WORSHIP, UNTO WHATSOEVER POWER YOU KNEEL."

This passage out of a favourite book of sentences had virtue to help her
now in putting away the 'props of self.' It helped her for the time.
She could not foresee the contest that was commencing for her.

"LOVE THAT SHRIEKS AT A MORTAL WOUND, AND BLEEDS HUMANLY, WHAT IS HE
BUT A PAGAN GOD, WITH THE PASSIONS OF A PAGAN GOD?"

"Yes," thought Georgiana, meditating, "as different from the Christian
love as a brute from a man!"

She felt that the revolution of the idea of love in her mind (all that
consoled her) was becoming a temptation. Quick in her impulses, she
dismissed it. "I am like a girl!" she said scornfully. "Like a woman"
would not have flattered her. Like what did she strive to be? The
picture of another self was before her--a creature calmly strong,
unruffled, and a refuge to her beloved. It was a steady light through
every wind that blew, save when the heart narrowed; and then it waxed
feeble, and the life in her was hungry for she knew not what.

Georgiana's struggle was to make her great passion eat up all the others.
Sure of the intensity and thoroughness of her love for Merthyr, she would
forecast for herself tasks in his service impossible save to one
sensually dead and therefore spiritually sexless. "My love is pure," she
would say; as if that were the talisman which rendered it superhuman.
She was under the delusion that lovers' love was a reprehensible egoism.
Her heart had never had place for it; and thus her nature was
unconsummated, and the torment of a haunting insufficiency accompanied
her sweetest hours, ready to mislead her in all but very clearest