angely at variance with those of the social tribunal
which sits in judgment on virtue and vice. To her, for instance, the
woman who sells herself with ecclesiastical sanction differed only in
degree of impurity from her whose track is under the street-lamps. She
was not censorious, she was not self-righteous; she spoke to no one of
the convictions that ruled her, and to herself held them a mystery of
holiness, a revelation of high things vouchsafed she knew not whence nor
how. Suppose her to have been heart-free at this juncture of her fate,
think you she would have found it a whit less impossible to save her
father by becoming Dagworthy's wife. There was in her thought but one
parallel to this dire choice which lay before her: it was the means
offered to Isabel of rescuing her brother Claudio. That passion of
purity which fired Isabel's speech was the breath of Emily's life. She
knew well that many, and women too, would spare no condemnation of what
they would call her heartless selfishness; she knew that the paltriest
considerations of worldly estate are deemed sufficient to exact from a
woman the sacrifice now demanded of her. That was no law to Emily. The
moral sense which her own nature had developed must here alone control
her. Purity, as she understood it--the immaculate beauty of the
soul--was her religion: if other women would die rather than deny the
object of their worship, to her the ideal of chastity was worth no less
perfect a zeal. Far removed from the world which theorises, she
presented in her character a solution of the difficulties entertained by
those who doubtingly seek a substitute for the old religious sanctions.
Her motives had the simplicity of elemental faith; they were indeed but
the primary instincts of womanhood exalted to a rare perfection and
reflected in a consciousness of exceeding lucidity.

The awakening of love in such a nature as this was, as it were, the
admission to a supreme sacrament. Here was the final sanction of the
creed that had grown from within. In the plighting of her troth to
Wilfrid Athel, Emily had, as she herself saw it, performed the most
solemn and sacred act of her life; instead of being a mere preliminary
to a holy observance which should in truth unite them, it made that
later formality all but trivial. It was the aspiration of her devoutest
hours that this interchange of loving promise might keep its binding
sanctity for ever, that no touch of mutability might co