h in him
around it, threatening to stifle it, and whose personality drives him to
pick this ideal out and to lift it up and to hold it supreme lifelong. He
himself is its bitterest enemy, its most hateful foe, its would-be
murderer. He himself shrinks from and cowers at and abhors the choking
for its sake of faculties that draw titanic strength from the innermost
fibres of his own being. Yet he himself shelters and defends and battles
for this intruder on his peace, this source of endless pain and
brain-rending sorrow. A strength arises within him that tramples the
other strength underfoot; he celebrates his victory with sighs and tears.
So the New rises and rules until the Old is shattered and broken and
fights the New no more; so Brutality goes and so Humanity comes.

Nellie fought with herself kneeling there at her window, watching the
declining moon, staring at it with set eyes, grimly willing herself not
to think because to think was to surrender. Into heart and ear and brain
the serpents hissed words of love and thoughts of unspeakable joy. Upon
her lips they pressed again Ned's hot kisses. Around her waist they threw
again the clasping of his straining arms. "Why not? Why not?" they asked
her. "Why not? Why not?" they cried and shouted. "Why not? Oh, why not?"
they moaned to her. And she stared at the radiant moon and clenched her
fingers on the window sill and would not answer. Only to her lips rose a
prayer for death that she disowned unuttered. Had she fallen so low as to
seek refuge in superstition, she thought, and from that moment she bore
her agony in her own way.

It did pass through her mind that the ideal she had installed in her
passionate heart did not aid her, that it had shrunk back out of sight
and left her alone to fight for it against herself, left her alone to
keep her life for it free from the dominance of these mad passions that
had lifted their heads within her and that every nerve in her fought and
bled for. She crushed this back also. She would not think. Only she would
be loyal to her conception of Right even though the agony of her loyalty
drove her mad.

She knew what Pain meant, now. She drank to the very dregs the cup of
human misery. To have one's desires within one's reach, to have one's
whole being driving one to stretch out one's hand and satisfy the eternal
instincts within, and to force one's self to an abnegation that one's
heart revolts from, that indeed was Pain to her. She