I often thought him so, with the expression of tender human
care and gentlest sympathy which she alone seemed to have power to call
out upon his features. Zenobia, I suspect, would have given her eyes,
bright as they were, for such a look; it was the least that our poor
Priscilla could do, to give her heart for a great many of them. There
was the more danger of this, inasmuch as the footing on which we all
associated at Blithedale was widely different from that of conventional
society. While inclining us to the soft affections of the golden age,
it seemed to authorize any individual, of either sex, to fall in love
with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable
and prudent. Accordingly the tender passion was very rife among us, in
various degrees of mildness or virulence, but mostly passing away with
the state of things that had given it origin. This was all well
enough; but, for a girl like Priscilla and a woman like Zenobia to
jostle one another in their love of a man like Hollingsworth, was
likely to be no child's play.
Had I been as cold-hearted as I sometimes thought myself, nothing would
have interested me more than to witness the play of passions that must
thus have been evolved. But, in honest truth, I would really have gone
far to save Priscilla, at least, from the catastrophe in which such a
drama would be apt to terminate.
Priscilla had now grown to be a very pretty girl, and still kept
budding and blossoming, and daily putting on some new charm, which you
no sooner became sensible of than you thought it worth all that she had
previously possessed. So unformed, vague, and without substance, as
she had come to us, it seemed as if we could see Nature shaping out a
woman before our very eyes, and yet had only a more reverential sense
of the mystery of a woman's soul and frame. Yesterday, her cheek was
pale, to-day, it had a bloom. Priscilla's smile, like a baby's first
one, was a wondrous novelty.
Her imperfections and shortcomings
affected me with a kind of playful pathos, which was as absolutely
bewitching a sensation as ever I experienced. After she had been a
month or two at Blithedale, her animal spirits waxed high, and kept her
pretty constantly in a state of bubble and ferment, impelling her to
far more bodily activity than she had yet strength to endure. She was
very fond of playing with the other girls out of doors. There is
hardly another sight in the world so pretty as that of a company of
young girls, almost women grown, at play, and so giving themselves up
to their airy impulse that their tiptoes barely touch the ground.