The recital on Agnes's part was perfectly
translucent and pure, for she had said no word and had had no thought
that brought the slightest stain upon her soul. Love and prayer had been
the prevailing habit of her life, and in promising to love and pray she
had had no worldly or earthly thought. The language of gallantry, or
even of sincere passion, had never reached her ear; but it had always
been as natural to her to love every human being as for a plant
with tendrils to throw them round the next plant, and therefore she
entertained the gentle guest who had lately found room in her heart
without a question or a scruple.
As Agnes related her childlike story of unconscious faith and love, her
listener felt himself strangely and bitterly agitated. It was a vision
of ignorant purity and unconsciousness rising before him, airy and
glowing as a child's soap-bubble, which one touch might annihilate; but
he felt a strange remorseful tenderness, a yearning admiration, at its
unsubstantial purity. There is something pleading and pitiful in the
simplicity of perfect ignorance,--a rare and delicate beauty in its
freshness, like the morning-glory cup, which, once withered by the heat,
no second morning can restore. Agnes had imparted to her confessor, by
a mysterious sympathy, something like the morning freshness of her own
soul; she had redeemed the idea of womanhood from gross associations,
and set before him a fair ideal of all that female tenderness and purity
may teach to man.
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