I have said this--that if he will do as I would have him do, I will do as you would have me do.' 'Have you not been too rash?
Have you not demanded of him something which, for the sake of public opinion, he dare not grant openly, and yet which he may allow you to do for yourself when once--' 'I have.

If I am to be a victim, the sacrificing priest shall at least be a man, and not a coward and a time-server.

If he believes this Christian faith, let him defend it against me; for either it or I shall perish.

If he does not--as he does not--let him give up living in a lie, and taking on his lips blasphemies against the immortals, from which his heart and reason revolt!' And she clapped her hands again for the maid-servant, gave her the letter silently, shut the doors of her chamber, and tried to resume her Commentary on Plotinus.

Alas! what were all the wire-drawn dreams of metaphysics to her in that real and human struggle of the heart?
What availed it to define the process by which individual souls emanated from the universal one, while her own soul had, singly and on its own responsibility, to decide so terrible an act of will?
or to write fine words with pen and ink about the immutability of the supreme Reason, while her own reason was left there to struggle for its life amid a roaring shoreless waste of doubts and darkness?
Oh, how grand, and clear, and logical it had all looked half an hour ago! And how irrefragably she had been deducing from it all, syllogism after syllogism, the non-existence of evil!--how it was but a lower form of good, one of the countless products of the one great all-pervading mind which could not err or change, only so strange and recondite in its form as to excite antipathy in all minds but that of the philosopher, who learnt to see the stem which connected the apparently bitter fruit with the perfect root from whence it sprang.