ever.
She put her thumb and her forefinger to her betrothal ring; but they
rested there, without drawing it off. Romola's mind had been rushing
with an impetuous current towards this act, for which she was preparing:
the act of quitting a husband who had disappointed all her trust, the
act of breaking an outward tie that no longer represented the inward
bond of love. But that force of outward symbols by which our active
life is knit together so as to make an inexorable external identity for
us, not to be shaken by our wavering consciousness, gave a strange
effect to this simple movement towards taking off her ring--a movement
which was but a small sequence of her energetic resolution. It brought
a vague but arresting sense that she was somehow violently rending her
life in two: a presentiment that the strong impulse which had seemed to
exclude doubt and make her path clear might after all be blindness, and
that there was something in human bonds which must prevent them from
being broken with the breaking of illusions.

If that beloved Tito who had placed the betrothal ring on her finger was
not in any valid sense the same Tito whom she had ceased to love, why
should she return to him the sign of their union, and not rather retain
it as a memorial? And this act, which came as a palpable demonstration
of her own and his identity, had a power unexplained to herself, of
shaking Romola. It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live,
that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born
into sound. But there was a passionate voice speaking within her that
presently nullified all such muffled murmurs.

"It cannot be! I cannot be subject to him. He is false. I shrink from
him. I despise him!"

She snatched the ring from her finger and laid it on the table against
the pen with which she meant to write. Again she felt that there could
be no law for her but the law of her affections. That tenderness and
keen fellow-feeling for the near and the loved which are the main
outgrowth of the affections, had made the religion of her life: they had
made her patient in spite of natural impetuosity: they would have
sufficed to make her heroic. But now all that strength was gone, or,
rather, it was converted into the strength of repulsion. She had
recoiled from Tito in proportion to the energy of that young belief and
love which he had disappointed, of that lifelong devotion to her father
against whic