“Do you think she was a saint?” said Tessa, in Lisa’s ear, showing her the lock.
Lisa rejected that notion very decidedly by a backward movement of her fingers, and then stroking the rippled gold, said—
“She’s a great and noble lady. I saw such in my youth.”
Romola went home and sat alone through the sultry hours of that day with the heavy certainty that her lot was unchanged. She was thrown back again on the conflict between the demands of an outward law, which she recognised as a widely-ramifying obligation, and the demands of inner moral facts which were becoming more and more peremptory.
She had drunk in deeply the spirit of that teaching by which Savonarola had urged her to return to her place. She felt that the sanctity attached to all close relations, and, therefore, preeminently to the closest, was but the expression in outward law of that result towards which all human goodness and nobleness must spontaneously tend; that the light abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue.
What else had Tito’s crime towards Baldassarre been but that abandonment working itself out to the most hideous extreme of falsity and ingratitude?
And the inspiring consciousness breathed into her by Savonarola’s influence that her lot was vitally united with the general lot had exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion. She was marching with a great army; she was feeling the stress of a common life. If victims were needed, and it was uncertain on whom the