If he could but persuade her that the love offered in the agony of the fire must be a nobler love than that whispered from a bed of roses, then perhaps, dissolved in confluent sadness and sweetness, she would hold out to him the chalice of her heart, and the one pearl of the world would yet be his--a woman all his own--pure as a flower, sad as the night, and deep as nature unfathomable.
He had a grand idea of woman.

He had been built with a goddess-niche in his soul, and thought how he would worship the woman that could fill it.
There was a time when she must, beyond question, be one whose radiant mirror had never reflected form of man but his: now he would be content if for him she would abjure and obliterate her past.

To make the woman who had loved forget utterly, was a greater victory, he said, than to wake love in the heart of a girl, and would yield him a finer treasure, a richer conquest.

Only, pure as snow she must be--pure as the sun himself! Paul Faber was absolutely tyrannous in his notions as to feminine purity.

Like the diamond shield of Prince Arthur, Knight of Magnificence, must be the purity that would satisfy this lord of the race who could live without a God! Was he then such a master of purity himself?
one so immaculate that in him such aspiration was no presumption?
Was what he knew himself to be, an idea to mate with his unspotted ideal?
The notion men have of their own worth, and of claims founded thereon, is amazing; most amazing of all is what a man will set up to himself as the standard of the woman he will marry.