ONE DAY OUT OF ALL THE YEARS It was not enough! If you would safely renounce a joy, you had best enjoy something of it first.

Renunciation must have something to live on.

You can "take up the whole of love and utter it," and _then_ "say adieu for ever," but not before.
I have asked mercy for Jenny, though it was perhaps hardly necessary, for the world always pities Jenny.

Now I would ask it for Isabel and Theophil, who are thus quietly to sacrifice the greatest thing in their lives, the one reality for which they have come into existence, for Jenny's sake.

Great is their love for each other, but even greater and stranger must be their involuntary love for an invisible goodness, an ideal of ineffable pity.