This longing for the immortal soul of love seized her like an unquenchable thirst, until it seemed to her that all outward forms of expression—­all embraces all words—­were but dead earthly things until the breath of the spirit had entered in to raise them from mere trivial accidents into eternal symbols.

Then suddenly she understood, for the first time, that she had humiliated herself by going to his rooms, and she felt her cheek burn in remembering a step which she had taken, under the stress of feeling, without an instant’s hesitation.  It seemed to her now, when she looked back upon it, that it would have been better to have lost him forever than to have lowered her pride in the way that she had done—­but before seeing him her pride had been nothing to her, and she realised that if she felt his affection slipping from her again she would be driven to the same or even to greater lengths of self-abasement.

“But I did wrong—­I have lowered myself forever in his eyes,” she thought, “he can never feel the same respect for me again, and because I have lost his respect I have lost also my power to keep him constant to me in his heart.”

With the confession, she was aware that a spiritual battle took place within her, and she thought of her soul, not as one but as multiple—­as consisting of hosts of good and evil angels who warred against one another without ceasing.  And she felt assured that presently the good or the evil host would be vanquished and that henceforth she would belong to the victorious side forever—­not for this life only, but for a thousand lives and an eternal evolution along the course which she herself had chosen.  A passage she had once read in an old book occurred to her, and she recalled that the writer had spoken of God as “the place of the soul.”  If this were so, had she not filled that place which is God with a confusion in which there was only terror and disorder.

“Why has it all happened as it has?” she demanded almost in despair.  “Why did I love him in the beginning?  Why did I humiliate myself in his eyes to-day?” But her motives, which appeared only as impulses, were still shrouded in the obscurity of her ignorance; and the one thing that remained clear to her was that she had struggled breathlessly for the happiness she had not possessed.  Was it this desire for happiness, she asked, which had returned to her now in the form of an avenging fury?

At the corner of Fifth Avenue, while she stopped upon the sidewalk to wait for the stage, she was joined by Mr. Wilberforce, who told her that he had just come from her house.

“I was particularly sorry to miss you,” he added, “because I brought a book of poems I wanted to talk over with you—­the work of a young Irishman with a touch of genius.”

“Yes, yes,” she responded vaguely, without knowing what she said.  Literature appeared to her suddenly as the most uninteresting pursuit upon the earth, and she longed to escape from the presence of Mr. Wilberforce, because she knew that he would weary her by ceaseless allusions to books which she no longer read.