Read "The Prophet's Mantle" by Edith Nesbit online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The Clare Stanley who studied Bakounin and quoted Matthew Arnold was a very different girl from the Clare Stanley who had in the autumn entertained the reprehensible idea of bringing to her feet the interesting stranger at Morley's Hotel. In looking back on that time, which she did with hot cheeks and uncomfortable self-condemnation, it really seemed to her that she had changed into another being -- development, when it is rapid, being always bewildering. It would be interesting to know with what emotions the rose remembers being a green bud. Pleasanter ones perhaps than those of the woman whose new earnest sense of the intense seriousness of life leads her to look back -- not with indulgent eyes -- on the follies of her unawakened girlhood. The story of the sleeping beauty is an allegory with a very real meaning. Every woman's mind has its time of slumber, when the creed of the day is truth and the convention of the day is morality.
The fairy prince's awakening kiss may come in the pages of a book, in the words of a speaker, through love, through suffering, through sorrow, through a thousand things glad or sad, and to some it never comes, and that is the saddest thing of all. Clare had slept, and now was well awake, and it was no word of Count Litvinoff's that had broken the slumbrous spell.