every life. Evil is too near us all
for us to tread long upon the flowers without starting up the adders
that hide beneath them. You had to have your first look into the cells
of darkness, and perhaps it is best you had it here and now. The deeps
are for men's eyes as well as the starry heavens."
"Yes, yes."
"There are some persons," he went on slowly, "you know them, who tread
the ways of life with their eyelids closed to everything but the strip
of velvet lawn on which they choose to walk. Earth's sighs and
deep-drawn groans are nothing to them. The world may swing on in its way
to perdition; so long as their pathway feels soft, they neither heed nor
care. But you do not desire to be one of these, Paula! With your great
soul and your strong heart, you would not ask to sit in a flowery maze,
while the rest of the world went sliding on and down into wells of
destruction, you might have made pools of healing by the touch of your
womanly sympathy."
"No, no."
"I cannot tell you, I dare not tell you," he went on in a strange
pleading voice that tore at the very roots of her heart, and rung in her
memory forever, "what evil underlies the whole strata of life! At home
and abroad, on our hearthstones and within our offices, the mocking
devil sits. You can scarcely walk a block, my little one, without
encountering a man or brushing against the dress of a woman across whose
soul the black shadow lies heavier than any words of his or hers could
tell. What the man you saw to-day, said of one unhappy being in this
city, is true, God help us all, of many. Dark spots are easier acquired
than blotted out, my Paula. In business as in society, one needs to
carry the white shield of a noble purpose or a self-forgetting love, to
escape the dripping of the deadly upas tree that branches above all
humanity. I have walked its ways, my darling, and I know of what I
speak. Your white robe is spotless but--"
"O there is where the pain comes in," she cried; "there, just there, is
where the dagger strikes. She says she was once like me. O, could any
temptation, any suffering, any wrong or misfortune that might befall me,
ever bring me to where she is! If it could--"
"Paula!" This time his voice came authoritatively. "You are making too
much of a frenzied woman's impulsive exclamation. To her darkened and
despairing eyes any young woman of a similar style of beauty would have
called forth the same remark. It was a sign that she was n
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