Explore "One Man in His Time" by Ellen Glasgow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
As the car passed through the deserted streets, Corinna placed her hand on Patty's with a reassuring pressure. Without appearing to do so, she was studying the girl's soft profile, now flashing out in a sudden sharp light, now melting back again into the vagueness of the shadows. What was there about this girl, Corinna asked herself, which appealed so strongly to the protective impulse in her heart? Was it because this undisciplined child, with that curious sporting instinct which supplied the place of Victorian morality, represented for her, as well as for Stephen, some inarticulate longing for the unknown, for the adventurous? Did Patty's charm for them both lie in her unlikeness to everything they had known in the past? In Corinna, as in Stephen, two opposing spirits had battled unceasingly, the realistic spirit which accepted life as it was, and the romantic spirit which struggled toward some unattainable perfection, which endeavoured to change and decorate the actuality.
More than Stephen, perhaps, she had faced life; but she had not accepted it without rebellion. She had learned from disappointment to see things as they are; but deep in her heart some unspent fire of romance, some imprisoned esthetic impulse, sought continually to gild and enrich the experience of the moment. And this girl, so young, so ingenuous, so gallant and so appealing, stood in Corinna's mind for the poetic wildness of her spirit, for all that she had seen in a vision and had missed in reality.