ak down. Was there something lacking in
me? or was it that I feared to mar or destroy the love she had. This,
surely, had not been the fashion of other loves, called unlawful, the
classic instances celebrated by the poets of all ages rose to mock me.

"Incurably romantic," she had called me, in calmer moments, when I was
able to discuss our affair objectively. And once she declared that I had
no sense of tragedy. We read "Macbeth" together, I remember, one rainy
Sunday. The modern world, which was our generation, would seem to be cut
off from all that preceded it as with a descending knife. It was
precisely from "the sense of tragedy" that we had been emancipated: from
the "agonized conscience," I should undoubtedly have said, had I been
acquainted then with Mr. Santayana's later phrase. Conscience--the old
kind of conscience,--and nothing inherent in the deeds themselves, made
the tragedy; conscience was superstition, the fear of the wrath of the
gods: conscience was the wrath of the gods. Eliminate it, and behold!
there were no consequences. The gods themselves, that kind of gods,
became as extinct as the deities of the Druids, the Greek fates, the
terrible figures of German mythology. Yes, and as the God of Christian
orthodoxy.

Had any dire calamities overtaken the modern Macbeths, of whose personal
lives we happened to know something? Had not these great ones broken with
impunity all the laws of traditional morality? They ground the faces of
the poor, played golf and went to church with serene minds, untroubled by
criticism; they appropriated, quite freely, other men's money, and some
of them other men's wives, and yet they were not haggard with remorse.
The gods remained silent. Christian ministers regarded these modern
transgressors of ancient laws benignly and accepted their contributions.
Here, indeed, were the supermen of the mad German prophet and philosopher
come to life, refuting all classic tragedy. It is true that some of these
supermen were occasionally swept away by disease, which in ancient days
would have been regarded as a retributive scourge, but was in fact
nothing but the logical working of the laws of hygiene, the result of
overwork. Such, though stated more crudely, were my contentions when
desire did not cloud my brain and make me incoherent. And I did not fail
to remind Nancy, constantly, that this was the path on which her feet had
been set; that to waver now was to perish. She smiled, yet sh