and body suffered much, one sees a calamity
vaguely, and cannot define it; appreciates it, and does not know it. She
came to Marion's room about a half-hour before they were to start for
the church. Marion was already dressed and ready, save for the few final
touches, which, though they have been given a dozen times, must still
again be given just before the bride starts for the church. Such is the
anxious mind of women on these occasions. The two stood and looked at
each other a moment, each wondering what were the thoughts of the other.
Lali was struck by that high, proud look over which lay a glamour of
infinite satisfaction, of sweetness, which comes to every good woman's
face when she goes to the altar in a marriage which is not contingent
on the rise or fall in stocks, or a satisfactory settlement. Marion,
looking, saw, as if it had been revealed to her all at once, the intense
and miraculous change which had come over the young wife, even within
the past two months. Indeed, she had changed as much within that time as
within all the previous four years--that is, she had been brought to a
certain point in her education and experience, where without a newer
and deeper influence she could go no further. That newer and deeper
influence had come, and the result thereof was a woman standing upon the
verge of the real tragedy to her life, which was not in having married
the man, but in facing that marriage with her new intelligence and
a transformed soul. Men can face that sort of thing with a kind of
philosophy, not because men are better or wiser, but because it
really means less to them. They have resources of life, they can bury
themselves in their ambitions good or bad, but a woman can only bury
herself in her affections, unless her heart has been closed; and in that
case she herself has lost much of what made her adorable. And while she
may go on with the closed heart and become a saint, even saintship is
hardly sufficient to compensate any man or woman for a half-lived life.
The only thing worth doing in this world is to live life according
to one's convictions--and one's heart. He or she who sells that fine
independence for a mess of pottage, no matter if the mess be spiced,
sells, as the Master said, the immortal part of him.

And so Lali, just here on the edge of Marion's future, looking into that
mirror, was catching the reflection of her own life. When two women come
so near that, like the lovers in the Tempe