danger is for her the greater and more insidious,
because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all
its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought.

When at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the
increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper
needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite
action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism,
cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and
privations. She strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like hers
has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to make
it as hard as may be to bear. She would deny to herself the very beauty
of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything
sweet and glad, as temptations and snares. From all this she is brought
back by Philip. But he, touching as he is in the humility and tender
unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament
to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral requirements of her
being. He may win her back to the love of beauty and the sense of joy;
but he is not the one to stand by her side when the stern conflict
between pleasure and right, sense and soul, the world and God, is being
fought out within her.

With her introduction to Stephen Guest, that conflict assumes specific
and tangible form; and it has emphatically to be fought out _alone_. All
external circumstances are against her; even Lucy's sweet unjealous
temper, and Tom's bitter hatred, combining with Philip's painful self-
consciousness to keep the safeguard of his presence less constantly at
her side. At last the crowning temptation comes. Without design, by a
surprise on the part of both, the step has been taken which may well seem
irretraceable. Going back from it is not merely going back from joy and
hope, but going back to deeper loneliness than she has ever known; and
going back also to misunderstanding, shame, and lifelong repentance. But
conscience, the imperative requirements of the higher life within, have
resumed their power. There is no paltering with that inward voice; no
possibility but the acceptance of the present urgent right,--the instant
fleeing from the wrong, though with it is bound up all of enjoyment life
can know. It is thus she has to take up her cross, not the less hard to
bear that her own hands hav