion, and were still pleasant idlers about town;
and it rarely happens in a metropolis that we have
intimate friendships with those of another generation,
unless there be some common tie in the cultivation
of art and letters, or the action of kindred sympathies
in the party strife of politics. Therefore Travers
and Kenelm had had little familiar communication with
each other since they first met at the Beaumanoirs’.
Now and then they found themselves at the same crowded
assemblies, and interchanged nods and salutations.
But their habits were different; the houses at which
they were intimate were not the same, neither did they
frequent the same clubs. Kenelm’s chief
bodily exercise was still that of long and early rambles
into rural suburbs; Leopold’s was that of a late
ride in the Row. Of the two, Leopold was much
more the man of pleasure. Once restored to metropolitan
life, a temper constitutionally eager, ardent, and
convivial took kindly, as in earlier youth, to its
light range of enjoyments.
Had the intercourse between the two men been as frankly
familiar as it had been at Neesdale Park, Kenelm would
probably have seen much more of Cecilia at her own
home; and the admiration and esteem with which she
already inspired him might have ripened into much warmer
feeling, had he thus been brought into clearer comprehension
of the soft and womanly heart, and its tender predisposition
towards himself.
