an being to be in a full experiment of worldliness. Who is the judge?
But we, I say, who loved her, and knew so well the noble possibilities
of her royal nature under circumstances favorable to its development,
felt more and more her departure from her own ideals. Her life in its
spreading prosperity seemed more and more shallow. I do not say she was
heartless, I do not say she was uncharitable, I do not say that in all
the externals of worldly and religious observance she was wanting; I do
not say that the more she was assimilated to the serenely worldly nature
of her husband she did not love him, or that she was unlovely in the
worldliness that ingulfed her and bore her onward. I do not know that
there is anything singular in her history. But the pain of it to us was
in the certainty--and it seemed so near--that in the decay of her higher
life, in the hardening process of a material existence, in the transfer
of all her interests to the trivial and sensuous gratifications--time,
mind, heart, ambition, all fixed on them--we should never regain our
Margaret. What I saw in a vision of her future was a dead soul--a
beautiful woman in all the success of envied prosperity, with a dead
soul.

XXII

It is difficult not to convey a false impression of Margaret at this
time. Habits, manners, outward conduct--nay, the superficial kindliness
in human intercourse, the exterior graceful qualities, may all remain
when the character has subtly changed, when the real aims have changed,
when the ideals are lowered. The fair exterior may be only a shell.
I can imagine the heart retaining much tenderness and sympathy with
suffering when the soul itself has ceased to struggle for the
higher life, when the mind has lost, in regard to life, the final
discrimination of what is right and wrong.

Perhaps it is fairer to Margaret to consider the general opinion of the
world regarding her. No doubt, if we had now known her for the first
time, we should have admired her exceedingly, and probably have
accounted her thrice happy in filling so well her brilliant position.
That her loss of interest in things intellectual, in a wide range of
topics of human welfare, which is in the individual soul a sign of
warmth and growth, made her less companionable to some is true, but her
very absorption in the life of her world made her much more attractive
to others. I well remember a dinner one day at the Hendersons', when Mr.
Morgan and I happened t