respect for the world as I have seen it.  For many people in the world I have a great deal, but not for the substance out of which Society has built itself.  One never loses one’s real friends, no matter what one does.  Every circumstance of my life has isolated me from this structure called society, forced me to make my own laws.  I may never be happy, because my capacity for happiness is too great, but in my own case there is no alternative worth considering.  This is the substance of what I have thought since we met, but you are not to speak to me of it again while my mother lives.”

“I do not promise you that—­but this:  that I will do much thinking before I speak again.”

X

But although they parted with formal courtesy, it was several nights before either slept.  Rachael went home to her bed and lay down, because she feared to agitate her mother, but her disposition was to go out and walk the circuit of the Island, and she rose as soon as she dared, and climbed to the highest crest behind the house.  It was cold there, and the wind was keen.  She sat for hours and stared out at Nevis, who was rolling up her mists, indifferent to the torment of mortals.

During the past fortnight she had conceived a certain stern calm, partly in self-defence, due in part to love for her mother.  But since she had left Hamilton, last night, there had been moments when she had felt alone in the Universe with him, exalted to such heights of human passion that she had imagined herself about to become the mother of a new race.  Her genius, which in a later day might have taken the form of mental creation, concentrated in a supreme capacity for idealized human passion, and its blind impulse was a reproduction of itself in another being.

Were she and Hamilton but the victims of a mighty ego roaming the Universe in search of a medium for human expression?  Were they but helpless sacrifices, consummately equipped, that the result of their union might be consummately great?  Who shall affirm or deny?  The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.  We know absolutely nothing.  But we have these facts:  that a century and a half ago, on a tropical island, where, even to common beings, quick and intense love must seem the most natural thing in the world, this man and woman met; that the woman, herself born in unhappy conditions, but beautiful, intellectual, with a character developed far beyond her years and isolated home by the cruel sufferings of an early marriage, reared by a woman whose independence and energy had triumphed over the narrow laws of the Island of her birth, given her courage to snap her fingers at society—­we know that this woman, inevitably remarkable, met and loved a stranger from the North, so generously endowed that he alone of all the active and individual men who surrounded her won her heart; and that the result of their union was one of the stupendous intellects of the world’s history.