Читать книгу There & Back - George MacDonald - Страница 18

At this point, Barbara’s friend came into the room, and they went away together.

Theodora, so named by her mother because she was born on a Sunday, was a very different girl from Barbara. Nominally friends, neither understood the other. Theodora was the best of the family, but that did not suffice to make her interesting. She was short, stout, rather clumsy, with an honest, thick-featured face, and entirely without guile. Even when she saw it, she could not believe it there. She had not much sympathy, but was very kind. She never hesitated to do what she was sure was right; but then, except for rules, many of them far from right themselves, she would have been almost always in doubt. Anything in the shape of a rule, she received as an angel from heaven. If all the rules she obeyed had been right, and she had seen the right in them, she would have been making rapid progress; as it was, her progress was very slow. How Barbara and she managed to entertain each other, I find it hard to think; but all forms of innocent humanity must have much in common. A contrast, nevertheless, the two must have presented to any power able to read them. Barbara was like a heath of thyme and wild roses and sudden winds; Theodora like a Dutch garden without its flowers. They never quarrelled. I suspect they did not come near enough to quarrel.

Barbara left Richard almost bewitched, and considerably perplexed. He had never seen anything like her. No more had most people that met her. She seemed of another nature from his, a sort of sylph or salamander, yet, in simplest human fashion, she had come quite close to him. She had indeed brought to bear upon him, without knowing it, that humbling and elevating power which ideal womankind has always had, and will eternally have upon genuine manhood. There was an airiness about her, yet a reality, a lightness, yet a force, a readiness, a life, such as he could never have imagined. She was a revelation unrevealed—a presence lovely but incredible, suggesting facts and relations which the commonplace in him said could not exist. The vision was, to use a favourite but pagan phrase, “too good to be true.” Richard’s knowledge of girls was small indeed, but he had now enough to make his first comparison: Alice was like China, Barbara like Venetian glass. He thought there was something in Alice if he could only get at it: he feared there was nothing in Barbara to get at. For one thing, how could she have such parents and take it so lightly!