oral death falls on it; and any sin looks
sweet that takes it nearer to its goal. It is a passion that generates
at once all the loftiest and all the vilest things, which between them
ennoble and corrupt the world--even as heat generates at once the
harvest and the maggot, the purpling vine and the lice that devour it.
It is a passion without which the world would decay in darkness, as it
would do without heat, yet to which, as to heat, all its filthiest
corruption is due.

* * *

A woman's fair repute is like a blue harebell--a touch can wither it.

* * *

Viva had gained the "great world;" and because she had gained it all the
old things of her lost past grew unalterably sweet to her now that they
no longer could be called hers. The brown, kind, homely, tender face of
grand'mere; the gambols of white and frolicsome Bebe; the woods where,
with every spring, she had filled her arms with sheaves of delicate
primroses; the quaint little room with its strings of melons and sweet
herbs, its glittering brass and pewter, its wood-fire with the soup-pot
simmering above the flame; the glad free days in the vineyard and on
the river, with the winds blowing fragrance from over the clover and
flax, and the acacias and lindens; nay, even the old, quiet, sleepy
hours within the convent-walls, lying on the lush unshaven grass, while
the drowsy bells rang to vespers or compline,--all became suddenly
precious and dear to her when once she knew that they had drifted away
from her for evermore.

* * *

Then he bent his head, letting her desire be his law; and that music,
which had given its hymn for the vintage-feast of the Loire, and which
had brought back the steps of the suicide from the river-brink in the
darkness of the Paris night, which sovereigns could not command and
which held peasants entranced by its spell, thrilled through the
stillness of the chamber.

Human in its sadness, more than human in its eloquence, now melancholy
as the Miserere that sighs through the gloom of a cathedral at midnight,
now rich as the glory of the afterglow in Egypt, a poem beyond words, a
prayer grand as that which seems to breathe from the hush of mountain
solitudes when the eternal snows are lighted by the rising of the
sun--the melody of the violin filled the silence of the closing day.

The melancholy, ever latent in the vivid natures of men of genius, is
betrayed and finds voic