Did he not constantly covet
their youth and opportunity? Nevertheless, praiseworthy as their
motive had been, the fact remained that nowhere in the village was
there a man the peer of Delight Hathaway. Rare in her girlish beauty,
rarer yet in her promise of womanhood, what a prize she would be for
him who had the fineness of fiber to appreciate the guerdon!
Willie was wont to attest that he himself was not a marrying man; yet
notwithstanding the assertion, deep down within the fastness of his
soul he had had his visions,--visions pure, exalted and characteristic
of his sensitively attuned nature. They were the exquisite secrets of
his life; the unfulfilled dreams that had kept him holy; a part of the
divine in him; echoes of hungers and longings that reached unsatisfied
into a world other than this. Earth had failed to consummate the loves
and ambitions of the dreamer. His had been a flattened, warped,
starved existence whose perfecting was not of this sphere. And as
without bitterness he reviewed the glories that had passed him by, he
prayed that these bounties might not also be denied her who, rounding
into the full splendor of her womanhood, was worthy of the best heaven
had to bestow.
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