larger
view, whence the whole of the battle-line lay disclosed.

At other and more poignant moments he saw her as waving him bravely on
while he steamed out through towering seas to safety. The impression was
that of smiling at her destiny. Had she fixed upon it? and did she
linger now only that she might inspire him in his charge? She was
capable, he knew, of taking calmly the irrevocable step, of accepting the
decree as she read it. The thought tortured, the desire to save her from
herself obsessed him; with true clairvoyance she had divined him aright
when she had said that he wished her to have faith in him for her own
sake. Could he save her in spite of herself? and how? He could not see
her, except by chance. Was she waiting until he should have crossed the
bar before she should pay some inexorable penalty of which he knew
nothing?

Thus he speculated, suffered, was at once cast down and lifted up by the
thought of her. To him, at least, she was one of those rare and
dauntless women, the red stars of history, by whom the Dantes and
Leonardos are fired to express the inexpressible, and common clay is
fused and made mad: one of those women who, the more they reveal, become
the more inscrutable. Divinely inarticulate, he called her; arousing the
passion of the man, yet stirring the sublimer efforts of the god.

What her feelings toward him, whether she loved him as a woman loves a
man he could not say, no man being a judge in the supreme instance. She
beheld him emancipated, perhaps, from what she might have called the
fetters of an orthodoxy for which she felt an instinctive antagonism; but
whether, though proclaiming himself free, the fact of his continuation in
the ministry would not of itself set up in her a reaction, he was unable
to predict. Her antipathy to forms, he saw, was inherent. Her interest
--her fascinated absorption, it might be called--in his struggle was
spiritual, indeed, but it also had mixed in it the individualistic zeal
of the nonconformist. She resented the trammels of society; though she
suffered from her efforts to transcend them. The course he had
determined upon appeared to her as a rebellion not only against a
cut-and-dried state of mind, but also against vested privilege. Yet she
had in her, as she confessed, the craving for what privilege brings in
the way of harmonious surroundings. He loved her for her contradictions.

Thus he was utterly unable to see what the future held for him