their felicity perfect.  Now, it is too late.  The world knows the truth—­marriage can never whitewash Virginia in society’s eyes—­no future can condone the crime of the past.  He has settled every farthing he has in the world upon her—­no mean fortune—­he loads her with gifts—­he is perpetually thinking of her pleasure and amusement, and yet, for ever, the load of his debt to her weighs down his soul.

And Virginia?  Paul is all in all to her; he is her heart, her soul, her conscience, and yet he cannot shield her from the fate which he has brought upon her.  What must inevitably be the sufferings of a proud and pure-minded woman, who knows herself to be an object of scorn to her sex?  How would a man, naturally honorable and high-minded, feel, if, in some fatal moment, he had been tempted to commit a forgery, or take an unfair advantage at cards, and was afterwards shunned by every man friend; thrust out of every club, banned utterly from the society of his fellows, except those with whom it would revolt him to associate?  This is the only case that can parallel that of a woman who has lost the world for a man’s sake; and men who have a difficulty in realizing how great is the sacrifice they compel or accept from a woman, would do well to consider this.

Virginia suffered many a bitter pang when she showed herself in public with Philip.  She quivered under the open stare, or the look askance of members of her sex; if she showed a brave front, it was that of the Spartan boy!  Philip was particularly fond of the opera and the play; he would not have gone without her; so she accompanied him, and made no demur.  Of course every relation and friend she had in the world shunned her as though she were a leper, which indeed, morally, she was in their eyes.  She loved society; no woman was more calculated to shine in it, and from this she was cut off.  True, they constantly entertained brilliant and clever men, whose conversation and company were very agreeable to her; but, however much a woman may like, may even prefer the society of men, it is a bitter thought to her that she cannot command that of her own sex.  And, though men treated her with even a greater and more delicate courtesy than they would perhaps have shown their own women, Virginia was none the less keenly conscious of the moral ban under which she lay.

She was the daughter of a clergyman, she had been religiously brought up, and she writhed under the terrible consciousness that her life was a sin against her God.  At first she went to church, but everything she heard there sent the iron deeper into her soul; if there were comforting promises to repentant Magdalens, there was nothing but wrath and threatening for those who continued in their sin.  By-and-by she left off going to church.  Philip was a sceptic, most of his friends were the same.  Virginia listened to their talk, and, in time, her faith began to waver; she liked to think they were right, and that the Bible was a string of fables; it lessened her sense of criminality and remorse, but it cut her off forever from the only consolation a woman can know, when her hour of trial comes.  If man could supply the place of God and Saviour now, whither should she fly when he was torn from her or grew weary of her?