If any one had had a sufficiently fantastic imagination and sufficient audacity to prophesy to Clementina before she started from London the effect upon her temperament of a Roman Temple and moonshine, she would have said things in her direct way uncomplimentary to his intelligence. She would have forgotten her own epigram to the effect that woman always has her sex hanging round the neck of her spirit. But her epigram had proved its truth. She was feeling a peculiar graciousness in the focal adjustment above considered, was letting her spirit soar with its brother to planes of pure beauty, when lo! suddenly, spirit was hurled from the empyrean into the abyss by the thing clinging round its neck, which took its place on the said planes with a pretty gurgle of exultation. That is what had happened. And is it not all too natural? There are plants which will keep within them a pallid life in a coal-cellar—but put in the sun and the air and the rain will break magically into riotous leaf and bud and flower. Love, foolish, absurd, lunatic, reprehensible—what you will—had come into the sun and the air and the rain, and it had broken magically into blossom. Of course, she had no business to bring it into the air; she ought to have kept it in the coal-cellar; she ought not to have let the door be opened by the wheedlings of a captivating youth. In plain language, a woman of six-and-thirty ought never to have fallen in love with a boy of twenty-three. Of course not. A vehement passionate nature is the easiest thing in the world to keep under control. A respectable piece of British tape ought to be strong enough leash for any tiger of the jungle. That Clementina, ill-favoured and dour, should have given herself up, in the solitude of her room, to her intoxication is, no doubt, a matter for censure. It was mad and bad and sad, but it was sweet. It was human. The rare ones from whom no secrets of a woman’s pure heart are hid might say that it was divine. But the many who pity let them not grudge her hour of joy to a woman of barren life.