Page:The Two Women (1910).djvu/28

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A MEDLEY OF MOODS


Alas! for the man and for the artist with the shifting point of perspective. Life shall be a confusion of ways to the one; the landscape shall rise up and confound the other.

Take the case of Lorison. At one time he appeared to himself to be the feeblest of fools; at another he conceived that he followed ideals so fine that the world was not yet ready to accept them. During one mood he cursed his folly; possessed by the other, he bore himself with a serene grandeur akin to greatness: in neither did he attain the perspective.

Generation before, the name had been “Larsen”; his race had bequeathed him its fine-strung, melancholy temperament, its saving balance of thrift and industry.

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