Finally the tide of Christianity rose, burst, in a biblical father who
drove her into a night of snow that was a triumph of the actual
substituted for the cut paper of stage convention. That she would be
rescued, no doubt was permitted; and Lee took no part in the storm of
applause which greeted this act of satisfactory heroics.
The other spirit had appalled him: in his state of mental doubt--it
might equally have been a condition of obscure hope--he had been rudely
shoved toward pessimism; the converse of the announced purpose of the
picture. The audience, for one thing, was so depressingly wrong in the
placing of its merriment: it laughed delightedly at a gaunt feminine
vindictiveness hurrying through the snow on an errand of destruction.
The fact that the girl's maternity was transcendent in a generous and
confident heart, made lovely by spiritual passion, escaped everyone.
The phrase, spiritual passion, had occurred to him without forethought
and he wondered if it were permissible, if it meant anything? It did
decidedly to him; he told himself further that it was the fusion of the
body and all the aspirations called spirit in one supreme act of
feeling.
It had been his and Fanny's ... at first. Then the spirit, though it
had lingered in other relationships, had deserted the consummation of
passion. That hadn't grown perfunctory, but it became a thing more and
more strictly of the flesh; with this it was less thrilling.
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