the grounds she had had for her
second flight. How could she feel the needs of others and not feel,
above all, the needs of the nearest?

But then came reaction against such self-reproach. The memory of her
life with Tito, of the conditions which made their real union
impossible, while their external union imposed a set of false duties on
her which were essentially the concealment and sanctioning of what her
mind revolted from, told her that flight had been her only resource.
All minds, except such as are delivered from doubt by dulness of
sensibility, must be subject to this recurring conflict where the
many-twisted conditions of life have forbidden the fulfilment of a bond.
For in strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of
the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old. Life has
lost its perfection: it has been maimed; and until the wounds are quite
scarred, conscience continually casts backward, doubting glances.

Romola shrank with dread from the renewal of her proximity to Tito, and
yet she was uneasy that she had put herself out of reach of knowing what
was his fate--uneasy that the moment might yet come when he would be in
misery and need her. There was still a thread of pain within her,
testifying to those words of Fra Girolamo, that she could not cease to
be a wife. Could anything utterly cease for her that had once mingled
itself with the current of her heart's blood?

Florence, and all her life there, had come back to her like hunger; her
feelings could not go wandering after the possible and the vague: their
living fibre was fed with the memory of familiar things. And the
thought that she had divided herself from them for ever became more and
more importunate in these hours that were unfilled with action. What if
Fra Girolamo had been wrong? What if the life of Florence was a web of
inconsistencies? Was she, then, something higher, that she should shake
the dust from off her feet, and say, "This world is not good enough for
me"? If she had been really higher, she would not so easily have lost
all her trust.

Her indignant grief for her godfather had no longer complete possession
of her, and her sense of debt to Savonarola was recovering predominance.
Nothing that had come, or was to come, could do away with the fact that
there had been a great inspiration in him which had waked a new life in
her. Who, in all her experience, could demand the same gratitude from