There came a sense of dishonesty, too, in
having used the old man's money chiefly in acquiring those mental graces
which his father could neither comprehend nor value.
Three years passed. Gradually the memory of his love for the sea-maid
had grown indistinct; and, more or less unconscious that this love had
been the door to the more wealthy gardens of his mind, he inclined to
despise it now as he despised the elegy he had written for the child who
was drowned. It was his own passion he was inclined to forget and
despise; the sea-maid herself was remembered, and respected, and
wondered at, and disbelieved in, and believed in, as of old, but that
which remains in the mind, never spoken of, never used as a cause of
activity of either thought or action, recedes into the latent rather
than the active portion of the memory.
Once, just once, in the first year of his foreign life, he had told to a
friend the history of that, his one and only love-story. The result had
not been satisfactory. His companion was quite sure that Caius had been
the subject of an artful trick, and he did not fail to suggest that the
woman had wanted modesty. Nothing, he observed, was more common than for
men who were in love to attribute mental and physical charms to women
who were in reality vulgar and blatant. Caius, feeling that he could
advance no argument, refused to discuss the subject; it was months
before he had the same liking for this friend, and it was a sign that
what the other called "the sea-myth" was losing its power over him when
he returned to this friendship.
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