In a word, every man in love shows better than he is, though,
thank God, not better than he is meant to become.
After Kate's departure, Alec's health improved much more rapidly. Hope,
supplied by his own heart, was the sunlight in which he revived. He had
one advantage over some lovers--that he was no metaphysician. He did
not torture himself with vain attempts to hold his brain as a mirror to
his heart, that he might read his heart there. The heart is deaf and
dumb and blind, but it has more in it--more life and blessedness, more
torture and death--than any poor knowledge-machine of a brain can
understand, or even delude itself into the fancy of understanding.
From the first, Kate's presence had not been favourable to his
recovery, irrespectively of the excitement and restlessness which it
occasioned; for she was an absorbent rather than a diffuser of life.
Her own unsatisfied nature, her excitableness, her openness to all
influences from the external world, and her incapacity for supplying
her needs in any approximate degree from inward resources; her
consequent changeableness, moodiness, and dependency--were all
unfavourable influences upon an invalid who loved her.
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