"If I could only see Mr. Eltinge," she murmured, after an hour of distracted thought and indecision. "There is no time to write--indeed, I could not write on such a subject, and--and--I'm afraid he'd advise me against it. He can't understand a woman's feelings in a case like this, at least he could not understand a passionate, faulty girl like me. I've no patience--no fortitude. I could die for my love--I think, I hope, I could for my faith,--but I feel no power within me to endure patiently year after year. I would be like the poor, weak women they shut up in the Inquisition and who suffered on to the end only through remorseless compulsion, because the walls were too thick for escape, and the tormentor's hands and the rack were irresistible. My soul would succumb as well as my body. This would seem wild, wicked talk to Mr. Eltinge; it would seem weak and irrational to any man. But I'm only Ida Mayhew, and such is my nature. I've been made all the more incapable of patient self-sacrifice by self-indulgence from my childhood up. Oh, will it be very, very wrong to win him if I can?" and the passionate tears and sobs that followed these words would seem to indicate that she understood her nature only too well. At last she concluded, in weariness and exhaustion, "I'm too weak and distracted to think any more. I hardly know whether it's right or wrong. I hope it isn't very wrong. I won't decide now. Let matters take their own course as they have done and I may see clearer by and by." But deep in her heart she felt that this was about the same as yielding to the temptation. She bathed her eyes, tried to think how she could spend the intervening hours before they would meet again. Then with a sense of dismay she began to consider, "If we are to meet so often what are we to talk about? He once tried to converse with me and found me so ignorant he couldn't. It seemed to me I didn't know anything that evening, and he'll soon grow disgusted with me again as he sees my poor little pack of knowledge is like a tramp's bundle that he carries around with him. I must read--I must study every moment, or I haven't the remotest chance of success. Success! Oh, merciful heaven! it's the same as if I were setting about it all deliberately and there's no use of deceiving myself. I hope it isn't very, very wrong." She went to her father's library with flushed cheeks and hesitating steps, as if it were the tree from which she might pluck the fruit of forbidden knowledge. The long rows of ponderous and neglected books appalled her; she took down two or three and they seemed like unopened mines, deep and rocky. She felt instinctively that there was not time for her to transmute their ores into graceful and natural mental adornments.