And her character brought it about that the very strength of her love for Wilfrid acted as another impulse to renunciation.  Which had been the stronger motive in her refusal to sacrifice herself—­the preservation of her chaste womanhood, or the inability to give up him she loved?  Could she, at the tribunal of her conscience, affirm that her decision had held no mixture of the less pure?  Nay, had she not known that revolt of self in which she had maintained that the individual love was supreme, that no title of inferiority became it?  She saw now more clearly than then the impossibility of distinguishing those two motives, or of weighing the higher and the lower elements of her love.  One way there was, and one way only, of proving to herself that she had not fallen below the worthiness which purest love demanded, that she had indeed offered to Wilfrid a soul whose life was chastity—­and that must be utterly to renounce love’s earthly reward, and in spirit to be faithful to him while her life lasted.  The pain of such renunciation was twofold, for did she not visit him with equal affliction?  Had she the right to do that?  The question was importunate, and she held it a temptation of her weaker self.  Wilfrid would bear with her.  He was of noble nature, and her mere assurance of a supreme duty would outweigh his personal suffering.  On him lay no obligation of faithfulness to his first love; a man, with the world before him, he would, as was right, find another to share his life.  To think that was no light test of steadfastness in Emily the image of Wilfrid loving and loved by another woman wrung the sinews of her heart.  That she must keep from her mind; that was more than her strength could face and conquer.  It should be enough to love him for ever, without hope, without desire.  Faithfulness would cost her no effort to purify herself in ideal devotion would be her sustenance, her solace.

What of her religion of beauty, the faith which had seen its end in the nourishment of every instinct demanding loveliness within and without?  What of the ideal which saw the crown of life in passion triumphant, which dreaded imperfectness, which allowed the claims of sense equally with those of spirit, both having their indispensable part in the complete existence?  Had it not conspicuously failed where religion should be most efficient?  She understood now the timidity which had ever lurked behind her acceptance of that view of life.  She had never been able entirely to divest herself of the feeling that her exaltation in beauty-worship was a mood born of sunny days, that it would fail amid shocks of misfortune and prove a mockery in the hour of the soul’s dire need.  It shared in the unreality of her life in wealthy houses, amid the luxury which appertained only to fortune’s favourites, which surrounded her only by chance.  She had presumptuously taken to herself the religion of her superiors, of those to whom fate allowed the assurance of peace, of guarded