shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else how shall they
learn to revere the light?" That guardianship may become needless; but
only when all outward law has become needless--only when duty and love
have united in one stream and made a common force. [Footnote: Chapter
XI.]

Another form in which Nemesis punishes us is described in the essay on "A
Half-Breed" in _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_. Mixtus was a man
with noble aims, but he was fascinated by Scintilla, and realized none of
his ideals. He was captivated by her prettiness, liveliness and music, and
then he was captured on his worldly side. She did not believe in "notions"
and reforms, and he succumbed to her wishes. As a result, his life was
crippled, he was always unsatisfied with himself. Of this form of
retribution George Eliot says,--

An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its
unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all
newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment
of change. I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love
of ideas, practical beliefs and social habits. And faithlessness here
means not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a
yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original
choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a
growing desire. In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the
melancholy lot; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively
vengeful than Dido. The child of a wandering tribe, caught young and
trained to polite life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run away
to the old wilds and get his nature into tune. But there is no such
recovery possible to the man who remembers what he once believed
without being convinced that he was in error, who feels within him
unsatisfied stirrings toward old beloved habits and intimacies from
which he has far receded without conscious justification or unwavering
sense of superior attractiveness in the new. This involuntary renegade
has his character hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is like an
organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding themselves
without method, so that hearers are amazed by the most unexpected
transitions--the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe
confounding both.

W