thought grasped together the two worlds of being,--the what has been,
and the what shall be. All hope seemed stricken from the future, as
a man strikes from the calculations of his income the returns from a
property irrevocably lost. At her age but few of her sex have parted
with religion; but even such mechanical faith as the lessons of her
childhood, and the constrained conformities with Christian ceremonies,
had instilled, had long since melted away in the hard scholastic
scepticism of her fatal tutor,--a scepticism which had won, with little
effort, a reason delighting in the maze of doubt, and easily narrowed
into the cramped and iron logic of disbelief by an intellect that
scorned to submit where it failed to comprehend. Nor had faith given
place to those large moral truths from which philosophy has sought to
restore the proud statue of Pagan Virtue as a substitute for the meek
symbol of the Christian cross. By temperament unsocial, nor readily
moved to the genial and benevolent, that absolute egotism in which
Olivier Dalibard centred his dreary ethics seemed sanctioned to Lucretia
by her studies into the motives of man and the history of the world. She
had read the chronicles of States and the memoirs of statesmen, and
seen how craft carries on the movements of an age. Those Viscontis,
Castruccios, and Medici; those Richelieus and Mazarins and De Retzs;
those Loyolas and Mohammeds and Cromwells; those Monks and Godolphins;
those Markboroughs and Walpoles; those founders of history and
dynasties and sects; those leaders and dupers of men, greater or lesser,
corrupters or corrupt, all standing out prominent and renowned from
the guiltless and laurelless obscure,--seemed to win, by the homage of
posterity, the rewards that attend the deceivers of their time. By a
superb arrogance of generalization, she transferred into private life,
and the rule of commonplace actions, the policy that, to the abasement
of honour, has so often triumphed in the guidance of States. Therefore,
betimes, the whole frame of society was changed to her eye, from the
calm aspect it wears to those who live united with their kind; she
viewed all seemings with suspicion; and before she had entered the
world, prepared to live in it as a conspirator in a city convulsed,
spying and espied, schemed against and scheming,--here the crown for the
crafty, there the axe for the outwitted.

But her love--for love is trust--had led her half way forth from t