"O majesty of earth, my solemn mother! ............ Earth and Ether, Ye I invoke to know the wrongs I suffer."
With a groan she turned away, threw herself upon a chair, and covered up her face with her hands; but after a few minutes she took them down, and said slowly--
"But let me try to think calmly.... Perhaps I have been too hasty in at once supposing that I must give him up. Marriage, except among Catholics, is not a sacrament: it is merely a civil contract made by law, and 'what the law can make it can break' is an old-established maxim, therefore Edwin is evidently free." She paused; but again she resumed her soliloquy. "Yet the Church, I know, does not recognise the law of divorce even among those who are not her children; but if that decree be against reason, justice, and charity, am I bound to submit to it? It could not be a good deed to drive him to despair, and that, too, without being able to give him any sufficiently sound reason--at least, any which would appear so to him--for my conduct. He would think that my love for him was not strong enough to make me give up--as he would call it--a mere prejudice of my education. It would only make him hate, and keep him away from, religious truth. No, I cannot do this. There is no really good reason why I may not be your wife, my beloved, and that I will be! So now it is decided, I will marry him; and having begun the night in true heroine style, with a wild rhapsody, I had better finish it like a rational person and go to bed. But _how_ I wish that he had never been married, or that she" (Flora gave her no name) "were dead!"
She stood up, took off her ball dress, put on her dressing-gown, and began to take down her hair.
Has the battle, then, been fought and lost? Is Flora about to fall from light to darkness? Will she be false to her own principle? Will she cast herself into the chaos of uncertainty and shifting opinion from which she would have drawn her lover? Does she forget, when she says that her refusal to marry him would keep him away from religious truth, that if she does marry him, she places a stronger barrier than ever between him and it? Yet stay, the battle is not quite over; even if the enemy has gained possession of the colours for the moment, they may be regained by the poor combatant.