Candish and the less satisfaction he found in his own conduct. Yet
perhaps the human mind cannot cease self-justification at any point
short of annihilation, and Philip still had in his secret thought a
deep feeling that the church should more absolutely settle the question
of the celibacy of its clergy, so that there might be no more doubts.
He honored the attitude of Candish, and he resolved to imitate it. He
who has never shaken hands with the devil, however, can have little
idea how hard it is to loose his grasp; and Philip groaned at the
thought of how far he was even from wishing to put his love out of its
high place in his heart.

His mind was calmer as he sat that evening talking with his mother.
Mrs. Ashe was a plain, sweet-faced woman, with gray hair brushed
smoothly under her cap of black lace. There was in her pale, faded face
little beauty of feature or coloring; yet the light of her kindly and
delicate spirit shone through. Maurice Wynne had once said that she was
like a sweet-pea,--born with wings, but tethered so that she might not
fly away. Philip, with his exquisite sensitiveness, found an
unspeakable comfort in her presence; a soothing sense of rest and peace
so blissful that it seemed almost wrong. There are even in this worldly
age many women who hide under the covering of uneventful, commonplace
lives existences full of spiritual richness,--women who find in
religion not the mechanical acceptance of form, not a mere superstition
which encrusts an outworn creed, but a vital, uplifting force; a power
which fills their souls with imaginative warmth and fervor. The worth
of an experience is to be estimated by the emotional fire which it
kindles; and to the lives of such women the dull, colorless round of
their daily existence gives no real clue. Theirs is the life of the
spirit, and for them the inner is the only true life. It is when the
sunken eye shines with a glow from deep within; when the thin cheeks