one man. I cannot get away from
her. She has me fast. I cannot live without her. Then I must bear the
torture that jealousy of her will certainly bring me in silence. I must
conceal it. I must try to kill it. I must make the best of whatever
she will give me, knowing that she can never, with her nature and her
training, be exclusively mine as a good woman might be.' This he said to
himself. This plan of conduct he traced for himself. But he soon
found that he was not strong enough to keep to it. His jealousy was a
devouring fire, and he could not conceal it. Domini, he described to me
minutely the effect of jealousy in a human heart. I had never imagined
what it was, and, when he described it, I felt as if I looked down into
a bottomless pit lined with the flames of hell. By the depth of that pit
I measured the depth of his passion for this woman, and I gained an idea
of what human love--not the best sort of human love, but still genuine,
intense love of some kind--could be. Of this human love I thought at
night, putting it in comparison with the love God's creature can have
for God. And my sense of loneliness increased, and I felt as if I had
always been lonely. Does this seem strange to you? In the love of God
was calm, peace, rest, a lying down of the soul in the Almighty arms. In
the other love described to me was restlessness, agitation, torture, the
soul spinning like an atom driven by winds, the heart devoured as by a
disease, a cancer. On the one hand was a beautiful trust, on the other
a ceaseless agony of doubt and terror. And yet I came to feel as if the
one were unreal in comparison with the other, as if in the one were a
loneliness, in the other fierce companionship. I thought of the Almighty
arms, Domini, and of the arms of a woman, and--Domini, I longed to have
known, if only once, the pressure of a woman's arms about my neck, about
my breast, the touch of a woman's hand upon my heart.

"And of all this I never spoke at confession. I committed the deadly sin
of keeping back at confession all that." He stopped. Then he said, "Till
the end my confessions were incomplete, were false.

"The stranger told me that as his love for this woman grew he found it
impossible to follow the plan he had traced for himself of shutting his
eyes to the sight of other eyes admiring, desiring her, of shutting his
ears to the voices that whispered, 'This it will always be, for others
as well as for you.' He found it impossible