pen and ink about the immutability of 
the supreme Reason, while her own reason was 
left there to struggle for its life amid a roaring 
shoreless waste of doubts and darkness ? Oh, how 
grand, and clear, and logical it had all looked half 
an hour ago ! And how irrefragably she had been 
deducing from it all, syllogism after syllogism, the 
non-existence of evil ! how it was but a lower 
form of good, one of the countless products of the 
one great all-pervading mind which could not err 
or change, only so strange and recondite in its 
form as to excite  in all minds but that of 
the philosopher, who learnt to see the stem which 
connected the apparently bitter fruit with the per- 
fect root from whence it sprung. Could she see 
the stem there ? the connection between the 
pure and supreme Reason, and the hideous caresses 
of the debauched and cowardly Orestes? was not 
that evil, pure, unadulterate with any vein of good, 
past, present, or future? . . . 

True ; she might keep her  pure amid it 



Miriam 69 

all ; she might sacrifice the base body, and ennoble 
the  by the self-sacrifice. . . . And yet, would 
not that increase the wordnetfear, the , the evil of 
it to her, at