She was returning to Dulwich in her carriage, and until she arrived home her thoughts hankered and gnawed, pestered and terrified her.  Never had she felt so ashamed, so disgusted with herself, and the after taste of the falsehoods she had told came back into her mouth, and her face grew dark in the beautiful summer evening.  Her brows were knit, and she resolved that if the occasion happened again, she would tell Owen the truth.  This was no mock determination; on this point she was quite sure of herself.  Looking round she saw the mean streets of Camberwell.  She saw them for a moment, and then she sank back into her reverie.

She was deceiving Owen, she was deceiving her father, she was deceiving Ulick, she was deceiving Monsignor—­he would not have thought of asking her to sing at the concert if he knew what a life was hers.  Nor would those good women at the convent accept her aid if they knew what kind of woman she was.  And the strange thing was that she did not believe herself to be a bad woman; at the bottom of her heart she loved truth and sincerity.  She wished to have an ideal and to live up to it, yet she was doing the very opposite.  That was what was so strange, that was what she did not understand, that was what made her incomprehensible to herself.  She sighed, and at the bottom of her heart there lay an immense weariness, a weariness of life, of the life she was leading, and she longed for a life that would coincide with her principles, and she felt that if she did not change her life, she would do something desperate.  She might kill herself.

It is true that man is a moral animal, but it is not true that there is but one morality; there are a thousand, the morality of each race is different, the morality of every individual differs.  The origin of each sect is the desire to affirm certain moral ideas which particularly appeal to it; every change of faith is determined by the moral temperament of the individual; we prefer this religion to that religion because our moral ideas are more implicit in these affirmations than in those.

The restriction of sexual intercourse is the moral ideal of Western Europe; it is the one point on which all Christians are agreed; it is the one point on which they all feel alike.  So inherent is the idea of sexual continence in the Western hemisphere that even those whose practice does not coincide with their theory rarely impugn the wisdom of the law which they break; they prefer to plead the weakness of the flesh as their excuse, and it is with reluctance that they admit that without an appeal to conscience it would be impossible to prove that it is wrong for two unmarried people to live together.  It is not perceived that the fact that no material proof can be produced strengthens rather than weakens the position of the moralist.  To do unto others as you would be done unto, to love your neighbour as yourself, are practical moralities which may be derived from