And what, after all, are the gratified expectations of any career in comparison with its hidden despairs? It may be a fact that love, in every imaginative mind, approaches madness; on the other hand, the least imaginative are often not merely attracted but carried away, without any sort of consent, by some over-mastering human magnetism. To love well is a quality in temperament, just as to preach well, or to conduct a siege well, or to tend the sick well, or, in fact, to do anything well, is a special distinction, a ruling motive in the great pursuit of absolute felicity--a pursuit which is the inalienable right of all human creatures, whether fixed mistakenly in this world, or wisely in the next. No calling can be obeyed without suffering, but as in the old legend each man's cross was found exquisitely fitted to his own back, so a vocation is found to be just when, on the whole, one has fewer misgivings that way than in any other. By the exercise of self-discipline one may do much that is not repulsive only but suicidal--a man may so treat his spirit that it becomes a sort of petrified vapour. When, however, he has dosed, reduced, tortured, and killed every vital instinct in his nature till he is an empty shape and nothing more, he must not flatter himself that he has accomplished a great work. Life is not for the dead, but for the living, and in crucifying our flesh we have to be quite certain that we are playing no ghost's farce, inflicting airy penalties on some handfuls of harsh dust. Robert could not feel that absorbing interest in himself which enables so many to cut themselves adrift, painfully, no doubt, from every creature and all impersonal anxieties. If he wished for fame, power, wealth, it was that he might use them to the advantage of his friends, or for the reparation, in some degree, of his father's sin. But all the joy and all the melancholy in love give a free rein to egoism, and now that he had gained, as he believed, the desire of his eyes, the confused, tyrannical, inexplicable, triumphant selfishness dormant in him, as in all of us, began to assert its terrible power. He forgot the agonies, storms, and fevers of the past. Work had not always been able to dominate his unrest. There had been times when he had been compelled to follow the beckoning dreams; when, in tightening his clasp about the mockeries of his hope, he lost the pale happiness which he held already. Whole days had passed when some oppressive thought had spread its dark wings, as a bird of prey, over his whole being, crushing him gradually down to the earth. Now the occasion, the solitude, the glory of the night cast their spell over his soul. For the first time his emotion, so long dumb and imprisoned, found speech. Brigit listened, almost afraid, to his burning words, which, new and strange to her, were, in reality, but the echo of his interior life, his secret intimate thoughts, the pent-up eloquence of a latent habitual devotion long distrusted for its