she was no woman? that he, merely as a man, owed her nothing?  Her fault was grievous; it stung him to the soul:  what then was it not to her?  Not now for his own shame merely, or the most, did he lament it, but for the pity of it, that the lovely creature should not be clean, had not deserved his adoration; that she was not the ideal woman; that a glory had vanished from the earth; that she he had loved was not in herself worthy.  What then must be her sadness!  And this was his—­the man’s—­response to her agony, this his balm for her woe, his chivalry, his manhood—­to dash her from him, and do his potent part to fix forever upon her the stain which he bemoaned!  Stained?  Why then did he not open his arms wide and take her, poor sad stain and all, to the bosom of a love which, by the very agony of its own grief and its pity over hers, would have burned her clean?  What did it matter for him?  What was he?  What was his honor?  Had he had any, what fitter use for honor than to sacrifice it for the redemption of a wife?  That would be to honor honor.  But he had none.  There was not a stone on the face of the earth that would consent to be thrown at her by him!

Ah men! men! gentlemen! was there ever such a poor sneaking scarecrow of an idol as that gaping straw-stuffed inanity you worship, and call honor?  It is not Honor; it is but your honor.  It is neither gold, nor silver, nor honest copper, but a vile, worthless pinchbeck.  It may be, however, for I have not the honor to belong to any of your clubs, that you no longer insult the word by using it at all.  It may be you have deposed it, and enthroned another word of less significance to you still.  But what the recognized slang of the day may be is nothing—­therefore unnecessary to what I have to say—­which is, that the man is a wretched ape who will utter a word about a woman’s virtue, when in himself, soul and body, there is not a clean spot; when his body nothing but the furnace of the grave, his soul nothing but the eternal fire can purify.  For him is many a harlot far too good:  she is yet capable of devotion; she would, like her sisters of old, recognize the Holy if she saw Him, while he would pass by his Maker with a rude stare, or the dullness of the brute which he has so assiduously cultivated in him.

By degrees Faber grew thoroughly disgusted with himself, then heartily ashamed.  Were it possible for me to give every finest shade and gradation of the change he underwent, there would be still an unrepresented mystery which I had not compassed.  But were my analysis correct as fact itself, and my showing of it as exact as words could make it, never a man on whom some such change had not at least begun to pass, would find in it any revelation.  He ceased altogether to vaunt his denials, not that now he had discarded them, but simply because he no longer delighted in them.  They were not interesting to him any more.  He grew yet paler and thinner.  He ate little