true
man troubled by intellectual doubt, is so troubled unto further health
and growth. Let him be alive and hopeful, above all obedient, and he
will be able to wait for the deeper content which must follow with
completer insight. Men may say such a man but deceives himself, that
there is nothing of the kind he pleases himself with imagining; but this
is at least worth reflecting upon--that while the man who aspires fears
he may be deceiving himself, it is the man who does not aspire who
asserts that he is. One day the former may be sure, and the latter may
cease to deny, and begin to doubt.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE DOCTOR'S STUDY.

Paul Faber's condition, as he sat through the rest of that night in his
study, was about as near absolute misery as a man's could well be, in
this life, I imagine. The woman he had been watching through the first
part of it as his essential bliss, he had left in a swoon, lying naked
on the floor, and would not and did not go near her again. How could he?
Had he not been duped, sold, married to----?--That way madness lay! His
pride was bitterly wounded. Would it had been mortally! but pride seems
in some natures to thrive upon wounds, as in others does love. Faber's
pride grew and grew as he sat and brooded, or, rather, was brooded upon.

He, Paul Faber, who knew his own worth, his truth, his love, his
devotion--he, with his grand ideas of woman and purity and unity,
conscious of deserving a woman's best regards--he, whose love (to speak
truly his unworded, undefined impression of himself) any woman might be
proud to call hers--he to be thus deceived! to have taken to his bosom
one who had before taken another to hers, and thought it yet good enough
for him! It would not bear thinking! Indignation and bitterest sense of
wrong almost crazed him. For evermore he must be a hypocrite, going
about with the knowledge of that concerning himself which he would not
have known by others! This was how the woman, whom he had brought back
from death with the life of his own heart, had served him! Years ago she
had sacrificed her bloom to some sneaking wretch who flattered a God
with prayers, then enticed and bewitched and married _him_!

In all this thinking there was no thought but for himself--not one for
the woman whose agony had been patent even to his wrath-blinded eyes. In
what is the wretchedness of our condition more evident than in this,
that the sense of wrong always makes us unjust?