now; there seemed some special power, some special undiscovered tie
between us that led me on and yet deceived me. It was especially
evident in her singing, this deep power. She sang, you remember, to
her own accompaniment on the harp, and her method, though so simple
it seemed almost childish, was at the same time charged with a great
melancholy that always moved me most profoundly. The sound of her
small, plaintive voice, the sight of her slender fingers that plucked
the strings in some delicate fashion native to herself, the tiny foot
that pressed the pedal--all these, with her dark searching eyes fixed
penetratingly upon my own while she sang of love and love's
endearments, combined in a single stroke of very puissant and
seductive kind. Passions in me awoke, so deep, so ardent, so
imperious, that I conceived them as born of the need of one soul for
another. I attributed their power to genuine love. The following
reactions, when my soul held up a finger and bade me listen to her
still, small warnings, grew less positive and of ever less duration.
The frontier between physical and spiritual passion is perilously
narrow, perhaps. My judgment, at any rate, became insecure, then
floundered hopelessly. The sound of the harp-strings and of Marion's
voice could overwhelm its balance instantly.

Mistaking, perhaps, my lukewarm-ness for restraint, she led me at last
to the altar you described as one of sacrifice. And your instinct,
more piercing than my own, proved only too correct: that which I held
for love declared itself as pity only, the soft, affectionate pity of
a weakish man in whom the flesh cried loudly, the pity of a man who
would be untrue to himself rather than pain so sweet a girl by
rejecting the one great offering life placed within her gift. She
persuaded me so cunningly that I persuaded myself, yet was not aware
I did so until afterwards. I married her because in some manner I