She had always regarded her soul as the battlefield of two opposite

principles, the good and the bad, the high and the low. God made her, she

thought, and He alone; He made everything that she was; but she would not

have said that He made the evil in her. Yet her belief did not admit the

existence of Creative Evil; and so she said to herself that she herself

was that evil, and she must struggle against herself; she must question

whatever she strongly wished because she strongly wished it. It was not

logical; she did not push her postulates to their obvious conclusions; and

there was apt to be the same kind of break between her conclusions and her

actions as between her reasons and her conclusions. She acted impulsively,

and from a force which she could not analyse. She indulged reveries so

vivid that they seemed to weaken and exhaust her for the grapple with

realities; the recollection of them abashed her in the presence of facts.

With all this, it must not be supposed that she was morbidly introspective.

Her life had been apparently a life of cheerful acquiescence in worldly

conditions; it had been, in some measure, a life of fashion, or at least

of society. It had not been without the interests of other girls' lives,

by any means; she had sometimes had fancies, flirtations, but she did not

think she had been really in love, and she had refused some offers of

marriage for that reason.




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