A foolish train of thought that.  As if he were only a dreamer.  As if it were a dream that had to do with it.  As if his dream had not long ago loved, followed, and embraced a divine reality.  As if it had ever fallen away after that one superb act of reconciliation.

He had done poor Flossie some injustice.  She suffered in his eyes because she came short, not of the dream, but of the reality.  To be placed beside Lucia Harden would have been a severe test for any woman; but for Flossie it was cruelty itself.  He had never subjected her to that, not even in thought; for he felt that the comparison, cruel to one woman, was profanation to the other.  It was only feminine Fate who could be so unkind as to put those two side by side, that he might look well, and measure his love for Flossie by his love for Lucia, seeing it too as it was.  Maddox had not been far wrong there.  For anything spiritual in that emotion, he might as well have gone back to Poppy Grace.  Better; since between him and Flossie that gross tie, once formed, could not be broken.  Better; since there had at least been no hypocrisy in his relations with the joyous Poppy.  Better anything than this baseness skulking under the superstition of morality.  If a man has no other feeling for an innocent woman than that, better that a mill-stone should be hanged about his neck than that he should offend by marrying her.

And yet there had been something finer and purer in this later love than in the first infatuation of his youth.  On that day, seven days ago, the last day it had to live, he had been touched by something more sacred, more immortal than desire.  There had been no illusion in the poetry that clothed the figure of a woman standing in an empty room, dearer to her than the bridal chamber; a woman whose face grew soft as her instinct outran the bridal terror and the bridal joy, divining beyond love the end that sanctifies it.

But beyond all that again he could see that, whereas the love of all other women had torn him asunder, the love of Lucia made him whole.  Poppy had drawn him by his senses; Flossie by his senses and his heart; Lucia held him by his senses, his heart, his intellect, his will, by his spirit, by his genius, by the whole man.  Long after his senses had renounced their part in her, the rest of him would cling to her, satisfied and appeased.  And but for Flossie it would have been so even now.  Though his senses had rest in Lucia’s presence, their longing for her was reawakened, not only by the thought of his approaching marriage, but by the memory of that one moment when he had realized the mystery of it, the moment of poor Flossie’s transfiguration, when he had seen through the thick material veil, deep into the spiritual heart of love.  With Lucia the veil had been transparent from the first.  It was not with her as it was with those women who must wait for the hour of motherhood to glorify them.  Of those two years of his betrothal what was there that he would care to keep?  Only one immortal moment, that yet knew of the mortality before and after it.  While of the last seven days Lucia had made a whole heavenly procession of ascending hours, every moment winged with the immortal fire.  Flying moments; but flame touched flame in flying, and they became one life.