h he had committed an irredeemable offence. And it seemed
as if all motive had slipped away from her, except the indignation and
scorn that made her tear herself asunder from him.

She was not acting after any precedent, or obeying any adopted maxims.
The grand severity of the stoical philosophy in which her father had
taken care to instruct her, was familiar enough to her ears and lips,
and its lofty spirit had raised certain echoes within her; but she had
never used it, never needed it as a rule of life. She had endured and
forborne because she loved: maxims which told her to feel less, and not
to cling close lest the onward course of great Nature should jar her,
had been as powerless on her tenderness as they had been on her father's
yearning for just fame. She had appropriated no theories: she had
simply felt strong in the strength of affection, and life without that
energy came to her as an entirely new problem.

She was going to solve the problem in a way that seemed to her very
simple. Her mind had never yet bowed to any obligation apart from
personal love and reverence; she had no keen sense of any other human
relations, and all she had to obey now was the instinct to sever herself
from the man she loved no longer.

Yet the unswerving resolution was accompanied with continually varying
phases of anguish. And now that the active preparation for her
departure was almost finished, she lingered: she deferred writing the
irrevocable words of parting from all her little world. The emotions of
the past weeks seemed to rush in again with cruel hurry, and take
possession even of her limbs. She was going to write, and her hand
fell. Bitter tears came now at the delusion which had blighted her
young years, tears very different from the sob of remembered happiness
with which she had looked at the circlet of pearls and the pink
hailstone. And now she felt a tingling shame at the words of ignominy
she had cast, at Tito--"Have you robbed some one else who is _not_
dead?" To have had such words wrung from her--to have uttered them to
her husband seemed a degradation of her whole life. Hard speech between
those who have loved is hideous in the memory, like the sight of
greatness and beauty sunk into vice and rags.

That heart-cutting comparison of the present with the past urged itself
upon Romola till it even transformed itself into wretched sensations:
she seemed benumbed to everything but inward throbbings, and