ng counsel where Victor for his soul's sake needed it, was
beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.

It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement.
A pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her
at her next sight of Nesta. She had not taken in her front mind the
contrast of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which
the guilty was by a transient ceremony released. Nature could at a push
be eloquent to defend the guilty. Not a word of vindicating eloquence
rose up to clear the innocent. Nothing that she could do; no
devotedness, not any sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy
to come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child. She dreamed
of the succour in eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a
fact spoke over the population, with a relentless rolling out of its one
hard word. But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred
to Nesta. It seemed a cruel mystery. How was it permitted by the
Merciful Disposer! .... Nataly's intellect and her reverence clashed.
They clash to the end of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of
Life as a remote Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about
this or that issue, instead of being beside us, within us, our breath,
if we will; marking on us where at each step we sink to the animal,
mount to the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of body or mind.
She was in her error, from judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate
of individuals. Chiefly her error was, to try to be thinking at all amid
the fevered tangle of her sensations.

A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when
her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of
existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal
footing with the world while yet she lived. She hated herself for
taking pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard,
ill-balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as
not to be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to
welcome the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person had a
greater than common need of the protection.

CHAPTER XVII. CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS

That Mausoleum at Dreux may touch to lift us. History, pleads for the
pride of