"I wonder why I didn't marry him?" said Gabriella softly; and not until Miss Polly answered her, was she aware that she had spoken aloud. In her spiritual reaction from the grosser reality of passion, the delicacy and remoteness of Arthur's love borrowed the pious and mystic qualities of religious worship. She had seen the sordid and ugly sides of sex; and she felt now a profound disgust for the emotion which drew men and women together--for the light in the eyes, the touch of the lips, the clinging of the hands. Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now the very memory of them filled her with repulsion. She still wanted love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl, she had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential reality; now, utterly disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is there left in life? What is the thing that really counts, after all? What is the possession that makes all the striving worth while in the end? At twenty-seven love is over for me, and if love is over, what remains to fill the rest of my life? There must be something else--there must be a reality somewhere which is truer, which is profounder, than love." This, she knew, was the question which neither tradition nor custom could answer. Religion, perhaps, might have helped her; but it was characteristic of her generation that she should give religion hardly a thought as a possible solution of the problem of life. She wanted substance, facts, experience; she wanted to examine, to analyze, to discover; and it was just here that religion hopelessly failed her as a guide. Faith she had had in her cradle--faith in life, faith in love, faith in herself; and it was faith that had brought her to this bleak disenchantment of spirit. No, she wanted knowledge now, not faith; she wanted truth, not illusion.