f being justified,
when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
delicately perfect. History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
with us to inspire. In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
for offering counsel where Victor for his soul's sake needed it, was
beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.

It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement. A
pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her at
her next sight of Nesta. She had not taken in her front mind the contrast
of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which the guilty
was by a transient ceremony released. Nature could at a push be eloquent
to defend the guilty. Not a word of vindicating eloquence rose up to
clear the innocent. Nothing that she could do; no devotedness, not any
sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy to come, nothing could
remove the shadow from her child. She dreamed of the succour in
eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact spoke over the
population, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard word. But
eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred to Nesta. It
seemed a cruel mystery. How was it permitted by the Merciful Disposer!
. . . . Nataly's intellect and her reverence clashed. They clash to the end
of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as a remote
Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about this or that issue,
instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we will; marking on
us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount to the divine, we and
ours who follow, offspring of body or mind. She was in her error, from
judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals. Chiefly her
error was, to try to be thinking at all amid the fevered tangle of her
sensations.

A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when
her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of
existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal
footing with the world while yet she lived. She hated herself for taking
pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard,
ill-balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not
to be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome
the restorative c