Is it not so ?" "True," said I.

"I was thinking of what you, with your capacity and intelligence, joined to your love of pleasure, and your impatience of unreasonable restraint--of what you would have been in that past.

And even now, when all is won and has been for a long time, my heart is sickened with thinking of all the waste of life that has gone on for so many years." "So many centuries," she said, "so many ages!" "True," I said; "too true," and sat silent again.
She rose up and said: "Come, I must not let you go off into a dream again so soon.

If we must lose you, I want you to see all that you can see first before you go back again." "Lose me ?" I said--"go back again?
Am I not to go up to the North with you?
What do you mean ?" She smiled somewhat sadly, and said: "Not yet; we will not talk of that yet.

Only, what were you thinking of just now ?" I said falteringly: "I was saying to myself, The past, the present?
Should she not have said the contrast of the present with the future: of blind despair with hope ?" "I knew it," she said.