an idea of what human love—­not the best sort of human love, but still genuine, intense love of some kind—­could be.  Of this human love I thought at night, putting it in comparison with the love God’s creature can have for God.  And my sense of loneliness increased, and I felt as if I had always been lonely.  Does this seem strange to you?  In the love of God was calm, peace, rest, a lying down of the soul in the Almighty arms.  In the other love described to me was restlessness, agitation, torture, the soul spinning like an atom driven by winds, the heart devoured as by a disease, a cancer.  On the one hand was a beautiful trust, on the other a ceaseless agony of doubt and terror.  And yet I came to feel as if the one were unreal in comparison with the other, as if in the one were a loneliness, in the other fierce companionship.  I thought of the Almighty arms, Domini, and of the arms of a woman, and—­Domini, I longed to have known, if only once, the pressure of a woman’s arms about my neck, about my breast, the touch of a woman’s hand upon my heart.

“And of all this I never spoke at confession.  I committed the deadly sin of keeping back at confession all that.”  He stopped.  Then he said, “Till the end my confessions were incomplete, were false.

“The stranger told me that as his love for this woman grew he found it impossible to follow the plan he had traced for himself of shutting his eyes to the sight of other eyes admiring, desiring her, of shutting his ears to the voices that whispered, ’This it will always be, for others as well as for you.’  He found it impossible.  His jealousy was too importunate, and he resolved to make any effort to keep her for himself alone.  He knew she had love for him, but he knew that love would not necessarily, or even probably, keep her entirely faithful to him.  She thought too little of passing intrigues.  To her they seemed trifles, meaningless, unimportant.  She told him so, when he spoke his jealousy.  She said, ’I love you.  I do not love these other men.  They are in my life for a moment only.’

“‘And that moment plunges me into hell!’ he said.

“He told her he could not bear it, that it was impossible, that she must belong to him entirely and solely.  He asked her to marry him.  She was surprised, touched.  She understood what a sacrifice such a marriage would be to a man in his position.  He was a man of good birth.  His request, his vehement insistence on it, made her understand his love as she had not understood it before.  Yet she hesitated.  For so long had she been accustomed to a life of freedom, of changing amours, that she hesitated to put her neck under the yoke of matrimony.  She understood thoroughly his character and his aim in marrying her.  She knew that as his wife she must bid an eternal farewell to the life she had known.  And it was a life that had become a habit to her, a life that she was fond of.  For she was enormously vain, and she was a—­she was a very physical