all, we have the boyhood of the two friends who are
afterwards to grow apart in their sympathies; the one alert
of mind, imaginative, open to every intellectual influence,
also impetuous and hot-blooded; the other shy and
intellectually stolid, but good to the very core, and moved
by the strongest of altruistic impulses. In accordance with
their respective characters, the first of these youths becomes
a physician, and the other a clergyman. Then we have the
sister of the physician, who becomes the wife of the
clergyman, a noble, proud, self-centred nature, finely
strung to the inmost fibre of her being. Then we have a
woman of the other sort, clinging, abnormally sensitive, a
child when the years of childhood are over, and made the
victim of a shocking child-marriage to a crippled old man.
She it is whom the physician loves, and persuades to a
legal dissolution of her immoral union. After some years,
he makes her his wife, and their happiness would be complete
were it not for the social and religious prejudice aroused.
The clergyman, whom years of service in the state church
have hardened into bigotry, is officially, as it were,
compelled to condemn the friend of his boyhood, and even the
sister, for a time grown untrue to her own generous nature,
shares in the estrangement. In vain does the physician seek
to shelter his wife from the chill of her environment. She
droops, pines away, and finally dies, gracious, lovable, and
even forgiving to the last. Then the death angel comes close
to the clergyman and his wife, hovering over their only child,
and at last the barrier of formalism and prejudice and
religious bigotry is swept away from their minds. Their
natural sympathies, long repressed, resume full sway, and they