ne--by that, I mean a love with no small element of the
everlasting in it. The woman who can cast such a love from her is not
likely to meet with such another. But with this one I have nothing to
do.

It had been well if he had been left with only a wounded heart, but in
that heart lay wounded pride. He hid it carefully, and the keener in
consequence grew the sensitiveness, almost feminine, which no stranger
could have suspected beneath the manner he wore. Under that bronzed
countenance, with its firm-set mouth and powerful jaw--below that clear
blue eye, and that upright easy carriage, lay a faithful heart haunted
by a sense of wrong: he who is not perfect in forgiveness must be
haunted thus; he only is free whose love for the human is so strong
that he can pardon the individual sin; he alone can pray the prayer,
"Forgive us our trespasses," out of a full heart. Forgiveness is the
only cure of wrong. And hand in hand with Sense-of-injury walks ever
the weak sister-demon Self-pity, so dear, so sweet to many--both of
them the children of Philautos, not of Agape. But there was no hate, no
revenge, in Godfrey, and, I repeat, his weakness he kept concealed. It
must have been in his eyes, but eyes are hard to read. For the rest,
his was a strong poetic nature--a nature which half unconsciously
turned ever toward the best, away from the mean judgments of common
men, and with positive loathing from the ways of worldly women. Never
was peace endangered between his mother and him, except when she
chanced to make use of some evil maxim which she thought experience had
taught her, and the look her son cast upon her stung her to the heart,
making her for a moment feel as if she had sinned what the theologians
call the unpardonable sin. When he rose and walked from the room
without a word, she would feel as if abandoned to her wickedness, and
be miserable until she saw him again. Something like a spring-cleaning
would begin and go on in her for some time after, and her eyes would
every now and then steal toward her judge with a glance of awe and
fearful apology. But, however correct Godfrey might be in his judgment
of the worldly, that judgment was less inspired by the harmonies of the
universe than by the discords that had jarred his being and the
poisonous shocks he had received in the encounter of the noble with the
ignoble. There was yet in him a profound need of redemption into the
love of the truth for the truth's sake. He had