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- 9660
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 9608
- text
- I.
Though resolved to face all out to the last, at whatever desperate
hazard, Pierre had not started for the city without some reasonable
plans, both with reference to his more immediate circumstances, and his
ulterior condition.
There resided in the city a cousin of his, Glendinning Stanly, better
known in the general family as Glen Stanly, and by Pierre, as Cousin
Glen. Like Pierre, he was an only son; his parents had died in his early
childhood; and within the present year he had returned from a protracted
sojourn in Europe, to enter, at the age of twenty-one, into the
untrammeled possession of a noble property, which in the hands of
faithful guardians, had largely accumulated.
In their boyhood and earlier adolescence, Pierre and Glen had cherished
a much more than cousinly attachment. At the age of ten, they had
furnished an example of the truth, that the friendship of fine-hearted,
generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and
elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness,
and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short,
by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.
Nor is this boy-love without the occasional fillips and spicinesses,
which at times, by an apparent abatement, enhance the permanent delights
of those more advanced lovers who love beneath the cestus of Venus.
Jealousies are felt. The sight of another lad too much consorting with
the boy's beloved object, shall fill him with emotions akin to those of
Othello's; a fancied slight, or lessening of the every-day indications
of warm feelings, shall prompt him to bitter upbraidings and reproaches;
or shall plunge him into evil moods, for which grim solitude only is
congenial.
Nor are the letters of Aphroditean devotees more charged with headlong
vows and protestations, more cross-written and crammed with discursive
sentimentalities, more undeviating in their semi-weekliness, or
dayliness, as the case may be, than are the love-friendship missives of
boys. Among those bundles of papers which Pierre, in an ill hour, so
frantically destroyed in the chamber of the inn, were two large packages
of letters, densely written, and in many cases inscribed crosswise
throughout with red ink upon black; so that the love in those letters
was two layers deep, and one pen and one pigment were insufficient to
paint it. The first package contained the letters of Glen to Pierre, the
other those of Pierre to Glen, which, just prior to Glen's departure for
Europe, Pierre had obtained from him, in order to re-read them in his
absence, and so fortify himself the more in his affection, by reviving
reference to the young, ardent hours of its earliest manifestations.
But as the advancing fruit itself extrudes the beautiful blossom, so in
many cases, does the eventual love for the other sex forever dismiss the
preliminary love-friendship of boys. The mere outer friendship may in
some degree--greater or less--survive; but the singular love in it has
perishingly dropped away.
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