What comfort there was in it we had in knowing that she was a favorite in the society of which we read such glowing descriptions, and that no one else bore its honors more winningly.  It was not an easy life, with all its exactions and incessant movement.  It demanded more physical strength than most women possess, and we were not surprised to hear from time to time that she was delicate, and that she went through her season with feverish excitement.  But she chose it; it had become necessary to her.  Can women stop in such a career, even if they wish to stop?

Yes, she chose it.  I, for one, never begrudged her any pleasure she had in life, and I do not know but she was as happy as it is possible for human being to be in a full experiment of worldliness.  Who is the judge?  But we, I say, who loved her, and knew so well the noble possibilities of her royal nature under circumstances favorable to its development, felt more and more her departure from her own ideals.  Her life in its spreading prosperity seemed more and more shallow.  I do not say she was heartless, I do not say she was uncharitable, I do not say that in all the externals of worldly and religious observance she was wanting; I do not say that the more she was assimilated to the serenely worldly nature of her husband she did not love him, or that she was unlovely in the worldliness that ingulfed her and bore her onward.  I do not know that there is anything singular in her history.  But the pain of it to us was in the certainty—­and it seemed so near—­that in the decay of her higher life, in the hardening process of a material existence, in the transfer of all her interests to the trivial and sensuous gratifications—­time, mind, heart, ambition, all fixed on them—­we should never regain our Margaret.  What I saw in a vision of her future was a dead soul—­a beautiful woman in all the success of envied prosperity, with a dead soul.

XXII

It is difficult not to convey a false impression of Margaret at this time.  Habits, manners, outward conduct—­nay, the superficial kindliness in human intercourse, the exterior graceful qualities, may all remain when the character has subtly changed, when the real aims have changed, when the ideals are lowered.  The fair exterior may be only a shell.  I can imagine the heart retaining much tenderness and sympathy with suffering when the soul itself has ceased to struggle for the higher life, when the mind has lost, in regard to life, the final discrimination of what is right and wrong.

Perhaps it is fairer to Margaret to consider the general opinion of the world regarding her.  No doubt, if we had now known her for the first time, we should have admired her exceedingly, and probably have accounted her thrice happy in filling so well her brilliant position.  That her loss of interest in things intellectual, in a wide range of topics of human welfare, which is in the individual soul a sign of warmth and growth,