western waves.

She had always regarded her soul as the battlefield of two opposite
principles, the good and the bad, the high and the low. God made her, she
thought, and He alone; He made everything that she was; but she would not
have said that He made the evil in her. Yet her belief did not admit the
existence of Creative Evil; and so she said to herself that she herself
was that evil, and she must struggle against herself; she must question
whatever she strongly wished because she strongly wished it. It was not
logical; she did not push her postulates to their obvious conclusions; and
there was apt to be the same kind of break between her conclusions and her
actions as between her reasons and her conclusions. She acted impulsively,
and from a force which she could not analyse. She indulged reveries so
vivid that they seemed to weaken and exhaust her for the grapple with
realities; the recollection of them abashed her in the presence of facts.

With all this, it must not be supposed that she was morbidly introspective.
Her life had been apparently a life of cheerful acquiescence in worldly
conditions; it had been, in some measure, a life of fashion, or at least
of society. It had not been without the interests of other girls' lives,
by any means; she had sometimes had fancies, flirtations, but she did not
think she had been really in love, and she had refused some offers of
marriage for that reason.




III.