And yet in reality she perfectly understood why it was that, instead of forgetting, memory was becoming more and more poignant, more and more persecuting.  It was because the searching processes of love were going deeper and deeper into her inmost soul.  This good man who loved her, who was going to take her injured life into his keeping, to devote to her all his future, and all the harvest of his upright and hard-working past—­she was going to marry him with a lie between them, so that she could never look him straight in the face, never be certain that, sometime or other, something would not emerge like a drowned face from the dark, and ruin all their happiness.  It had seemed, at the beginning, so easy to keep silence, to tell everything but the one miserable fact that she couldn’t tell!  And now it was getting intolerably hard, just because she knew for the first time what love really meant, with its ardour for self-revelation, for an absolute union with the beloved.  By marrying him without confession, she would not only be wronging him, she would be laying up probable misery for herself—­and him—­through the mere action of her own temperament.

For she knew herself.  Among the girls and women she had been thrown with during the preceding year and a half, there were some moral anarchists, with whose views she had become strikingly familiar.  Why, they said, make so much of these physical facts?  Accept them, and the incidents that spring from them.  Why all this weeping and wailing over supposed shames and disgraces?  The sex-life of the present is making its own new codes.  Who knows what they will ultimately be?  And as for the indelible traces and effects of an act of weakness or passion that the sentimental and goody-goody people talk of, in the majority of cases they don’t exist.  After it, the human being concerned may be just the same as before.

Rachel was quite aware of this modern gospel.  Only she was shut out from adopting it in her own case by an invincible heredity, by the spirit of her father in her, the saintly old preacher, whose uncompromising faith she had witnessed and shared through all her young years.  She might and did protest that the faith was no longer hers.  But it had stamped her.  She could never be wholly rid of its prejudices and repulsions.  What would her father have said to her divorce?—­he with his mystical conception of marriage?  She dreaded to think.  And as to that other fact which weighed on her conscience, she seemed to hear herself pleading—­with tears!—­“Father!—­it wasn’t my will—­it was my weakness!—­Don’t look at me so!”

And now, in addition, there was the pressure upon her of Ellesborough’s own high ideals and religious temper; of the ideals, also, of his family, as he was tenderly and unconsciously revealing them.  And, finally, there was the daily influence of Janet’s neighbourhood—­Janet, so austere for herself, so pitiful for others:  Janet, so like Ellesborough in the unconscious sternness of her moral outlook, so full, besides, of an infinite sorrow for the sinner.