and not at the
traditions of things. He is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the
gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our
regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of
tawdry tinsel.

Yet even here he has not struck all truth. It is the most improbable
thing in the world that any woman should have built up such a wall
around herself as is represented here. It is morally impossible that
such a woman as Hannah Thurston should have done it. It is simply
unnatural. It might, perhaps, happen, just as a woman might happen to
have been born with five fingers on each hand. But it is not with freaks
of Nature, it is with Nature, that we have to deal. Girls may please
themselves with fine-sounding phrases about equal powers and equal
rights in marriage, but they generally vanish with the first approach of
a living affection. No idea of independence or equality ever, we dare
affirm, came between a great nature and its great love. No woman of
exalted aims and large capacities, it may be safely said, will ever be
held back from love, or even from marriage, by any scruples as to her
relative standing. The stumbling-block in the way of such a woman as
Hannah Thurston would not be a dread of the "submission of love," but
rather of a submission without love, a submission of mere contiguity to
somewhat hard, false, coarse, unjust, naming itself with a name to which
it had no title. If she trusted her lover thoroughly, she would intrust
all risks to love. She would know with her head and feel with her heart,
that, with the chivalry, the intensity, the reverence, the elevation of
such a sentiment as she imagined, there could be neither bondage nor
freedom, neither mine nor thine, but a oneness that would bring all
relations into harmony with itself. The very essence of love is
humility, and at the same time its glory is that it abolishes all laws,
all rights, all powers, and is to itself alone law, right, and power. By
the completeness of self-abnegation may the footsteps of love be traced.
This partially the author recognizes, choosing it for the conclusion of
the whole matter, but erring in that he makes it come with resistance
and reluctance, the conquest of love, instead of spontaneously and
unconsciously, its necessary concomitant.

In the hero of the story and his relations to the heroine, with
occasional questionable traits, we find often a generosity, delicacy,
and devot