vine charity burns within you, and you
behold the need of your fellow-men by the light of that flame, you will
not call your offering great. You have carried yourself proudly, as one
who held herself not of common blood or of common thoughts; but you have
been as one unborn to the true life of man. What! you say your love for
your father no longer tells you to stay in Florence? Then, since that
tie is snapped, you are without a law, without religion: you are no
better than a beast of the field when she is robbed of her young. If
the yearning of a fleshly love is gone, you are without love, without
obligation. See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life of the
believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and feels the
glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was
made, and beholds the history of the world as the history of a great
redemption in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his own place and
among his own people! If you held that faith, my beloved daughter, you
would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and blindly seeking the
good of a freedom which is lawlessness. You would feel that Florence
was the home of your soul as well as your birthplace, because you would
see the work that was given you to do there. If you forsake your place,
who will fill it? You ought to be in your place now, helping in the
great work by which God will purify Florence, and raise it to be the
guide of the nations. What! the earth is full of iniquity--full of
groans--the light is still struggling with a mighty darkness, and you
say, `I cannot bear my bonds; I will burst them asunder; I will go where
no man claims me'? My daughter, every bond of your life is a debt: the
right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie nowhere else. In
vain will you wander over the earth; you will be wandering for ever away
from the right."

Romola was inwardly struggling with strong forces: that immense personal
influence of Savonarola, which came from the energy of his emotions and
beliefs: and her consciousness, surmounting all prejudice, that his
words implied a higher law than any she had yet obeyed. But the
resisting thoughts were not yet overborne.

"How, then, could Dino be right? He broke ties. He forsook his place."

"That was a special vocation. He was constrained to depart, else he
could not have attained the higher life. It would have been stifled
within him."

"And I