"Why? How can it be otherwise?" cried _Henri_, starting up. "Cornelia, be more merciful than the fate that denies you to me. Could I reject my prince's call to the aid of the throne, withdraw my powers from the service of the state at the moment they were most needed? Ought I to have made such a sacrifice to my love when I was sure you would joyfully offer the lesser one, which is necessary to our happiness? What have you to fear? You are living in exceptional circumstances, have no one's permission to ask, have told me a hundred times that you despised the judgment of the world, that you felt within your own heart a higher power, which justified you in taking your own course. If I had believed any woman capable of a love which had sufficient morality in self to be able to cast aside all laws without degenerating, it would have been yourself; and you are such a woman, you alone. In your lofty breast human nature has developed free and unfettered, as it came from the hand of the Creator; it does not judge according to the ordinances of the church-police, or so-called moral tradition, but, pure and undefiled, unquestioningly follows the guidance of the love which pervades all creation, and which mankind first disfigured and chained by arbitrary laws." "Indeed!" said Cornelia. "And our ideas of virtue, of the sacredness of marriage, they would lack all firm foundation had not God placed a guard upon our passions in our own breasts." "Cornelia, can _you_ ask such questions? They are a protection to the weak, of course. Marriage, as a sacrament, is a great institution, which the infirmities of human nature rendered necessary; but for those strong exceptional natures that feel themselves nearer the deity it is an empty form." "So would be morality, honor, family happiness,--all would be mere illusions, and our most immediate aim nothing more than to become thinking animals. This would bring us nearest to our divine origin."