From Dreams to Waking

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Excerpt from From Dreams to Waking: A Novel "Child! your imagination will be your ruin. You live in a world that does not exist, and you see nothing as it is. I am sorry for you, for I know too well what you will have to suffer. But who can give another reason and common-sense? We must all dree our own weird, and yours will be a heavy one!" The speaker, Miss Morris, flicked out her flounces with a hopeless air, and, passing her hand over her eyes, sighed heavily. There was as much fretfulness as sorrow in this sigh, temper having the trick of pain, and a look of suffering making a very good mask for the feeling of displeasure. But Miss Morris, though observant, was not introspective, and had never come to that knowledge of herself which the sage said was the last and most difficult attainment of wisdom, hence she honestly believed that she was only sorry, and not in the least "put out, " when she deprecated, as so often before, this inconvenient activity of fancy which made calls on her sympathy to which she could not respond. The child, of whose bewildering imagination she spoke so plaintively, was her niece, Venetia Greville, a slender, fair-faced girl of seventeen, with a certain dreamy look in her large blue eyes, and that kind of settled sweetness in her smile which seemed as if she smiled more from what she thought and felt than from what she saw and knew, so far justifying her poor fretful, sickly, timorous aunt in her disclaimers, and, as she prophesied, threatened in the future that sorrow which comes to all dreamers before they wake and realize. Those dreamy blue eyes, that settled sweetness of smile, were true tracings of the hidden writing. Venetia did live in a world of her own - which was by no means the world of ordinary human habitation - where she saw beauty that did not exist, virtue that her own mind only created, love-worthiness, greatness, nobleness, where were not even the shadows of divine things, where she made gods out of the clouds in the sky, and gave her worship to mist-wreaths that faded away as she looked. Nevertheless, she was not as yet discouraged, and when one little cloud-god melted away and was lost, she created another which did as well. For among the needs of her young soul, that of enthusiasm about some person or some thing was the most imperative. This need had already led her into some troubles and a few follies, earnest of graver sorrows in the future when the besoin d'enthousiasmer should have given place to the more fatal besoin d'aimer, when the creation of an ideal for whom she should sacrifice herself, not only admire as from a distance - the worship of a god to whom she might bring the living incense of her love, not only watch as he floated through the sky - would be the terrible law of her life, when what was now the mere phantasy of her imagination would be then the main fact of her being. As it was, her troubles had been comparatively slight and her follies unimportant, all the same, she had had the one and committed the other. Thus: last holidays, when she was sixteen, she had idealized the gardener's young daughter, a pretty, clever, facile kind of girl, who, she persuaded herself, was a genius in the rough, like one of the great of the earth born in obscure places, of whom she had been reading, a genius wanting only the aid of a friendly hand to strip away the rugged envelope and let the nobly fashioned soul go free. Full of this fancy, she had insisted on teaching the girl all that she herself knew, including music and drawing, French and physical geography. She made her holidays seasons of real hard work to herself and of infinite penance to Letty, till, tired out of her life by her lessons, and getting past the age when bread and jam rounded off the possibilities of human enjoyment, she went of her own accord as a nurse-girl