I read the Imitation and the Life of Saint
Catherine. I fully believed in the miracles of the saints, and I was
dying to have one of my own. The least little accident that could have
been twisted into a miracle would have carried me straight into the
bosom of the church. I had the real religious passion. It has passed
away, and, as I sat here just now, I was wondering what had become of
it!"
Rowland had already been sensible of something in this young lady's tone
which he would have called a want of veracity, and this epitome of her
religious experience failed to strike him as an absolute statement of
fact. But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently
the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history
in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an
infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood
of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and
picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and
spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in
experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction which blossomed
in her talk were not so much perversions, as sympathetic exaggerations,
of fact.
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