At heart he had a feeling that the predilection of his wife was a more magnanimous choice than his own, and that Biter’s difficult masculinity might weigh more in the scheme of things than the harmonious winsomeness of his little girl. But the heart, he reflected, will suffer no dictate, and his heart, after all, had belonged to the little girl ever since she came, ever since he saw her for the first time. And whenever he held her in his arms, that first time came back to him. He remembered the bright room in the Woman’s Hospital in which little Lorie first saw the light—twelve years lay between her coming and that of her elder brother and sister. He had entered the room, and almost at the very moment in which, attended by the smiles of the mother, he had carefully drawn back the curtain of the little canopied doll’s bed that stood beside the larger one, and had become conscious of the tiny marvel which lay there amidst the cushions, so beautifully formed and surrounded, as it were, by a clarity of sweetness and harmonious proportion, with hands which were even then, though on a smaller scale, as beautiful as now, with wide-open eyes which were even then of a heavenly blue and reflected the shining day—at that very moment he had felt his heart seized and made captive. It was love at first sight and forever, a feeling which, unknown, unexpected, and unhoped for—so far as his consciousness was concerned—utterly possessed him and which he at once comprehended, joyfully and with surprise, as being something that would be valid for life.
Doctor Cornelius, moreover, knew that, properly considered, he might have been mistaken as to the utter unexpectedness, the unhoped-for-ness, of this feeling, as well as its complete arbitrariness. He knew at heart that it could not have overcome him by mere chance and become a part of his life, but that somehow, even though unconsciously, he must have been prepared for it, or, more correctly, been ready for it; that something within him was ready to engender it in his heart at the given moment, and that this something, strange to say, was his character as a professor of history. Doctor Cornelius was not wont to say this—he was merely sometimes aware of it, and then he indulged in a mysterious smile. He knew that professors of history do not like history, in so far as it is history that happens, but only as history that has happened; that they hate the upheavals of the present, because they are lawless, disconnected, and impudent—in one word, “unhistorical”—and that their heart is with the coherent, proper, and historical past. And when the professor took his walk along the river before dinner, he was wont to confess to himself that the spirit of the timeless and the eternal lay over the past, and that this spirit was much more congenial to the nerves of a professor of history than all the insolence of the present. The past is perpetuated—that is to say, it is dead; and death is the source of all seemliness and permanent significance. The doctor was secretly convinced of this, when he went walking alone in the dark. It was his preservative instinct, his sense for the “eternal,” which caused him to save himself from the cynical asperities of the times by taking refuge in his love for this little daughter of his. For paternal love and a child at the breast of a mother—these are timeless and eternal and therefore beautiful and holy. And yet, when he pondered in the dark, Cornelius understood that there was something that was not quite right and good in this love of his—he conceded it theoretically for the sake of knowledge. This love of his, judging by its origin, was fettered to a certain tendency; there was hostility in it, opposition to history in the making, and inclination in favour of history that was made—that is to say, death. Extraordinary enough, to be sure, yet true, true to some degree. His passion for this sweet little piece of life and progeny was in some way connected with death; it was a passion that remained faithful to him, and arraigned itself against life, and this, in a certain sense, was not well, not as it should be, although it would naturally have been the maddest kind of asceticism to stifle the purest and loveliest emotion of his heart because of such an occasional and purely scientific insight into things.
He held his little daughter upon his knees, and her thin, rosy little legs hung down beside his own. He spoke to her, his eyebrows raised, in a tone of tender and comic reverence, and listened with rapture to the sweet, piping voice in which she answered him, calling him “Abel.” He exchanged eloquent glances with the mother, who was attending to her Biter and gently advising him to be sensible and well-behaved, for, being unduly vexed by life’s little ironies, he had had another attack of temper today and had acted like a howling dervish. From time to time Cornelius also cast a half-suspicious glance towards the Big Ones, for he felt it not impossible that they were familiar with certain learned analyses in connection with his evening walks. But if this was so, they did not betray it. They stood behind their chairs and leaned their arms upon the backs, regarding
