into eternal symbols.

Then suddenly she understood, for the first time, that she had
humiliated herself by going to his rooms, and she felt her cheek burn in
remembering a step which she had taken, under the stress of feeling,
without an instant's hesitation. It seemed to her now, when she looked
back upon it, that it would have been better to have lost him forever
than to have lowered her pride in the way that she had done--but before
seeing him her pride had been nothing to her, and she realised that if
she felt his affection slipping from her again she would be driven to
the same or even to greater lengths of self-abasement.

"But I did wrong--I have lowered myself forever in his eyes," she
thought, "he can never feel the same respect for me again, and because I
have lost his respect I have lost also my power to keep him constant to
me in his heart."

With the confession, she was aware that a spiritual battle took place
within her, and she thought of her soul, not as one but as multiple--as
consisting of hosts of good and evil angels who warred against one
another without ceasing. And she felt assured that presently the good or
the evil host would be vanquished and that henceforth she would belong
to the victorious side forever--not for this life only, but for a
thousand lives and an eternal evolution along the course which she
herself had chosen. A passage she had once read in an old book occurred
to her, and she recalled that the writer had spoken of God as "the place
of the soul." If this were so, had she not filled that place which is
God with a confusion in which there was only terror and disorder.

"Why has it all happened as it has?" she demanded almost in despair.
"Why did I love him in the beginning? Why did I humiliate myself in his
eyes to-day?" But her motives, which appeared only as impulses, were
still shrouded in the obscurity of her ignorance; and the one thing that
remained clear to her was that she had struggled breathlessly for the
happiness she had not possessed. Was it this desire for happiness, she
asked, which had returned to her now in the form of an avenging fury?

At the corner of Fifth Avenue, while she stopped upon the sidewalk to
wait for the stage, she was joined by Mr. Wilberforce, who told her that
he had just come from her house.

"I was particularly sorry to miss you," he added, "because I brought a
book of poems I wanted to talk over with you--the work of a young
Irishman wit