daily in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles
like hers: yet they were something to bear, hard to bear, at times
unbearable.

But those were times of weakness. Let anything be doubted rather than
the good guidance of the man who was her breath of life! Whither he led,
let her go, not only submissively, exultingly.

Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that unless rushing
into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should
therefore think it.

This was the prudent woman's clear deduction from the state wherein she
found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman.
Her surrender then might be likened to the detachment of a flower on the
river's bank by swell of flood: she had no longer root of her own; away
she sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crashing
fall, a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more the sunny
whirling surface. Strange to think, she had not since then power to
grasp in her abstract mind a notion of stedfastness without or within.

But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman. Love is a madness, having
heaven's wisdom in it--a spark. But even when it is driving us on the
breakers, call it love: and be not unworthy of it, hold to it. She and
Victor had drunk of a cup. The philtre was in her veins, whatever the
directions of the rational mind.

Exulting or regretting, she had to do it, as one in the car with a
racing charioteer. Or up beside a more than Titanically audacious
balloonist. For the charioteer is bent on a goal; and Victor's course
was an ascension from heights to heights. He had ideas, he mastered
Fortune. He conquered Nataly and held her subject, in being above his
ambition; which was now but an occupation for his powers, while the aim
of his life was at the giving and taking of simple enjoyment. In spite
of his fits of unreasonableness in the means--and the woman loving
him could trace them to a breath of nature--his gentle good friendly
innocent aim in life was of this very simplest; so wonderful, by
contrast with his powers, that she, assured of it as she was by
experience of him, was touched, in a transfusion of her feelings through
lucent globes of admiration and of tenderness, to reverence. There
had been occasions when her wish for the whole world to have proof and
exhibition of his greatness, goodness, and simplicity amid his gifts,
prompted her incitement of him to stand forth emin