ldliness.

What comfort there was in it we had in knowing that she was a favorite in
the society of which we read such glowing descriptions, and that no one
else bore its honors more winningly. It was not an easy life, with all
its exactions and incessant movement. It demanded more physical strength
than most women possess, and we were not surprised to hear from time to
time that she was delicate, and that she went through her season with
feverish excitement. But she chose it; it had become necessary to her.
Can women stop in such a career, even if they wish to stop?

Yes, she chose it. I, for one, never begrudged her any pleasure she had
in life, and I do not know but she was as happy as it is possible for
human being to be in a full experiment of worldliness. Who is the judge?
But we, I say, who loved her, and knew so well the noble possibilities of
her royal nature under circumstances favorable to its development, felt
more and more her departure from her own ideals. Her life in its
spreading prosperity seemed more and more shallow. I do not say she was
heartless, I do not say she was uncharitable, I do not say that in all
the externals of worldly and religious observance she was wanting; I do
not say that the more she was assimilated to the serenely worldly nature
of her husband she did not love him, or that she was unlovely in the
worldliness that ingulfed her and bore her onward. I do not know that
there is anything singular in her history. But the pain of it to us was
in the certainty--and it seemed so near--that in the decay of her higher
life, in the hardening process of a material existence, in the transfer
of all her interests to the trivial and sensuous gratifications--time,
mind, heart, ambition, all fixed on them--we should never regain our
Margaret. What I saw in a vision of her future was a dead soul--a
beautiful woman in all the success of envied prosperity, with a dead
soul.

XXII

It is difficult not to convey a false impression of Margaret at this
time. Habits, manners, outward conduct--nay, the superficial kindliness
in human intercourse, the exterior graceful qualities, may all remain
when the character has subtly changed, when the real aims have changed,
when the ideals are lowered. The fair exterior may be only a shell. I can
imagine the heart retaining much tenderness and sympathy with suffering
when the soul itself has ceased to struggle for the higher life, when the
mind has lost, in