conduct in which she had been indulging
narrowed themselves down to her own life and to sternest, commonest
reality. Christianity is never a quality that can be abstracted from the
individual and looked upon as having duties of its own.

She fought against the knowledge that she liked him so well; the thought
of being his wife was the thought of a sacrifice that appalled her. A
convent cell would not have appeared to her half so far removed from all
that belongs to the pride of life; and lives there anyone who has so
wholly turned from that hydra-headed delight as not to shrink, as from
some touch of death, from fresh relinquishment? Her pulses stirred to
those strains of life's music that call to emulation and the manifold
pomps of honour; and, whatever might be the reality, in her judgment the
wife of Alec Trenholme must renounce all that element of interest in the
world for ever. Our sense of distinction poises its wings on the opinion
of men; and, as far as she had learnt this opinion, a saint or a nun
(she knew it now, although before she had not thought it) had honourable
part in life's pageantry, but not the wife of such as he. The prospect
in her eyes was barren of the hope that she might ever again have the
power to say to anyone, "I am better than thou."

It did not help her that at her initiation into the Christian life she
had formally made just this renunciation, or that she had thought that
before now she had ratified the vow. The meaninglessness of such
formulas when spoken is only revealed when deepening life reveals their
depths of meaning. She asked, in dismay, if duty was calling her to this
sacrifice by the voice of love in her heart. For that Love who carries
the crown of earthly happiness in his hand was standing on the threshold
of her heart like a beggar, and so terrible did his demand seem to her
that she felt it would be easy to turn him away.

"I," she said to herself, "I, who have preached to others, who have
discoursed on the vanity of ambition--this has come to teach me what
stuff my glib enthusiasm is made of. I would rather perjure myself,
rather die, rather choose any life of penance and labour, than yield to
my own happiness and his, and give up my pride."

She arrayed before her all possible arguments for maintaining the
existing social order; but conscience answered, "You are not asked to
disturb it very much." Conscience used an uncomfortable phrase--"You are
only asked to make yo