Diana found there an infinity to learn. The sages and saints, it seemed,
are of all sides and all opinions. That had not been the lesson of her
youth. In a comforting heat of prejudice her father had found relief
from suffering, and his creeds had been fused with her young blood.
Lately she had seen their opposites embodied in a woman from whom she
shrank in repulsion--whose name never passed her lips--Oliver's
sister--who had trampled on her in her misery. Yet here, in Marion's
dingy lodging, she saw the very same ideas which Isabel Fotheringham
made hateful, clothed in light, speaking from the rugged or noble faces
of men and women who saw in them the salvation of their kind.
The intellect in Diana, the critical instinct resisted. And, moreover,
to have abandoned any fraction of the conservative and traditional
beliefs in which she had been reared was impossible for her of all
women; it would have seemed to her that she was thereby leaving those
two suffering ones, whom only her love sheltered, still lonelier in
death. So, beneath the clatter of talk and opinion, run the deep
omnipotent tides of our real being.
But if the mind resisted, the heart felt, and therewith, the soul--that
total personality which absorbs and transmutes the contradictions of
life--grew kinder and gentler within her.
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