The burden may be gone, but it is still present in the sharp effects of its absence.

He is a kind of moral poacher, who, though he may not live by law, takes much of his life's tone from the sense that he is eluding it.
His pleasures, though pleasurable in themselves, yet have this quality heightened by the sense of contrast.

'_I am at any rate not virtuous_,' his mistress says to him, '_and that is always something gained_.' George Eliot says of Maggie Tulliver, that she liked her aunt Pullet chiefly because she was not her aunt Gleg.

Theophile Gautier's hero likes the Venus Anadyomene, partly at least, because she is not the Madonna.
Nay, let us even descend to worse spectacles--to the sight of men struggling for enjoyments that are yet more obviously material, more devoid yet of any trace of mind or morals, and we shall see plainly, if we consult the mirror of art, that the moral element is present even here.

We shall trace it even in such abnormal literature of indulgence as the erotic work commonly ascribed to Meursius.