He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre of
his being, and could not more dispute its mastery than he could
dispute the force of gravitation of which he knew nothing but the
formula. He was only too glad to yield himself entirely, not to
her charm or to any sentimentality of religion, but to her mental
and physical energy of creation which had built up these World's
Fairs of thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St.
Louis pale.
"Both were faiths and both are gone," said Matthew Arnold of
the Greek and Norse divinities; but the business of a student was
to ask where they had gone. The Virgin had not even altogether
gone; her fading away had been excessively slow. Her adorer had
pursued her too long, too far, and into too many manifestations
of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either of
quantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less
admit her annihilation as energy.
So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had
found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her
lovers. Her own age had no time-measure. For years past, incited
by John La Farge, Adams had devoted his summer schooling to the
study of her glass at Chartres and elsewhere, and if the
automobile had one vitesse more useful than another, it was that
of a century a minute; that of passing from one century to
another without break.
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