e of indissolubleness, had ceased even to see the obligation
of a voluntary pledge: had she not proved that the things to which she
had pledged herself were impossible? The impulse to set herself free
had risen again with overmastering force; yet the freedom could only be
an exchange of calamity. There is no compensation for the woman who
feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a
mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human
blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then for ever passed
her by.

And now Romola's best support under that supreme woman's sorrow had
slipped away from her. The vision of any great purpose, any end of
existence which could ennoble endurance and exalt the common deeds of a
dusty life with divine ardours, was utterly eclipsed for her now by the
sense of a confusion in human things which made all effort a mere
dragging at tangled threads; all fellowship, either for resistance or
advocacy, mere unfairness and exclusiveness. What, after all, was the
man who had represented for her the highest heroism: the heroism not of
hard, self-contained endurance, but of willing, self-offering love?
What was the cause he was struggling for? Romola had lost her trust in
Savonarola, had lost that fervour of admiration which had made her
unmindful of his aberrations, and attentive only to the grand curve of
his orbit. And now that her keen feeling for her godfather had thrown
her into antagonism with the Frate, she saw all the repulsive and
inconsistent details in his teaching with a painful lucidity which
exaggerated their proportions. In the bitterness of her disappointment
she said that his striving after the renovation of the Church and the
world was a striving after a mere name which told no more than the title
of a book: a name that had come to mean practically the measures that
would strengthen his own position in Florence; nay, often questionable
deeds and words, for the sake of saving his influence from suffering by
his own errors. And that political reform which had once made a new
interest in her life seemed now to reduce itself to narrow devices for
the safety of Florence, in contemptible contradiction with the
alternating professions of blind trust in the Divine care.

It was inevitable that she should judge the Frate unfairly on a question
of individual suffering, at which she looked with the eyes of personal
tenderness, and _he_ with the eyes