and, it might be, errors. She was a woman and weak; that is, not trained
for strength. She was a soul; therefore perpetually pointing to growth
in purification. He felt it, and even discerned it of her, if he could
not have phrased it. The something sovereignty characteristic that
aspired in Diana enchained him. With her, or rather with his thought of
her soul, he understood the right union of women and men, from the roots
to the flowering heights of that rare graft. She gave him comprehension
of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often explained. With
her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in
our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross
earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and
the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction. In Booth, a happy
prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more
than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the
ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain
nobler races, now very dimly imagined.

Singularly enough, the man of these feelings was far from being a social
rebel. His Diana conjured them forth in relation to her, but was not on
his bosom to enlighten him generally. His notions of citizenship
tolerated the female Pharisees, as ladies offering us an excellent social
concrete where quicksands abound, and without quite justifying the Lady
Wathins and Constance Aspers of the world, whose virtues he could set
down to accident or to acid blood, he considered them supportable and
estimable where the Mrs. Fryar-Gunnetts were innumerable, threatening to
become a majority; as they will constantly do while the sisterhood of the
chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness.

Thoughts of Diana made phantoms of the reputable and their reverse alike.
He could not choose but think of her. She was free; and he too; and they