eart that the girl agonised and by comparison to the
torture there, the monster was benign.

Margaret was nineteen, which is a very mature age; perhaps the most
mature, since all girlhood lies behind it. Beyond are the
pharmacop[oe]ias of time and, fortune favouring, the sofas of
philosophy. But these sofas, even when within reach, are not adapted to
everybody. To the young, they are detestable. Reposefully they admonish
that nothing is important. They whisper patience to the impatient. To
hope, they say, "Be still"; to desire, "Be quiet"; to wisdom, "Be
foolish."

Conversation of that kind is very irritating, when you have heard it,
which Margaret never had. She was otherwise ignorant. She did not know
that a sage wrote a book in praise of folly. But she acted as though she
knew it by heart. She believed, as many of us do believe, that love
confers the right to run a fence around the happy mortals for whom we
care. It is a very astounding belief. Margaret, who believed in many
wonderful things, believed in that and, being credulous, believed also
that her betrothed had crawled under the fence and into what mire! It
polluted her, soiled her thoughts, followed and smeared her in the
secret chambers of her being. Any cross is heavy. This cross was
degrading.

In her darkened room, on her bed of pain, she had shrunk from it. Her
forehead was a coronet of fire. That was nothing. A greater pain
suppresses a lesser one. The burn of her soul was a moxa to the burn of
the flesh.

The cross, at first, seemed to her more than she could bear. She tried
to put it from her. Failing in that, she tried to endure it. But there
are times and occasions when resignation in its self-effacement
resembles suicide. She tried to resign herself, but she could not, her
young heart rebelled.

In that rebellion, evil came, peered at her, sat at her side, pulled at
her sleeve, sprang at her. The evil was hatred for this man who had
taken her love and despoiled it. She clasped it to her. It bruised but
it comforted. It dulled both the flame in her forehead and the shame in
her soul. Then as suddenly she began to cry.

Philosophy she lacked, but theosophy, which is a pansophy, she
possessed--when she did not need it. Now, when she needed it most, it
was empty as the noise in the street. Even otherwise it could not have
changed the unchangeable course of events.

There are sins that are scarlet. There are others, far worse, that are
drab. Me