Her face shimmered before his eyes as he walked along,--pale and serious, sweet and sensitive, smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and pure as he had never dreamed purity could be.

Her purity smote him like a blow.

It startled him.

He had known good and bad; but purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind.

And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal life.
And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life.