“No,” he said, in a voice that was half a whisper. “There would be no loneliness—” “If men were not fools and if women had not received the poison of the serpent.” They were both silent for a season. Joan stooped down and gathered snowdrops as they grew against the wall. The man watched her. The flowers seemed emblems of what their love might be. “I may see you again, then,” she said, presently, with a deep tone of content. He stood back from her and looked towards the horizon. There was a radiance upon his face as though light fell on him out of heaven. “Yes, if—” “Well?” “We vow here together.” She waited. “That I never touch you, never so much as touch your hand. That our flesh is severed absolutely; that only our spirits meet.” “I will swear that,” she said, slowly. So, under the sunlit sky and in the breath of the breeze, they swore both of them together a solemn oath, an oath to heaven. XVIII OPHELIA STRONG had discovered her escape from domesticities a relief after the irritations and petulances of the last few months. Married life had proved nothing to her save the inconsiderate bigotry of her husband and the selfishness of men who refuse to reconsider habits formed in bachelor days. Ophelia believed herself to be a most misunderstood and ill-used person, a woman sacrificed to the over-fervid rashness of her own heart. Her love, a very shallow stream dependent largely on the rainfall of flattery, could easily be turned into other channels. A devotee of sensations, vain and convictionless, it was the most natural problem for her to consider how best she could frame life afresh in order to produce the most palatable and abundant satisfactions to press into the cup of pleasure. Had Ophelia Strong been possessed of the literary knack, the world would probably have received from her sundry erotic and hysterical effusions upon the supreme brutality of man. Ophelia was a feminine realist in the flesh, but she was unable to record her experiences on paper. Possessed of a grievance, the modern Sappho scrolls out her often sordid wisdom and barters her emotions for the dubious edification of the members of circulating libraries. It is necessary in these days for the feminine realist to display a vivid familiarity with physiological data. The morbid anatomy of her own physical being is placed on record with a sincerity worthy of an encyclopædist. Elaborately stained sections are often remarkably beautiful under the microscope. Even diseased tissues tinctured azure and red resemble fine arabesque on rich mosaics. Reflect on the suggestiveness of morbid changes, however, and you will perhaps feel that there is something unpleasant in watching a woman preparing specimens to prove how the bacteria of sin affected her moral tissues.