over her past also? Was she bound to disclose every thing that lay in
that past? If Paul made no claim upon her beyond the grave, could he
claim back upon the dead past before he knew her, a period over which
she had now no more control than over that when she would be but a
portion of the material all?

But whatever might be Paul's theories of marriage or claims upon his
wife, it was enough for her miserable unrest that she was what is called
a living soul, with a history, and what has come to be called a
conscience--a something, that is, as most people regard it, which has
the power, and uses it, of making uncomfortable.

The existence of such questions as I have indicated reveals that already
between her and him there showed space, separation, non-contact: Juliet
was too bewildered with misery to tell whether it was a cleft of a
hair's breadth, or a gulf across which no cry could reach; this moment
it seemed the one, the next the other. The knowledge which caused it had
troubled her while he sought her love, had troubled her on to the very
eve of her surrender. The deeper her love grew the more fiercely she
wrestled with the evil fact. A low moral development and the purest
resolve of an honest nature afforded her many pleas, and at length she
believed she had finally put it down. She had argued that, from the
opinions themselves of Faber, the thing could not consistently fail to
be as no thing to him. Even were she mistaken in this conclusion, it
would be to wrong his large nature, his generous love, his unselfish
regard, his tender pitifulness, to fail of putting her silent trust in
him. Besides, had she not read in the newspapers the utterance of a
certain worshipful judge on the bench that no man had any thing to do
with his wife's ante-nuptial history? The contract then was certainly
not retrospective. What in her remained unsatisfied after all her