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- 10002
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- 9943
- text
- II.
But little would we comprehend the peculiar relation between Pierre and
Glen--a relation involving in the end the most serious results--were
there not here thrown over the whole equivocal, preceding account of it,
another and more comprehensive equivocalness, which shall absorb all
minor ones in itself; and so make one pervading ambiguity the only
possible explanation for all the ambiguous details.
It had long been imagined by Pierre, that prior to his own special
devotion to Lucy, the splendid Glen had not been entirely insensible to
her surprising charms. Yet this conceit in its incipiency, he knew not
how to account for. Assuredly his cousin had never in the slightest
conceivable hint betrayed it; and as for Lucy, the same intuitive
delicacy which forever forbade Pierre to question her on the subject,
did equally close her own voluntary lips. Between Pierre and Lucy,
delicateness put her sacred signet on this chest of secrecy; which like
the wax of an executor upon a desk, though capable of being melted into
nothing by the smallest candle, for all this, still possesses to the
reverent the prohibitive virtue of inexorable bars and bolts.
If Pierre superficially considered the deportment of Glen toward him,
therein he could find no possible warrant for indulging the suspicious
idea. Doth jealousy smile so benignantly and offer its house to the
bride? Still, on the other hand, to quit the mere surface of the
deportment of Glen, and penetrate beneath its brocaded vesture; there
Pierre sometimes seemed to see the long-lurking and yet unhealed wound
of all a rejected lover's most rankling detestation of a supplanting
rival, only intensified by their former friendship, and the unimpairable
blood-relation between them. Now, viewed by the light of this
master-solution, all the singular enigmas in Glen; his capriciousness in
the matter of the epistolary--"Dear Pierres" and "Dearest Pierres;" the
mercurial fall from the fever-heat of cordiality, to below the Zero of
indifference; then the contrary rise to fever-heat; and, above all, his
emphatic redundancy of devotion so soon as the positive espousals of
Pierre seemed on the point of consummation; thus read, all these riddles
apparently found their cunning solution. For the deeper that some men
feel a secret and poignant feeling, the higher they pile the belying
surfaces. The friendly deportment of Glen then was to be considered as
in direct proportion to his hoarded hate; and the climax of that hate
was evinced in throwing open his house to the bride. Yet if hate was the
abstract cause, hate could not be the immediate motive of the conduct of
Glen. Is hate so hospitable? The immediate motive of Glen then must be
the intense desire to disguise from the wide world, a fact unspeakably
humiliating to his gold-laced and haughty soul: the fact that in the
profoundest desire of his heart, Pierre had so victoriously supplanted
him. Yet was it that very artful deportment in Glen, which Glen
profoundly assumed to this grand end; that consummately artful
deportment it was, which first obtruded upon Pierre the surmise, which
by that identical method his cousin was so absorbedly intent upon
rendering impossible to him. Hence we here see that as in the negative
way the secrecy of any strong emotion is exceedingly difficult to be
kept lastingly private to one's own bosom by any human being; so it is
one of the most fruitless undertakings in the world, to attempt by
affirmative assumptions to tender to men, the precisely opposite emotion
as yours. Therefore the final wisdom decrees, that if you have aught
which you desire to keep a secret to yourself, be a Quietist there, and
do and say nothing at all about it. For among all the poor chances, this
is the least poor. Pretensions and substitutions are only the recourse
of under-graduates in the science of the world; in which science, on his
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