Oh! but passion doesn’t reason like this.  Indeed, O passionate reader!  Is passion, then, merely a wild beast, a savage, a blind fire?  Must it forfeit its fine name if it remembers mercy or owns duty?  Is it any less passion because it refuses sometimes to glut itself, and dares to go hungry all its days instead; any less passion because it chooses to burn up its own heart in an agony of its own consuming fire?

Mere violence is not a strength but a weakness in passion, and sometimes there is more passion in patience than in anything else in the world.  A passion that knows not pity is merely a daemonic possession, and should be taken to the madhouse.

I confess that there is nothing in the world more amazing to me than the easy brutality with which one hears of some men doing what is called “breaking off their engagements.”  Only a new face has to show itself, and the old face at once disappears with a blow and a wail.

Murder, of course, is one way out of many difficult situations, and the worst kinds of murder are by no means capital offences.  It is true that all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny’s and Theophil’s, but many are.  For a man wilfully to break an engagement means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all that made her woman stabbed to the quick of life.

Yet no one who knows anything of women can have failed to remark that women themselves are even more brutal in this matter.  Nothing could exceed the executioner-like promptitude with which a woman will despatch a man for whom she has ceased to care.  But in her case there is to be urged that, though fundamentally love is of equal importance to man and woman, it does not so often mean the absolute saving or wrecking of a man’s life as it does a woman’s.  It is not a disgrace to a man to be jilted; it is to a woman.  For a woman to be jilted is for her to have failed,—­as a woman; and for a woman to have failed as a woman is for her to value no other success.

All this to maintain, in spite of the reader, that Londonderry is no milksop because he is not going to jilt—­that is, murder—­poor little Jenny, throw up New Zion, and seek his new love on the wild winds.  But the agony of it none the less!  O Jenny!  Jenny! sweet and true and good and dear as ever,—­if only you would just take a sudden fancy for someone else!

Meanwhile the months were going by, and the day drawing nearer when, for a brief moment of fire, the orbits of those two separated lives were to touch once more.

What of Isabel during these months?  The woman whom God had created for Theophilus Londonderry did not forget her promise to write to the woman whom Theophilus Londonderry had created in his own image.  Wonderful letters, of course!  Why don’t women publish volumes of their letters, as men collect their scattered essays?  There is no writing in the world more immediately, conqueringly personal than a really clever woman’s letters; and they are not always compromising.