A man seldom really deceives himself, however, save in thinking that he
can deceive himself. There were moments in which his inner self rose up
and laughed him to scorn; moments in which his sin glowed before him in
colors blood-red. He saw himself apostate, false to his vows, drawn
away by his earthly lusts and beguiled. There were nights when he cast
himself upon the ground in an agony of self-abasement, beating his
breast and praying in a passion of remorse; times when by the cruelty
of his self-accusings he involuntarily sought to do penance for the
sweet sin which festered in his bosom.
Worse than all was the color which was imparted to his passion by the
self-imposed prohibitions which he was violating. The insistence upon
the earthly side of love which is an inevitable accompaniment to the
idea that woman is a temptation, cannot but degrade the relation of the
sexes in the mind of the professed celibate. To keep before the
thoughts the theory that passion is a snare and a pollution is to
render it impossible to love with purity and self-abandonment. Poor
Philip, endowed at birth with a nature of instinctive delicacy, could
not free himself from the taint of his training; yet he shrank as from
hot iron from the blasphemy of connecting any shadow of earthliness
with the woman who had become his ideal.
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