Father Damon understood this, and he went away profoundly grateful for her forbearance of verbal expression as much as for her sympathy.  But he did not suspect that she needed sympathy quite as much as he did, and consequently he did not guess the extent of her self-control.  It would have been an immense relief to have opened her heart to him—­and to whom could she more safely do this than to a priest set apart from all human entanglements?—­and to have asked his advice.  But Edith’s peculiar strength—­or was it the highest womanly instinct?—­lay in her discernment of the truth that in one relation of life no confidences are possible outside of that relation except to its injury, and that to ask interference is pretty sure to seal its failure.  As its highest joys cannot be participated in, so its estrangements cannot be healed by any influence outside of its sacred compact.  To give confidence outside is to destroy the mutual confidence upon which the relation rests, and though interference may patch up livable compromises, the bloom of love and the joy of life are not in them.  Edith knew that if she could not win her own battle, no human aid could win it for her.

And it was all the more difficult because it was vague and indefinite, as the greater part of domestic tragedies are.  For the most part life goes on with external smoothness, and the public always professes surprise when some accident, a suit at law, a sudden death, a contested will, a slip from apparent integrity, or family greed or feminine revenge, turns the light of publicity upon a household, to find how hollow the life has been; in the light of forgotten letters, revealing check-books, servants’ gossip, and long-established habits of aversion or forbearance, how much sordidness and meanness!

Was not everything going on as usual in the Delancy house and in the little world of which it was a part?  If there had been any open neglect or jealousy, any quarrel or rupture, or any scene, these could be described.  These would have an interest to the biographer and perhaps to the public.  But at this period there was nothing of this sort to tell.  There were no scenes.  There were no protests or remonstrances or accusations, nor to the world was there any change in the daily life of these two.

It was more pitiful even than that.  Here was a woman who had set her heart in all the passionate love of a pure ideal, and day by day she felt that the world, the frivolous world, with its low and selfish aims, was too strong for her, and that the stream was wrecking her life because it was bearing Jack away from her.  What could one woman do against the accepted demoralizations of her social life?  To go with them, not to care, to accept Jack’s idle, good-natured, easy philosophy of life and conduct, would not that have insured a peaceful life?  Why shouldn’t she conform and float, and not mind?

To be sure, a wise woman, who has been blessed or cursed with a long experience of life, would have known that such a course could not forever, or for long, secure happiness, and that a man’s love ultimately must rest upon a profound respect for his wife and a belief in her nobility.  Perhaps Edith did not reason in this way.  Probably it was her instinct for what was pure and true-showing, indeed, the quality of her love-that guided her.