The man Gabriel had been wakened once again from dreams. He was no longer the transcendental lover, blind to the physical philosophy of the sage in the street. Yesterday earth had been to him a primitive Eden where no sin lurked in the glory of the opening year. All this was changed as with the stroke of a wand. Purgatory had displaced paradise. Where quiet valleys had stood bright with sunlight the man saw a deep abyss steeped in gloom. There the satyr ran squealing after his prey. Thence came the hot roar of the bacchanal, the canting of the hypocrite, the whine of the miser scrambling for blood-stained gold. The din that rose from the pit was as the hoarse discords of a great city. The breath of it ascended like heavy smoke from some smouldering Sodom. The revulsion was all the more forceful for its severe and savage suddenness. It was enough for Gabriel to realize that he had sinned against that code of expediency that governs in large measure all social relationships. Empyrean sentiments appeared nebulous and flimsy beside the granite orthodoxy of the bourgeois world. It was of little solid advantage to turn from men to a higher judge for comfort and to fling a declaration of innocence in the face of illimitable ether. What though his thoughts were as white as the wing feathers of seraphs, these same thoughts would be trampled in the mire before the world would deign to surrender a verdict. It was the inevitable and mundane conclusion to which the man was brought in the argument. The social laws were based largely on physical considerations. Hence those who attempted to move in a higher sphere under the guidance of a more spiritual morality were doomed to misunderstanding and to speedy condemnation. The result of this mental storm was that Gabriel found himself hounded back from the open day into the more populous thickets of discretion. Expediency compelled him to contradict in action his newly conceived creed, to abandon his progressive banner at the first brush with the past. Like a revolutionary leader backed by a myriad fine notions and a hundred peasants armed with rusty carbines, he found himself impotent before the massed armaments of social orthodoxy. He was muzzled and disarmed by a single consideration, the consideration of a woman’s honor. The world’s verdict and his own idealism were scaled one against the other. Had self only been in the balance the dial might have indicated the weightier worth of truth. As it was, he had too much heart to play a Roman rôle. The times were jointed up too fast for him to break them by the sacrifice of a woman’s name.