"Then let me stop you. My weak hand is strong enough for that. Remain here, dear Claudia. Let me go downstairs and report that you are ill, as indeed and in truth you are. The marriage can be delayed, and then you can have an explanation with the viscount, and break it off altogether."
"And break my plighted faith! Is that your advice, young moralist?"
"There was no faith in your plighted word, Claudia. It was very wrong to promise to marry a man you could not love; but it would be criminal to keep such a promise. Speak candidly to his lordship, Claudia, and ask him to release you from your engagement. My word on it he will do it."
"Of course, and make me the town talk for the delight of all who envy me."
"Better be that than an unloving wife."
"No, Bee! I must fulfill my destiny. And, besides, I never thought of turning from it. I am in the power of the whirlpool or the demon."
"It is the demon—the demon that is carrying you down into this whirlpool. And the name of the demon is Ambition, Claudia; and the name of the whirlpool is Ruin."
"Yes! it is ambition that possesses my soul. None other but the sins by which angels fell would have power to draw my soul down from heaven—for heaven was possible to me, once!" And with these last words she melted into tears and wept as if the fountains of her heart were broken up and gushing through her eyes.
"Yes," she repeated in the pauses of her weeping. "Heaven was possible for me once! Never more, oh, never, never more! Filled with the ambition of Lucifer I have cast myself out of that heaven. But alas! alas! I have Lucifer's ambition without his strength to suffer."
"Claudia, dear Claudia!"