It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers
so often to take its place. The best and the worst--these are the
sole alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making:
hence life's spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever
present about us. Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the
best as their first choice, fight their way through defeat to the
standard of the second best and fight on there. And whatever one may
think of the legend otherwise, abundant experience justifies the story
that it was the Archangel who fell to the pit. The low never fall far:
how can they? They already dwell on the bottom of things, and many a
time they are to be seen there with vanity that they should inhabit
such a privileged highland.
During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the
tragic duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a
height of moral splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to
the lowest she harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or
as the stirred sediment of her own imperfections. And as is
unfortunately true, this descent into moral darkness possessed the
grateful illusion that it was an ascent into new light.
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