had been alone. It would
be impossible to enumerate all the reasons why she was sure that there
was nobody like him.

She knew that what she felt for him was affection, and she was quite
willing to believe that it was love. He certainly had no rival with her
at that time, and if she hesitated, it was because the thought of
marriage itself was repugnant to her.

In the secondary life of her imagination she was bound by the most
solemn vows, and under the most terrible penalties, to preserve herself
intact from the touch of man. In the dream, it was sacrilege for a man
to love her, and meant death to love him in return. She knew that it was
a dream, but she loved to believe that all the dream was true, and she
was too much accustomed to the thought not to be influenced by it.

There are great actors who become so used to a favourite part that they
go on acting it in real life, and have sometimes gone mad in the end, it
is said, believing themselves really to be the heroes or tyrants they
have represented. Only great second-rate actors "learn" their parts and
attain to a sort of perfection in them by mechanical means. The really
great first-rate artists make themselves a secondary existence by
self-suggestion, and really have two selves, one that thinks and acts
like Othello, or Hamlet, or Louis the Eleventh, the other that goes
through life with the opinions, convictions, and principles of Sir Henry
Irving, of Tommaso Salvini, or of Madame Sarah Bernhardt.

In a higher degree, because she had never learned but one part, and that
one proceeded in some way out of her own intelligence, Cecilia was in
the same state of dual consciousness, and if her waking life was
influenced by her imaginary existence in dreams, her dreams were
probably affected also by her waking life.

"Thou shalt so act, as to be worthy of happiness," said her favourite
philosopher. She could undoubtedly marry Guido, in spite of her
imaginary vows, if she chose to shake off the shadowy bond by an act of
everyday will. Would that be acting so as to deserve to be happy? What
is happiness? The belief that one is happy; nothing else. As Guido's
wife, should she believe that she was happy? Yes, if there were
happiness to be found in marriage. But she was happy already without it,
and would always be so, she was sure. Therefore she would be risking a
certainty for a possibility. "Who leaves the old and takes new, knows
what he leaves, not what he may find"