This passage out of a favourite book of sentences had virtue to help her now in putting away the ‘props of self.’  It helped her for the time.  She could not foresee the contest that was commencing for her.

     “Love that shrieks at A mortal wound, and bleeds humanly, what is he
     but A Pagan god, with the passions of A Pagan god?”

“Yes,” thought Georgiana, meditating, “as different from the Christian love as a brute from a man!”

She felt that the revolution of the idea of love in her mind (all that consoled her) was becoming a temptation.  Quick in her impulses, she dismissed it.  “I am like a girl!” she said scornfully.  “Like a woman” would not have flattered her.  Like what did she strive to be?  The picture of another self was before her—­a creature calmly strong, unruffled, and a refuge to her beloved.  It was a steady light through every wind that blew, save when the heart narrowed; and then it waxed feeble, and the life in her was hungry for she knew not what.

Georgiana’s struggle was to make her great passion eat up all the others.  Sure of the intensity and thoroughness of her love for Merthyr, she would forecast for herself tasks in his service impossible save to one sensually dead and therefore spiritually sexless.  “My love is pure,” she would say; as if that were the talisman which rendered it superhuman.  She was under the delusion that lovers’ love was a reprehensible egoism.  Her heart had never had place for it; and thus her nature was unconsummated, and the torment of a haunting insufficiency accompanied her sweetest hours, ready to mislead her in all but very clearest actions.

She saw, or she divined, much of this struggle; but the vision of it was fitful, not consecutive.  It frightened and harassed without illuminating her.  Now, upon Merthyr’s return, she was moved by it just enough to take his hand and say:—­

“We are the same?”

“What can change us?” he replied.

“Or who?” and as she smiled up to him, she was ashamed of her smile.

“Yes, who!” he interjected, by this time quite enlightened.  All subtle feelings are discerned by Welsh eyes when untroubled by any mental agitation.  Brother and sister were Welsh, and I may observe that there is human nature and Welsh nature.

“Forgive me,” she said; “I have been disturbed about you.”

Perceiving that it would be well to save her from any spiritual twists and turns that she might reach what she desired to know, he spoke out fully:  “I have not written to you about Miss Belloni lately.  I think it must be seven or eight days since I had a letter from her—­you shall see it—­looking as if it had been written in the dark.  She gave the address of a London hotel.  I went to her, and her story was that she had come to town to get Mr. Pole’s consent to her marriage with his son; and that when she succeeded in making herself understood by him, the old man fell, smitten with paralysis, crying out that he was ruined, and his children beggars.”