at, had he been able to search out his
own heart with his former acuteness of self-judgment, he would have
found the first germs of inclinations and feelings to which he had been
up till now a stranger. He would have discovered the birth of a new
longing for pleasure, a growing delight in the sensuous side of things;
or rather, he would have become convinced that temptations of this sort,
which had previously been in the main creatures of his own brain,
postulated in obedience to the doctrines and literature in which he had
been bred, had become self-assertive realities; and that what had been
set up only to be triumphantly knocked down had now taken a strong root
of its own, and refused to be displaced by spiritual exercises or
physical mortifications. Had he been able to pursue the analysis yet
further, it may be that, even in these days, he would have found that
the forces of this world were already beginning to personify themselves
for him in the attractive figure of Claudia Territon. As it was,
however, this discovery was yet far from him.

The function of passing a moral judgment on Claudia's conduct at this
juncture is one that the historian respectfully declines. It is easy to
blame fair damsels for recklessness in the use of their dangerous
weapons; and if they take the censure to heart--which is not usually the
case--easy again to charge them with self-consciousness or self-conceit.
We do not know their temptations and may not presume to judge them. And
it may well be thought that Claudia would have been guilty of an
excessive appreciation of herself had her conduct been influenced by the
thought that such a man as Stafford was likely to fall in love with her.
Of the conscious design of attracting him she must be acquitted, for she
acted under the force of a strong attraction exercised by him. Her mind
was not entirely engrossed in the pleasures, and what she imagined to be
the duties, of her station. She had a considerable, if untrained and
erratic, instinct toward religion, and exhibited that leaning toward the
mysterious and visionary which is the common mark of an acute mind that
has not been presented with any methodical course of training worthy of
its abilities. Such a temperament could not fail to be powerfully
influenced by Stafford; and when an obvious and creditable explanation
lies on the surface, it is an ungracious task to probe deeper in the
hope of coming to something less praiseworthy. Claudia