f a
respectable Christian home. Since those days the gravest reviews and
newspapers have dealt with such matters in language far more plain and
obtrusively crude than mine, and often displaying a much more restricted
sense of the ultimate problems connected with them. Certain critics,
indeed--among whom were many Catholic priests, with the experience of
the confessional to guide them--took a very different line, and welcomed
the book as a serious and valuable contribution to the psychology of
spiritual aspiration as dependent on supernatural faith.

Put briefly, the story of the novel is this. The heroine, who is young,
but not in her first girlhood, has in her aspect and her natural
disposition everything that is akin to the mystical aspirations of the
saint; but, more or less desolated by the diffused skepticism of the
day, she has been robbed of innocence by a man, an old family friend,
and has never been at peace with herself or wholly escaped from his
sinister power since. The hero, who meets her by accident and with whom
she is led into a half-reluctant friendship, has at first no suspicion
of the actual facts of her history, but believes her troubles, at which
she vaguely hints, to be due merely to the loss of religious beliefs
which were once her guide and consolation. He accordingly does his best,
though deprived of faith himself, to effect in her what Plato calls "a
turning round of the soul," and hopes that he may achieve in the process
his own conversion also. For aid in his perplexities he betakes himself
to a Catholic priest, once a well-known man of the world, and calls her
attention to the immortal passage in St. Augustine, beginning, "If to
any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth and
air and heaven." But he feels as though he were the blind endeavoring to
lead the blind, and the end comes at last in the garden of a
Mediterranean villa, behind whose lighted windows a fancy ball is in
progress. The hero, whose dress for the occasion is that of a Spanish
peddler, encounters the seducer in one of the shadowy walks and is shot
dead by the latter, who believes that his life is being threatened by
some genuine desperado; and the heroine, draped in white, like a Greek
goddess of purity, witnesses this sudden event, is overcome by the
shock, and dies of heart failure on a marble bench close by.

One of the stoutest defenders of this book was Lord Houghton, who, in
writing to me with