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SKETCHES. 345
the sensitive, loving, creative spirit within them, buried even
before it has had time to live. Also they sometimes look
up sadly, asking: “ Why do I live? Is life nothing else?”
These all are souls awaiting their Whitsuntide. Ex-
pectant souls ! could I but let you feel and believe, as firmly
as I do it myself, that it is coming, and the glory of its
reality shall exceed your most beautiful dreams.
Some of my fair readers have probably already guessed,
from the change which I have mentioned as having taken
place in Ellina, that her husband and the first conjugal hap-
piness also had changed. It was so. What husband and
what marriage remaius the same during a period of nine-
teen or twenty years? Ellina’s husband was a noble and
good man, as I have said, and [I repeat it. But still he was
too one-sided manly, as Ellina was too one-sided womanly.
His was a nature energetic, practical, looking at the outer
world ; hers poetical, sensitive, living in the world within
her. In several points husband and wife never harmonized.
They harmonized less and less, when, during succeeding
years and with an increasing family, the support of the
same necessarily claimed a greater exertion of his industry,
and when his time and his mind became more and more
taken up by outward, practical life. She felt herself more
and more lonely, and too proud and too wise to complain
of the unsatisfied wants of her soul and heart, she shut
herself up more within herself. She became still more like
the steep, rugged rock; she resembled the solitary lily
near it. Besides, there was between them another subject
of dispute and discontent, which, though frequently dropped,
was still as often renewed. And thus they became gradu-
ally estranged without clearly knowing how; between them
rose a something, a darkening cloud, an invisible wall, —
something nameless, they knew not what, which made them
more and more strangers to each other.
‘Husbands and wives! ye who have wandered together
through life some distance beyond the “ halcyon-days,” tell
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