pulsing around us, I tried to take her in my arms, to bring her lips to mine, she resisted me with an energy of will and body that I could not overcome, I dared not overcome.  She acknowledged her love for me, she permitted me to come to her, she had the air of yielding but never yielded.  Why, then, did she allow the words of love to pass? and how draw the line between caresses?  I was maddened and disheartened by that elusive resistance in her—­apparently so frail a thing!—­that neither argument nor importunity could break down.  Was there something lacking in me? or was it that I feared to mar or destroy the love she had.  This, surely, had not been the fashion of other loves, called unlawful, the classic instances celebrated by the poets of all ages rose to mock me.

“Incurably romantic,” she had called me, in calmer moments, when I was able to discuss our affair objectively.  And once she declared that I had no sense of tragedy.  We read “Macbeth” together, I remember, one rainy Sunday.  The modern world, which was our generation, would seem to be cut off from all that preceded it as with a descending knife.  It was precisely from “the sense of tragedy” that we had been emancipated:  from the “agonized conscience,” I should undoubtedly have said, had I been acquainted then with Mr. Santayana’s later phrase.  Conscience—­the old kind of conscience,—­and nothing inherent in the deeds themselves, made the tragedy; conscience was superstition, the fear of the wrath of the gods:  conscience was the wrath of the gods.  Eliminate it, and behold! there were no consequences.  The gods themselves, that kind of gods, became as extinct as the deities of the Druids, the Greek fates, the terrible figures of German mythology.  Yes, and as the God of Christian orthodoxy.

Had any dire calamities overtaken the modern Macbeths, of whose personal lives we happened to know something?  Had not these great ones broken with impunity all the laws of traditional morality?  They ground the faces of the poor, played golf and went to church with serene minds, untroubled by criticism; they appropriated, quite freely, other men’s money, and some of them other men’s wives, and yet they were not haggard with remorse.  The gods remained silent.  Christian ministers regarded these modern transgressors of ancient laws benignly and accepted their contributions.  Here, indeed, were the supermen of the mad German prophet and philosopher come to life, refuting all classic tragedy.  It is true that some of these supermen were occasionally swept away by disease, which in ancient days would have been regarded as a retributive scourge, but was in fact nothing but the logical working of the laws of hygiene, the result of overwork.  Such, though stated more crudely, were my contentions when desire did not cloud my brain and make me incoherent.  And I did not fail to remind Nancy, constantly, that this was the path on which her feet had been set; that to waver now was to perish.  She smiled, yet she showed concern.