Read "The Sin of Jasper Standish" by Eliza Margaret Jane Humphreys online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
A FEELING at once hurt and proud, yet holding depth of unsuspected pain, was asserting itself in Lyle Orcheton's heart. To have received such silent worship, such unmistakeable devotion as Derrick Mallory had shown, and then be left alone, facing an unexplained absence, an unuttered confession--it was a trying ordeal.
In later years a woman learns to be less sensitive than in the first dawn of exacting youth. Her dreams are less crystalline, her imagination less poetic. She has suffered disillusion, but learnt patience. She no longer rushes off at a tangent because her lover has omitted a duty or committed a trifling fault. Absence may be excusable; silence may possess virtues of discretion. She can afford to wait for explanation instead of flying into a whirlpool of emotion, or a cataract of tears by way of relief. But this wisdom comes only with years and knowledge, and a wider comprehension of poor humanity's limitations.