Three Weeks

Three Weeks

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Title: Three Weeks
Author: Elinor Glyn
Release Date: September, 2005 [EBook #8899] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on August 21,

2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE
WEEKS ***

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THREE WEEKS
BY ELINOR GLYN
1907

INTRODUCTION TO MY AMERICAN READERS
I feel now, when my "Three Weeks" is to be launched in a new land,
where I have many sympathetic friends, that, owing to the
misunderstanding and misrepresentation it received from nearly the
entire press and a section of the public in England, I would like to state
my view of its meaning. (As I wrote it, I suppose it could be believed I
know something about that!) For me "the Lady" was a deep study, the
analysis of a strange Slav nature, who, from circumstances and
education and her general view of life, was beyond the ordinary laws of
morality. If I were making the study of a Tiger, I would not give it the
attributes of a spaniel, because the public, and I myself, might prefer a
spaniel! I would still seek to portray accurately every minute instinct of
that Tiger, to make a living picture. Thus, as you read, I want you to
think of her as such a study. A great splendid nature, full of the

passionate realisation of primitive instincts, immensely cultivated,
polished, blasé. You must see her at Lucerne, obsessed with the
knowledge of her horrible life with her brutal, vicious husband, to
whom she had been sacrificed for political reasons when almost a child.
She suddenly sees this young Englishman, who comes as an echo of
something straight and true in manhood which, in outward appearance
at all events, she has met in her youth in the person of his Uncle Hubert.
She perceives in him at once the Soul sleeping there; and it produces in
her a strong emotion. Then I want you to understand the effect of Love
on them both. In her it rose from caprice to intense devotion, until the
day at the Farm when it reached the highest point--a desire to reproduce
his likeness. How, with the most passionate physical emotion, her
mental influence upon Paul was ever to raise him to vast aims and
noble desires for future greatness. In him love opened the windows of
his Soul, so that he saw the fine in everything.
The immense rush of passion in Venice came from her knowledge that
they soon must part. Notice the effect of the two griefs on Paul. The
first, with its undefined hope, making him do well in all things--even
his prowess as a hunter--to raise himself to be more worthy in her eyes;
the second and paralysing one of death, turning him into adamant until
his soul awakens again with the returning spring of her spirit in his
heart, and the consolation of the living essence of their love in the
child.
The minds of some human beings are as moles, grubbing in the earth
for worms. They have no eyes to see God's sky with the stars in it. To
such "Three Weeks" will be but a sensual record of passion. But those
who do look up beyond the material will understand the deep pure love,
and the Soul in it all, and they will realise that to such a nature as "the
Lady's," passion would never have run riot until it was sated--she
would have daily grown nobler in her desire to make her Loved One's
son a splendid man.
And to all who read, I say--at least be just! and do not skip. No line is
written without its having a bearing upon the next, and in its small
scope helping