mere ebullience and rush of her youth--with what haloes she will surround
even the meanest heads? Her blood calls her--not this man or that! She
takes her decisions--behind that veil of mystery that masks the woman at
her will. And who knows---who can know? A mother, perhaps. Not
Augustina--not he--nor another.

Groans broke from him. In vain he scourged himself and the vileness of
his own thoughts. In vain he said to himself, "All her instincts, her
preferences, are pure, guileless, delicate--I could swear it, I, who have
watched her every look and motion." Temper?--yes. Caprice?--yes. A
hundred immaturities and rawnesses?--yes! but at the root of all, the
most dazzling, the most convincing maidenliness. Not the down-dropt eyes,
the shrinking modesties of your old Christian or Catholic types--far from
it. But something that, as you dwelt upon it, seemed to make doubt a mere
folly.

And yet his very self-assurances, his very protests, left him in torment.
There is something in the Catholic discipline on points of sex-relation
that perhaps weakens a man's instinctive confidence in women. Evil and
its varieties, in this field, are pressed upon his thoughts perpetually
with a scholastic fulness so complete, a deductive frankness so
compelling, that nothing stands against the process. He sees corruption
everywhere--dreads it everywhere. There is no part of its empire, or its
action, that his imagination is allowed to leave in shadow. It is the
confessional that works. The devout Catholic sees all the world _sub
specie peccati_. The flesh seems to him always ready to fall--the devil
always at hand.

--Little restless proud creature! What a riddle she has been to him all
the time--flitting about the house so pale and inaccessible, so silent,