he felt himself to be. For Eustace's love had little or nothing of
chivalry, self-sacrifice, or purity in it; those were virtues which were
not taught at Rheims. Careful as the Jesuits were over the practical
morality of their pupils, this severe restraint had little effect in
producing real habits of self-control. What little Eustace had learnt of
women from them, was as base and vulgar as the rest of their teaching.
What could it be else, if instilled by men educated in the schools of
Italy and France, in the age which produced the foul novels of Cinthio
and Bandello, and compelled Rabelais in order to escape the rack and
stake, to hide the light of his great wisdom, not beneath a bushel, but
beneath a dunghill; the age in which the Romish Church had made
marriage a legalized tyranny, and the laity, by a natural and pardonable
revulsion, had exalted adultery into a virtue and a science? That all
love was lust; that all women had their price; that profligacy, though
an ecclesiastical sin, was so pardonable, if not necessary, as to be
hardly a moral sin, were notions which Eustace must needs have gathered
from the hints of his preceptors; for their written works bear to this
day fullest and foulest testimony that such was their opinion; and that
their conception of the relation of the sexes was really not a whit
higher than that of the profligate laity who confessed to them. He
longed to marry Rose Salterne, with a wild selfish fury; but only that
he might be able to claim her as his own property, and keep all others
from her. Of her as a co-equal and ennobling helpmate; as one in whose
honor, glory, growth of heart and soul, his own were inextricably wrapt
up, he had never dreamed. Marriage would prevent God from being angry
with that, with which otherwise He might be angry; and therefore the
sanction of the Church was the more "probable and safe" course. But as
yet his suit was in very embryo. He could not even tell whether Rose
knew of his love; and he wasted miserable hours in maddening thoughts,
and tost all night upon his sleepless bed, and rose next morning fierce