The very nobleness which
constrains her return makes that return the harder. The unknown into
which she had thought to flee had no possibility of pain or fear for her,
compared to the certain pain and difficulty of that life from which all
reality of love is gone: where her earnest, truthful spirit must live in
daily contact with baseness,--may even have, through virtue of her
relation to Tito, tacitly to concur in treason. She goes back to what,
constituted as she is, can be only a daily, lifelong crucifying, and she
goes back to it knowing that such it must be.
Thenceforth goes on in her that process which, far beyond all reasonings,
makes the mystery of sorrow intelligible to us,--the "making perfect
through suffering." It is not necessary we should trace the process step
by step. It is scarcely possible to do so, for its stages are too subtle
to be so traced. We see rather by result than in operation how her path
of voluntary self-consecration--of care and thought for all save self--of
patient, silent, solitary endurance of her crown of thorns, is
brightening more and more toward the perfect day.
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