of her life had aided her in attaining independence of ignoble dictation.  Her views were often strangely at variance with those of the social tribunal which sits in judgment on virtue and vice.  To her, for instance, the woman who sells herself with ecclesiastical sanction differed only in degree of impurity from her whose track is under the street-lamps.  She was not censorious, she was not self-righteous; she spoke to no one of the convictions that ruled her, and to herself held them a mystery of holiness, a revelation of high things vouchsafed she knew not whence nor how.  Suppose her to have been heart-free at this juncture of her fate, think you she would have found it a whit less impossible to save her father by becoming Dagworthy’s wife.  There was in her thought but one parallel to this dire choice which lay before her:  it was the means offered to Isabel of rescuing her brother Claudio.  That passion of purity which fired Isabel’s speech was the breath of Emily’s life.  She knew well that many, and women too, would spare no condemnation of what they would call her heartless selfishness; she knew that the paltriest considerations of worldly estate are deemed sufficient to exact from a woman the sacrifice now demanded of her.  That was no law to Emily.  The moral sense which her own nature had developed must here alone control her.  Purity, as she understood it—­the immaculate beauty of the soul—­was her religion:  if other women would die rather than deny the object of their worship, to her the ideal of chastity was worth no less perfect a zeal.  Far removed from the world which theorises, she presented in her character a solution of the difficulties entertained by those who doubtingly seek a substitute for the old religious sanctions.  Her motives had the simplicity of elemental faith; they were indeed but the primary instincts of womanhood exalted to a rare perfection and reflected in a consciousness of exceeding lucidity.

The awakening of love in such a nature as this was, as it were, the admission to a supreme sacrament.  Here was the final sanction of the creed that had grown from within.  In the plighting of her troth to Wilfrid Athel, Emily had, as she herself saw it, performed the most solemn and sacred act of her life; instead of being a mere preliminary to a holy observance which should in truth unite them, it made that later formality all but trivial.  It was the aspiration of her devoutest hours that this interchange of loving promise might keep its binding sanctity for ever, that no touch of mutability might come upon her heart till the last coldness stayed its heating.  A second love appeared to her self-contradicted; to transfer to another those thoughts which had wedded her soul to Wilfrid’s would not merely be sin, it was an impossibility.  Did he ever cease to cherish her—­a thought at which she smiled in her proud confidence—­that could in nothing affect her love for him, which was not otherwise to be expressed than as the sum of her consciousness....