There were instantaneously real things to be done,
real money to earn, men and women to live with and work with, to
conciliate or to resist. A mist rolled away from my eyes. What a
fantastic life it had been hitherto, how sheltered, how remote from
actuality! I seemed to have been building up a rococo stucco
habitation out of whims and fancies, adding a room here and a row
of pinnacles there, all utterly bizarre and grotesque. Vague dreams
of poetry and art, nothing penetrated or grasped, a phrase here, a
fancy there; one's ideal of culture seemed like Ophelia in Hamlet,
a distracted nymph stuck all over with flowers and anxious to
explain the sentimental value of each; the friendships themselves--
they had nothing stable about them either; they were not based upon
any common aim, any real mutual concern; they were nothing more
than the enshrining of a fugitive charm, the tracking of some
bright-eyed fawn or wild-haired dryad to its secret haunt, only to
find the bird flown and the nest warm. But now there was little
time for fancies; there was a real burden to carry, a genuine task
to perform; day after day slipped past, like the furrows in a field
seen from some speeding car; the contented mind, pleasantly wearied
at the end of the busy day, heaved a light-hearted sigh of relief,
and turned to some recreation with zest and delight. It was not
that the quest had been successful; it seemed rather that there was
no quest at all, and that it was the joy of daily work that had
been the missing factor .
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