Meanwhile, I
do what I am given to do; I perceive what I am allowed to perceive;
I suffer what is appointed for me to suffer; but all with a hope
that I may yet see the dawn break upon the sunlit sea, beyond the
dark hills of time.
X
THE DRAMATIC SENSE
The other day I was walking along a road at Cambridge, engulfed in
a torrent of cloth-capped and coated young men all flowing one way--
going to see or, as it is now called, to "watch" a match. We met a
little girl walking with her governess in the opposite direction.
There was a baleful light of intellect in the child's eye, and a
preponderance of forehead combined with a certain lankness of hair
betrayed, I fancy, an ingenuous academical origin. The girl was
looking round her with an unholy sense of superiority, and as we
passed she said to her governess in a clear-cut, complacent tone,
"We're quite exceptional, aren't we?" To which the governess
replied briskly, "Laura, don't be ridiculous!" To which exhortation
Laura replied with self-satisfied pertinacity, "No, but we ARE
exceptional, aren't we?"
Ah, Miss Laura, I thought to myself, you are one of those people
with a dramatic sense of your own importance.
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