The discovery that he needed her, that the task for
which he had given her up could after all not be accomplished without
her, served to overcome her last resistance. If the end for which both
strove could best be attained together--if he needed the aid of her
unfaltering faith as much as she needed that of his wealth and
power--why should any personal scruple stand between them? Why should
she who had given all else to the cause--ease, fortune, safety, and even
the happiness that lay in her hand--hesitate to make the final sacrifice
of a private ideal? According to the standards of her day there was no
dishonour to a woman in being the mistress of a man whose rank forbade
his marrying her: the dishonour lay in the conduct which had come to be
associated with such relations. Under the old dispensation the influence
of the prince's mistress had stood for the last excesses of moral and
political corruption; why might it not, under the new law, come to
represent as unlimited a power for good?
So love, the casuist, argued; and during those first months, when
happiness seemed at last its own justification, Fulvia lived in every
fibre. But always, even then, she was on the defensive against that
higher tribunal which her own conception of life had created. In spite
of herself she was a child of the new era, of the universal reaction
against the falseness and egotism of the old social code. A standard of
conduct regulated by the needs of the race rather than by individual
passion, a conception of each existence as a link in the great chain of
human endeavour, had slowly shaped itself out of the wild theories and
vague "codes" of the eighteenth-century moralists; and with this sense
of the sacramental nature of human ties, came a renewed reverence for
moral and physical purity.
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