youth attached to wealth and birth might have been seen in her very attacks upon them.  Now all her standards were spiritualised.  She had come to know what happiness and affection are possible in three rooms, or two, on twenty-eight shillings a week; and, on the other hand, her knowledge of Aldous—­a man of stoical and simple habit, thrust, with a student’s tastes, into the position of a great landowner—­had shown her, in the case at least of one member of the rich class, how wealth may be a true moral burden and test, the source of half the difficulties and pains—­of half the nobleness also—­of a man’s life.  Not in mere wealth and poverty, she thought, but in things of quite another order—­things of social sympathy and relation—­alterable at every turn, even under existing conditions, by the human will, lie the real barriers that divide us man from man.

Had they ever really formed a part of historical time, those eight months of their engagement?  Looking back upon them, she saw herself moving about in them like a creature without eyes, worked, blindfold, by a crude inner mechanism that took no account really of impressions from without.  Yet that passionate sympathy with the poor—­that hatred of oppression?  Even these seemed to her to-night the blind, spasmodic efforts of a mind that all through saw nothing—­mistook its own violences and self-wills for eternal right, and was but traitor to what should have been its own first loyalties, in seeking to save and reform.

Was true love now to deliver her from that sympathy, to deaden in her that hatred?  Her whole soul cried out in denial.  By daily life in natural relations with the poor, by a fruitful contact with fact, by the clash of opinion in London, by the influence of a noble friendship, by the education of awakening passion—­what had once been mere tawdry and violent hearsay had passed into a true devotion, a true thirst for social good.  She had ceased to take a system cut and dried from the Venturists, or any one else; she had ceased to think of whole classes of civilised society with abhorrence and contempt; and there had dawned in her that temper which is in truth implied in all the more majestic conceptions of the State—­the temper that regards the main institutions of every great civilisation, whether it be property, or law, or religious custom, as necessarily, in some degree, divine and sacred.  For man has not been their sole artificer!  Throughout there has been working with him “the spark that fires our clay.”

Yes!—­but modification, progress, change, there must be, for us as for our fathers!  Would marriage fetter her?  It was not the least probable that he and she, with their differing temperaments, would think alike in the future, any more than in the past.  She would always be for experiments, for risks, which his critical temper, his larger brain, would of themselves be slow to enter upon.  Yet she knew well enough that in her hands they would