from mental tension, and the ease of feeling after the strain of thought,
she found the highest form of pleasure she had tasted, the most rarefied,
the most intense. The St. Valentine's Day of her development was
approaching, and her heart had begun already to practise the notes of the
song-significant into which she would burst when it came.

It is a nice question that, as to where the sensuous ends, and the
spiritual begins. The dovetail is so exact just at the junction that it is
impossible to determine, and it is there that "spirit and flesh grow one
with delight" on occasion; but the test of the spiritual lies in its
continuity. Pleasures of the senses pall upon repetition, but pleasures of
the soul continue and increase. A delicate dish soon wearies the palate,
but the power to appreciate a poem or a picture grows greater the more we
study them--illustrations as trite, by the way, as those of the average
divine in his weekly sermon, but calculated to comfort to the same extent
in that they possess the charm of familiarity which satisfies self-love by
proving that we know quite as much of some subjects as those who profess
to teach them. Still, a happy condition of the senses may easily be
mistaken for a great outpouring of spiritual enthusiasm, and many an
inspiring soul unconsciously stimulates them in ways less pardonable
perhaps than the legitimate joy of a good dinner to a hungry man, or the
more subtle pleasure which a refined woman experiences while sharing the
communion of well-dressed saints on a cushioned seat, listening to
exquisite music in a fashionable church. Sensations of gladness send some
people to church whom grief of any kind would drive from thence
effectually. It is a matter of temperament. There are those who are by
nature grateful for every good gift, who even bow their heads and suffer
meekly if they perceive that they will have their reward, but are ready to
rebel with rage against any form of ineffectual pain. This was likely to
be Evadne's case. Yet her mother had been right about her having a deeply