When at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the
increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper
needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite
action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism,
cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and
privations. She strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like hers
has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to make
it as hard as may be to bear. She would deny to herself the very beauty
of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything
sweet and glad, as temptations and snares. From all this she is brought
back by Philip. But he, touching as he is in the humility and tender
unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament
to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral requirements of her
being. He may win her back to the love of beauty and the sense of joy;
but he is not the one to stand by her side when the stern conflict
between pleasure and right, sense and soul, the world and God, is being
fought out within her.
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