e.

Who half so brilliantly!--Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the
glittering armies of her enthusiasm. He had proved it; he proved it daily
in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles like hers:
yet they were something to bear, hard to bear, at times unbearable.

But those were times of weakness. Let anything be doubted rather than the
good guidance of the man who was her breath of life! Whither he led, let
her go, not only submissively, exultingly.

Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that unless rushing
into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should
therefore think it.

This was the prudent woman's clear deduction from the state wherein she
found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman. Her
surrender then might be likened to the detachment of a flower on the
river's bank by swell of flood: she had no longer root of her own; away
she sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crashing fall,
a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more the sunny whirling
surface. Strange to think, she had not since then power to grasp in her
abstract mind a notion of stedfastness without or within.

But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman. Love is a madness, having
heaven's wisdom in it--a spark. But even when it is driving us on the
breakers, call it love: and be not unworthy of it, hold to it. She and
Victor had drunk of a cup. The philtre was in her veins, whatever the
directions of the rational mind.

Exulting or regretting, she had to do it, as one in the car with a racing
charioteer. Or up beside a more than Titanically audacious balloonist.
For the charioteer is bent on a goal; and Victor's course was an
ascension from heights to heights. He had ideas, he mastered Fortune. He
conquered Nataly and held her subject, in being above his ambition; which
was now but an occupation for his powers, while the aim of his life was
at the giving and taking of simple enjoyment. In spite of his fits of
unreasonableness in the means--and the woman loving him could trace them
to a breath of nature--his gentle good friendly innocent aim in life was
of this very simplest; so wonderful, by contrast with his powers, that
she, assured of it as she was by experience of him, was touched, in a
transfusion of her feelings through lucent globes of admiration and of
tenderness, to reverence. There had been occasions when her wish for the
who