“You prefer that your ideal should sacrifice you?  One enjoys for a season the wide expanse visible from that lofty emotional pinnacle; but the atmosphere is too rarefied, and we gladly descend to the warm, denser air of the plains of common sense selfishness.  If it be lowering your standard to become the wife of a bishop (the youngest ever ordained in his State), clothed with the double distilled odors of sanctity and popularity, then heaven help your standard, which only heaven can fitly house.”

“Since you persist in assuming that so flattering an offer has been made me, I will set this subject at rest, by a final assurance that even were your surmise correct, I could never under any imaginable circumstances marry my cousin, Bishop Douglass.  Although I trust and reverence him beyond all other men, ’I love my cousin cousinly, no more,’ and he is too much absorbed by his holy office and its solemn responsibilities, to waste thought on the frail, sweet, rosy garland of any woman’s love.  Fret yourself no longer in casting matrimonial horoscopes for me.”

The flushed cheeks, and a certain icy curtness in Leo’s tone, warned her companion that she was rashly invading sacred precincts.

“Eight years ago I made the solemn asseveration that I would never marry; and I ran as a raw recruit to swell the army of foolish virgins who lost all the wedding splendors, the hypothetical ’cakes and ale’, for want of the oil of worldly wisdom.  Now I am thirty-three, and my lamp is filled to the brim, and the bridegroom is in sight.  Why not?  Adverse weather, rain, rust and mildew spoiled my beautiful golden harvest ten years ago, but aftermath is better than bare stubble fields, and though you miss the song of the reapers, you escape starvation.  Deny it as we may, we are hopelessly given over to fetichism, and each one of us ties around her stone image some beguiling orthodox label.  Leo, yours is pride, masquerading in the dun garb of ‘religious duty’.  Mine is self-love, pure and simple, the worldly weal of Alma Cutting; but nominally it is dubbed ‘grateful requital of a life of devotion’ in my lover!  You grieve over my heartlessness?  That is the one compensation time brings, when men and women have killed the best in our natures.  Teeth ache fiercely; then the nerve dies, and we have surcease from pain, and find comfort in knowing that the darkening wreck can throb no more.  There was a time when the pangs of Prometheus seemed only pastime to mine, but all things end; and now I get on as comfortably without a heart, as the victims of vivisection—­the frogs, and guinea pigs, and rabbits—­do without their brains.”

“I do indeed grieve over the fatal step you contemplate; I grieve over your unwomanliness in marrying a man whom you do not even pretend to love; and some terrible penalty will avenge the outrage against feminine nature.  Some day your heart will stir in its cold torpor, and then all Dante’s visions of horror, will become your realities, scuurging you down to despair.”