Faithfulness would cost her
no effort to purify herself in ideal devotion would be her sustenance,
her solace.

What of her religion of beauty, the faith which had seen its end in the
nourishment of every instinct demanding loveliness within and without?
What of the ideal which saw the crown of life in passion triumphant,
which dreaded imperfectness, which allowed the claims of sense equally
with those of spirit, both having their indispensable part in the
complete existence? Had it not conspicuously failed where religion
should be most efficient? She understood now the timidity which had ever
lurked behind her acceptance of that view of life. She had never been
able entirely to divest herself of the feeling that her exaltation in
beauty-worship was a mood born of sunny days, that it would fail amid
shocks of misfortune and prove a mockery in the hour of the soul's dire
need. It shared in the unreality of her life in wealthy houses, amid the
luxury which appertained only to fortune's favourites, which surrounded
her only by chance. She had presumptuously taken to herself the religion
of her superiors, of those to whom fate allowed the assurance of peace,
of guarded leisure wherein to cultivate the richer and sweeter flowers
of their nature. How artificial had been the delights with which she
soothed herself! Here, all the time, was the reality; here in this poor
home, brooded over by the curse of poverty, whence should come shame and
woe and death. What to her now were the elegance of art, the loveliness
of nature? Beauty had been touched by mortality, and its hues were of
the corpse, of the grave. Would the music of a verse ever again fill her
with rapture? How meaningless were all such toys of thought to one whose
path lay through the valley of desolation!

Thus did Emily think and feel in this sombre season, the passionate
force of her imagination making itself the law of life and the arbiter
of her destiny. She could not take counsel with time; her temperament
knew nothing of that compromise with ardours and impulses which is the
wisdom of disillusion. Circumstances willed that she should suffer by
the nobleness of her instincts those endowments which might in a happier
lot have exalted her to such perfection of calm joy as humanity may
attain, were fated to be the source of misery inconceivable by natures
less finely cast.

CHAPTER XVII

THEIR SEVERAL WAYS

As Wilfrid quitted the house, the gate was o