They were yesterday for love; partly for distinction, for a woman having
beauty to shine in the sphere of beauty; but chiefly to love and be
loved, therefore to live. She had yesterday read letters of a man who
broke a music from the word--about as much music as there is in a tuning
--fork, yet it rang and lingered; and he was not the magical musician.
Now those letters were as dust of the road. The sphere of beauty was a
glass lamp-globe for delirious moths. She had changed. Belief in the
real change gave her full view of the compliant coward she had been.

Her heart assured her she had natural courage. She felt that it could be
stubborn to resist a softness. Now she cared no more for the hackneyed
musical word; friendship was her desire. If it is not life's poetry, it
is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond
the terrors and the deceptions. And she could trust her friend: he who
was a singular constancy. His mother had told her of his preserving
letters of a girl he loved when at school; and of his journeys to an
empty house at Dover. That was past; but, as the boy, so the man would
be in sincerity of feeling trustworthy to the uttermost.

She mused on the friend. He was brave. She had seen how he took his
blow, and sorrow as a sister, conquering emotion. It was not to be
expected of him by one who knew him when at school. Had he faults? He
must have faults. She, curiously, could see none. After consenting to
his career as a schoolmaster, and seeing nothing ludicrous in it, she
endowed him with the young school-hero's reputation, beheld him with the
eyes of the girl who had loved him--and burnt his old letters!--bitterly
regretted that she burnt his letters!--and who had applauded his contempt
of ushers and master opposing his individual will and the thing he
thought it right to do.