. I saw such in my youth."

Romola went home and sat alone through the sultry hours of that day with
the heavy certainty that her lot was unchanged. She was thrown back
again on the conflict between the demands of an outward law, which she
recognised as a widely-ramifying obligation, and the demands of inner
moral facts which were becoming more and more peremptory. She had drunk
in deeply the spirit of that teaching by which Savonarola had urged her
to return to her place. She felt that the sanctity attached to all
close relations, and, therefore, pre-eminently to the closest, was but
the expression in outward law of that result towards which all human
goodness and nobleness must spontaneously tend; that the light
abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had
ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue.
What else had Tito's crime towards Baldassarre been but that abandonment
working itself out to the most hideous extreme of falsity and
ingratitude?

And the inspiring consciousness breathed into her by Savonarola's
influence that her lot was vitally united with the general lot had
exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion. She was
marching with a great army; she was feeling the stress of a common life.
If victims were needed, and it was uncertain on whom the lot might
fall, she would stand ready to answer to her name. She had stood long;
she had striven hard to fulfil the bond, but she had seen all the
conditions which made the fulfilment possible gradually forsaking her.
The one effect of her marriage-tie seemed to be the stifling
predominance over her of a nature that she despised. All her efforts at
union had only made its impossibility more palpable, and the relation
had become for her simply a degrading servitude. The law was sacred.
Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that
the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain
before Savonarola--the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended,
and where the sacredness of rebellion began. To her, as to him, there
had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on
its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the
face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine lightnings--lightnings
that may yet fall if the warrant has been false.

Before the sun had gone down she had adopted a resolve. She would a