It should be enough to love him for ever, without hope, without desire.

Faithfulness would cost her no effort to purify herself in ideal devotion would be her sustenance, her solace.
What of her religion of beauty, the faith which had seen its end in the nourishment of every instinct demanding loveliness within and without?
What of the ideal which saw the crown of life in passion triumphant, which dreaded imperfectness, which allowed the claims of sense equally with those of spirit, both having their indispensable part in the complete existence?
Had it not conspicuously failed where religion should be most efficient?
She understood now the timidity which had ever lurked behind her acceptance of that view of life.

She had never been able entirely to divest herself of the feeling that her exaltation in beauty-worship was a mood born of sunny days, that it would fail amid shocks of misfortune and prove a mockery in the hour of the soul's dire need.

It shared in the unreality of her life in wealthy houses, amid the luxury which appertained only to fortune's favourites, which surrounded her only by chance.

She had presumptuously taken to herself the religion of her superiors, of those to whom fate allowed the assurance of peace, of guarded leisure wherein to cultivate the richer and sweeter flowers of their nature.