"What, exactly, was the account I gave--?"
"Of the way you did feel? Well, it was very simple. You said you
had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you,
the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly
prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you,
that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of,
and that would perhaps overwhelm you."
"Do you call that very simple?" John Marcher asked.
She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you
spoke, to understand it."
"You do understand it?" he eagerly asked.
Again she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the belief?"
"Oh!" he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say.
"Whatever it's to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet come."
He shook his head in complete surrender now. "It hasn't yet come.
Only, you know, it isn't anything I'm to do, to achieve in the
world, to be distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an ass as
THAT. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were."
"It's to be something you're merely to suffer?"
"Well, say to wait for--to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly
break out in my life; possibly destroying all further
consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other
hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my
world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape
themselves.
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