yourselves when you have so many good reasons for being happy!"

If only some one would take away their money, their health, all the
marvelous gifts of which they are so unworthy! If only some one would
once more lay the yoke of poverty and real suffering on these slaves who
are incapable of being free and are driven mad by their liberty! If they
had to earn their bread in the sweat of their brows, they would be glad
enough to eat it. And if they were to come face to face with grim
suffering, they would never dare to play with the sham....

But, when all is said and done, they do suffer. They are ill. How, then,
are they not to be pitied?--Poor Jacqueline was quite innocent, as
innocent in drifting apart from Olivier as Olivier was in not holding
her. She was what Nature had made her. She did not know that marriage is
a challenge to Nature, and that, when one has thrown down the gauntlet
to Nature, it is only to be expected that she will arise and begin
valiantly to wage the combat which one has provoked. She saw that she
had been mistaken, and she was exasperated with herself; and her
disillusion turned to hostility towards the thing she had loved,
Olivier's faith, which had also been her own. An intelligent woman has,
much more than a man, moments of an intuitive perception of things
eternal: but it is more difficult for her to maintain her grip on them.
Once a man has come by the idea of the eternal, he feeds it with his
life-blood. A woman uses it to feed her own life: she absorbs it, and
does not create it. She must always be throwing fresh fuel into her
heart and mind: she cannot be self-sufficing. And if she cannot believe
and love, she must destroy--except she possess the supreme virtue of
serenity.

Jacqueline had believed passionately in a union based on a common faith,