Explore "The Lake of Wine" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Reason is fatal to romance, and Miss Royston was coming to it. She had, indeed, a very practical side to her character, which side was all of the world and eminently fancy-free. "Kiss-in-the-ring" in a fairy circle is a delightful pastime for the heyday of youth, but the time must come when the gravity of the problem as to to whom one shall throw the final handkerchief, must intrude itself through the merriest helter-skelter of the game. Then, as a matter of necessity, must follow the inevitable formule of the pretty cold-shoulder to ineligible _partis_; of little sisterly regrets on behalf of swains who take their dismissal rebelliously; of wee sops to passionate Cerberuses in the shape of Christmas cards depicting hands clasped above the motto "For auld lang syne"; of the citing of Job-comforter maxims felt by the recipient to be totally inapt to the tragedy of the situation. And so the jade plumes herself on her acquirement of the reasonable view, and makes an easy virtue of spoiling faith -- which is but a synonym for romance -- for the sake of five hundred a year.
No doubt this is as it should be; for that very faith, or romance, would be a sorry sole equipment for the nether side of youth. But it is also a matter for regret that reason, when come to, should so commonly refuse credit to any evidence but that of its senses, and should contemn in others that same spirit of ideality which coloured all the early processes of its own evolution.