The Three Stages of Clarinda Thorbald

In the soft light of an afternoon sun, Clarinda sat in an old chair and read a thesis upon love, and she found set forth in this thesis that without love the world would not go around. Further, without love life would be but dross and hideous calamity. She also found therein that men have died from love, and women have languished in torments when it was unrequited. Even though she was filled with apprehension as she read, she did not wish to eschew love, but was glad she was suffering from its effects. She imagined that her own particular love was different from the love anybody had ever been consumed with, and she was glad in her heart she was suffering from its effects. She perceived it affected the glint of her hair, and she even thought it affected the beauty of her smile. She knew it affected her eyes, and gave an added color to her cheeks. At times when she sat by herself, she was filled with fear that the object of her love might fail her—that what she felt might be a dream and not a real condition. At times this trepidation was so overwhelming she became frightened. It might occur that she would awake from her blissful state and find it was all a mistake. She even thought that it might not have happened—that the man she loved upon a certain night, at a certain place had whispered in her ear that without her love life would be a void. Clarinda was young and believed in love, and she had not found out that love dies even as the body, and often becomes stale, that more than often it passed from the soul as the miasma from the fetid lake.