"No, no!" cried Sylvester. "Ten thousand times--no! If so, every martyr, every patriot, who followed his highest instincts, regardless of old ties, every soul that had to save itself at any price, every one who has cut off the right hand, put out the right eye, has been wrong. Oh, the right hand, the right eye, are always so good. There is so much to be said for them! You can make out so good a case! Oh, you are so young, you seem but a child, you don't know really what you are doing. You think of your duty to others. No one has taught you your duty to yourself." "Oh," said Amethyst, with a sort of sad dignity, "I know much more about it all than you think." She moved a little away from him, and sat down, then presently went on speaking out her thoughts. Sylvester seemed to her almost like an incarnation of the opposing force within her. "I don't think it was wrong as I was--at least for some people there does not seem anything very right. Your father said I was to try for the least wrong--the rather better." "Yes," said Sylvester, "the least wrong--the most right _for you_!" "Then--something came over me. It all went flat. Then, you came and told me Lucian was coming back--and--and--I found out in another way, that if--if he brought back my feelings--I could and I would fight it all through--and _nothing_ would stand against me. But oh--the feelings are all gone. I've forgotten him! So my feelings can't be worth much, and--and there doesn't seem enough to fight about--to give it all up and condemn myself and my sisters to a bad, miserable life--oh, so many degradations!" "Lucian knows now how deeply he offended you," said Sylvester, swerving a little from his point, so much did he care what her feelings were. "It's not that. It is that I have changed. But I--I couldn't wrong _him_. I couldn't marry _him_ for--for an _establishment_!" The last word burst out as if in quotation marks, with a passionate accent of self-contempt and scorn. "What I want to say is," said Sylvester, "don't wrong yourself. Listen!--I believe in counsels of perfection. I don't judge all the women who have married as you say, and been good and saint-like and self-denying, for other people's sake. But you--you hear another Voice. Even for your sisters' sake--listen to it." Amethyst turned away, and hid her face against the back of her chair. She was not crying,--but a sense of being overwhelmed was coming upon her. The situation was beginning to make itself felt. "When one has no feelings," she said, after a minute--"neither religious nor any others--there is nothing left but doing right." "There _is_ that left," he answered, coming nearer. Another silence, then she faltered out--