‘Ce bonheur que j’ai tant souhaité, jusqu’à offrir de lui sacrifier mon bonheur, je souffre de le voir obtenu sans peine.... Juliette est heureuse; elle le dit, elle le paraît; je n’ai pas le droit, pas de raison, d’en douter.... D’où me vient, auprès d’elle, ce sentiment d’insatisfaction, de malaise? Peut-être à sentir cette félicité si pratique, si facilement obtenue.... Ô Seigneur! Gardez-moi d’un bonheur que je pourrais trop facilement atteindre!’ To Alissa, as to Mary, the usefulness and occupied content of Martha appear the husks of life: _Unum est necessarium_. Such natures need the liberty, the solitude, the rapt interminable progression, and ideal refuge of the inner life. A sort of disgust of reality seizes them at the very moment when the earthly paradise they dreamed of appears, at last, within their reach. Alissa has only to stretch out her hand in order to take her happiness. After all, is it worth while? The dread of disenchantment, the sense of mortal imperfection, paralyse her. The dawn of love is surely its most delicate, delicious moment; the high day of noon can never improve upon that exquisite suggestion. ‘Enough; no more! ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before....’ Those who have once imagined themselves in direct communication with that which lies behind appearances cannot resume unaltered the conditions of human society. Pascal in the full glory of scientific discovery--and is there any human emotion to compare with that of the man who suddenly sees enlarged the very boundaries of Nature?--in the passion of scientific debate, knew that abrupt revulsion of the mind, that withdrawal from finite things, that unique absorption in spiritual perfection which drove a Charles V. to quit the affairs of Europe for a monk’s cell in Estramadura. More than once the sense of Divine things has suggested to a strong nature some cruel doctrine of voluntary martyrdom, which (according to our own bias) we may deplore as a partial alienation of the mind, or admire as evidence of eternal truth. M. Gide’s Alissa is only a woman who renounces a permitted love; yet, in the same spirit, and with something of the same high strenuousness, she erases her dream and writes across the page of life: _Hic incipit amor Dei_. ‘La sainteté n’est pas un choix’ (she tells the unfortunate Jérôme), ‘mais une obligation.’