And that godhead had sufficed.
She had given up to him, together with her faith, her hope, her understanding, her entire spiritual life.
Passionate by nature, she had never loved any other human creature; even such slight thrills of sympathy as most maidens feel, and which by some are christened ‘experiences,’ having been almost or quite unknown to her. She had been a studious, reserved girl, with a manner which repelled the approaches of beardless young men of her own age; her beauty attracted them, but her steadfast intellectual eyes frightened and cowed the most impudent among them. Not till she came into collision with Bradley did she understand what personal passion meant; and even the first overtures were intellectual, leading only by very slow degrees to a more tender relationship.
Alma Craik, in fact, was of the same fine clay of which enthusiasts have been made in all ages. Born in the age of Pericles, she would doubtless have belonged to the class of which Aspasia was an immortal type; in the early days of Christianity, she would have perhaps figured as a Saint; in its mediaeval days as a proselytising abbess; and now, in the days of Christian decadence, she opened her dreamy eyes on the troublous lights of spiritual Science, found in them her inspiration and her heavenly hope. But men cannot live by bread alone, and women cannot exist without love. Her large impulsive nature was barren and incomplete till she had discovered what the Greek hetairai found in Pericles, what the feminine martyrs found in Jesus, what Eloisa found in Abelard; that is to say, the realisation of a masculine ideal. She waited, almost without anticipation, till the hour was ripe.
Love comes not as a slave
To any beckoning finger; but, some day,
When least expected, cometh as a King,
And takes his throne.
So at last it was with the one love of Alma’s life. Without doubt, without fear or question, she suffered her lover to take full sovereignty, and to remain thenceforth throned and crowned.
And now, she asked herself shudderingly, was it all over? Had the end of her dream come, when she had scarcely realised its beginning? If this was so, the beautiful world was destroyed. If Bradley was unworthy, there was no goodness in man; and if the divine type in humanity was broken like a cast of clay, there was no comfort in religion, no certainty of God.