He had done poor Flossie some injustice. She suffered in his eyes because she came short, not of the dream, but of the reality. To be placed beside Lucia Harden would have been a severe test for any woman; but for Flossie it was cruelty itself. He had never subjected her to that, not even in thought; for he felt that the comparison, cruel to one woman, was profanation to the other. It was only feminine Fate who could be so unkind as to put those two side by side, that he might look well, and measure his love for Flossie by his love for Lucia, seeing it too as it was. Maddox had not been far wrong there. For anything spiritual in that emotion, he might as well have gone back to Poppy Grace. Better; since between him and Flossie that gross tie, once formed, could not be broken. Better; since there had at least been no hypocrisy in his relations with the joyous Poppy. Better anything than this baseness skulking under the superstition of morality. If a man has no other feeling for an innocent woman than that, better that a mill-stone should be hanged about his neck than that he should offend by marrying her. And yet there had been something finer and purer in this later love than in the first infatuation of his youth. On that day, seven days ago, the last day it had to live, he had been touched by something more sacred, more immortal than desire. There had been no illusion in the poetry that clothed the figure of a woman standing in an empty room, dearer to her than the bridal chamber; a woman whose face grew soft as her instinct outran the bridal terror and the bridal joy, divining beyond love the end that sanctifies it.