All evil
prompting became good suggestion; every injustice made its claim to be
justification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling that she was
dragging herself out of life's quicksands upward to some rock, where
there might be loneliness for her, but where there would be cleanness.
The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred; and hatred
is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it needs
not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.
He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its
faithlessness and low carnal propensities. What rankled most
poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact
that the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountain
tops--that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling
near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable
to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now
his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words
about the growth of the world's spirit--about the sacrifice of the
lower in ourselves to the higher--this cant now became to her the
invocation and homage of the practised impostor: he had indeed carried
the Christmas Tree on his shoulder into the manger.
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