Say, rather, a world of honesty, and of courage! They, at
least, were not preoccupied all day long, and, if they woke in the
night, with the fear of death.
[36] It was part of their precocious worldliness to recognise, to
feel a little afraid of their new companion's intellectual power.
Those obviously meditative souls, which seem "not to sleep o'
nights," seldom fail to put others on their guard. Who can tell what
they may be judging, planning in silence, so near to one? Looking
back long afterwards across the dark period that had intervened,
Gaston could trace their ways through the world. Not many of them
had survived to his own middle life. Reappearing, from point to
point, they connected themselves with the great crimes, the great
tragedies of the time, as so many bright-coloured threads in that
sombre tapestry of human passion. To recall in the obtuse, grieved,
marred faces of uninteresting men or women, the disappointments, the
sorrows, the tragic mistakes of the children they were long ago; that
is a good trick for taking our own sympathy by surprise, which Gaston
practised when he saw the last, or almost the last, of some of them,
and felt a great pity, a great indulgence.
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