for sentimental languishment.  He made it a point of honour to seek no female companionship which could imperil his faith.  Unfortunately, this avoidance of the society which would soon have made him a happy renegade, was but too easy.  Marcella and he practically encouraged each other in a life of isolation, though to both of them such an existence was anything but congenial.  Their difficulties were of the same nature as those which had always beset Godwin Peak; they had no relatives with whom they cared to associate, and none of the domestic friends who, in the progress of time, establish and extend a sphere of genuine intimacy.

Most people who are capable of independent thought rapidly outgrow the stage when compromise is abhorred; they accept, at first reluctantly, but ere long with satisfaction, that code of polite intercourse which, as Steele says, is ’an expedient to make fools and wise men equal’.  It was Marcella’s ill-fate that she could neither learn tolerance nor persuade herself to affect it.  The emancipated woman has fewer opportunities of relieving her mind than a man in corresponding position; if her temper be aggressive she must renounce general society, and, if not content to live alone, ally herself with some group of declared militants.  By correspondence, or otherwise, Marcella might have brought herself into connection with women of a sympathetic type, but this effort she had never made.  And chiefly because of her acquaintance with Godwin Peak.  In him she concentrated her interests; he was the man to whom her heart went forth with every kind of fervour.  So long as there remained a hope of moving him to reciprocal feeling she did not care to go in search of female companions.  Year after year she sustained herself in solitude by this faint hope.  She had lost sight of the two or three schoolfellows who, though not so zealous as herself, would have welcomed her as an interesting acquaintance; and the only woman who assiduously sought her was Mrs. Morton, the wife of one of Christian’s friends, a good-natured but silly person bent on making known that she followed the ‘higher law’.

Godwin’s disappearance sank her in profound melancholy.  Through the black weeks of January and February she scarcely left the house, and on the plea of illness refused to see any one but her brother.  Between Christian and her there was no avowed confidence, but each knew the other’s secret; their mutual affection never spoke itself in words, yet none the less it was indispensable to their lives.  Deprived of his sister’s company, Christian must have yielded to the vice which had already too strong a hold upon him, and have become a maudlin drunkard.  Left to herself, Marcella had but slender support against a grim temptation already beckoning her in nights of sleeplessness.  Of the two, her nature was the more tragic.  Circumstances aiding, Christian might still forget his melancholy, abandon the whisky bottle, and pass a lifetime of amiable uxoriousness, varied with scientific enthusiasm.  But for Marcella, frustrate in the desire with which every impulse of her being had identified itself, what future could be imagined?