It is his falseness
and treason to the dead. Then comes the crisis of her career; her flight
from the unendurable burden of that divided life; her meeting with
Savonarola; and her being through him brought face to face with the
Christian aspect of that deepest of all moral truths,--the precedence of
duty above all else. Savonarola's demand might well seem to one such as
Romola laying on her a burden too heavy to be borne. It was not that it
called her to return to hardness and pain; she was going forth
unshrinking into the unknown with no certainty but that these would find
her there; it called her to return to what, with her high ideal of love
and life, could not but seem degradation and sin,--according in the
living daily lie that they two, so hopelessly parted, were one. To any
lower nature the appeal would have been addressed in vain. It prevails
with her because it sets before her but the extension and more perfect
fulfilment of the life law toward which she has been always aiming, even
through the dim light of her all but heathen nurture.
She goes back to reassume her cross: sadly, weariedly forecasting, as
only such a nature can do, all its shame and pain; and even still only
dimly assured that her true path lies here.
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