Her first devotion is to her father.  Her one passion of life is to compensate to him all he has lost:  the eyes, once so full of fire, now sightless; the son and brother, who, at the call of an enthusiasm with which their nobler natures refuse to sympathise—­for it was, in the first instance, but the supposed need to save his own soul—­has fled from his nearest duty of life.  To this devotion she consecrates her fair young existence.  For this she dismisses from it all thought of ease or pleasure, and chooses retirement and isolation; gives herself to uncongenial studies and endless labours, and accepts, in uncomplaining sadness, that which to such a nature is hardest of all to bear—­her father’s non-appreciation of all she would be and is to him.  From the first, her life is one of entire self-consecration.  The sphere of its activities expands as years flow on, but the principle is throughout the same.  In the exquisite simplicity, purity, and tenderness of her young love, she is Romola still.  There is no self-isolation included in it.  Side by side with satisfying her own yearning heart, lies the thought that she is thus giving to her father a son to replace him who has forsaken him.  Her first perception of the want of perfect oneness between Tito and herself dawns upon her through no change in him towards herself, but through his less sedulous attendance on her father.  And when at last the conviction is borne in upon her that between him and her, seemingly so closely united, there lies the gulf that parts truth and falsehood, heaven and hell, it is no perceptible withdrawal of his love from her that forces on her this conviction.  It is his falseness and treason to the dead.  Then comes the crisis of her career; her flight from the unendurable burden of that divided life; her meeting with Savonarola; and her being through him brought face to face with the Christian aspect of that deepest of all moral truths,—­the precedence of duty above all else.  Savonarola’s demand might well seem to one such as Romola laying on her a burden too heavy to be borne.  It was not that it called her to return to hardness and pain; she was going forth unshrinking into the unknown with no certainty but that these would find her there; it called her to return to what, with her high ideal of love and life, could not but seem degradation and sin,—­according in the living daily lie that they two, so hopelessly parted, were one.  To any lower nature the appeal would have been addressed in vain.  It prevails with her because it sets before her but the extension and more perfect fulfilment of the life law toward which she has been always aiming, even through the dim light of her all but heathen nurture.