ighteousness, and in evil meant inexorably a re-beginning in
evil. That was Fate, because it was also immutable Justice. Man
possessed the Divine gift of free will to use or abuse as he would, so
far as his own life-conduct was concerned; but there was no evasion of
the adamantine law of the survival and progress of the fittest, which,
in the course of ages, infallibly proved to be the best. This, in a
word, was why "some are born to honour and some to dishonour."

Yet she had still to fathom an even subtler mystery than this: the
mystery of sexual love. Why should one man and one woman, out of all the
teeming millions of humanity, be irresistibly attracted to each other by
a force which none can analyse or define? Why should a woman, confronted
with the choice between two men, one of whom possesses every apparent
advantage over the other, yet feel her heart go out to that other, and
impel her to follow him, even to the leaving of father and mother and
home, and all else that has been dear to her? Why in the soul of every
true man and woman is Love, when it comes, made Lord of all, and all in
all? It is because Love is co-eternal with Life, and these two have
loved, perchance wedded, many times before in other lives which they
have lived together, and, with the succession of these lives, their love
has grown stronger and purer, until "falling in love" is merely a
recognition of lovers; unconscious, no doubt, to those who have not
progressed far enough in wisdom, but none the less necessary and
inevitable for that.[1]

Is it not from ignorance of this truth, or wilful denial of this law,
that all the miseries of mismarriage come forth? Again the woman has
the choice. She obeys the bidding of her own lust of wealth and comfort
and social power, or she submits to the pressure of family influence, or
the stress of poverty, and crushes--or thinks she does--the ages-old
love out of her heart and marries the man she does not love, never has
loved, and never can. She has defied the eternal Law of Selection. She
has desecrated the sanctity of an immortal soul, and she has defiled the
temple of her body. She has sold herself for a price in the
market-place, and has become a prostitute endowed by law with a
conventional respectability, and for this crime she pays the penalty of
unsated heart-hunger. Instead of the fruits of Eden distilling their
sweet juices into her blood, the apples of Gomorrah turn perpetually to
ashes in her