And why all this strife and pain? Why all this bitter unyielding opposition and writhing agony under what was and is and will be? Wherefore not quietly accept the inevitable with magnanimous gentleness and wisdom, and, without anger or fuss or regret, conform his conduct to the best conditions for serenity of soul and wholesomeness of heart, in contentment with self and charity for all? Why not rather have suppressed wrath, avoided dispute, foregone retaliation, parted in peace if part they must, and, each uncomplained of and uninterfered with by the other, passed freely on in the strangely-checkered pathways of the world, to test the good of life and the mystery of death and the everlasting divineness of Providence? How much more auspicious such a course would have been than to be so convulsed with tormenting passions and strike to and fro in furious contention! Yes, why did they not either forgive and forget and renew their loving covenant, or else silently divide in kindness and liberty without one hostile deed or thought? Thus they would have consulted their truest dignity and interest. But, alas! in these infinitely delicate, inflammable, and explosive affairs of sentiment, dignity and interest are usually trampled contemptuously under foot by passion. Every one acts and reacts in accordance with his style and grade of character, his degrees of loyalty or enslavement to the different standards of action prevailing around him. A man held fast in a certain low or mediocre stage of spiritual evolution will naturally conduct himself in any trying emergency in a very different manner from one who has reached a transcendent height of emancipation, spontaneity, and nobleness. And there were two clear reasons why Forrest, in this most critical passage of his life, did not behave purely in the best and grandest way, but with a mixture of the vulgar method and the better one. First, he had not attained that degree of self-detachment which would make it possible for him to act under exciting circumstances calmly in the light of universal principles. He could not disentangle the prejudiced fibres of his consciousness from the personality long and closely associated with his own so as to treat her with impartiality and wisdom, regarding her as an independent personality rather than as a merged part of his own. He must still continue related to her by personal passion of some kind, when one passion died an opposite one springing up in its place. And, secondly, he could not in this matter free himself, although in many other matters he did remarkably free himself, from the tyranny of what is called public opinion. He had in this instance an extreme sensitiveness as to what would be thought of him and said of him in case his conduct openly deviated much from the average social usage. Thus his personal passions, mixed up in his imagination with every reference to the woman he had adored but now